Dan1863Sickles The astonishing thing about this documentary isn't the excitement and the drama. The football game is presented brilliantly, the key plays are shown in riveting detail and you really feel like you're down on the field with the players right until the final gun. But the astonishing thing is how much you really learn about Harvard and Yale and why they have the reputation of being the very best of the best colleges in America. All the interviews in this movie are interesting, but the one that shocked me was when this big, tough, Harvard linebacker broke down and started crying, forty years after the game! And not because he muffed a block or a tackle, either. "I can't believe Harvard would take a chance on a kid like me," he said. That line really stuck with me long after I left the theater. You see, I went to Columbia, which is also part of the Ivy League. But the whole time I was there in the mid-eighties, I had a sense that there was something missing. It wasn't till I saw this movie that I understood what it was. The thing about Harvard and Yale isn't that they only admit the richest kids, or the smartest kids. The thing is that once you're admitted you're really someone. You're a part of something. And I suspect it's not just the stars on the football teams who feel that way. When I was at Columbia it was just the opposite. It was a campus full of strangers located in the most impersonal urban landscape imaginable. I don't remember anyone crying over how lucky they were to be there. When my roommate dropped out halfway through the freshman year, no one on the faculty or in the administration begged him to stay. No one asked me why I didn't do more to help him, either. It wasn't until years later I began to ask myself that question. And I've begun to suspect that the answer lies largely in the way Columbia treated all its undergraduates like cattle. They didn't expect champions, and they didn't get them either. To be sure, there were some star athletes on campus, and they got plenty of fawning remarks and plenty of special attention from the faculty. But it was because they were part of a special elite, not because they really mattered as individuals. None of us really mattered as individuals. That's why Columbia is strictly third rate compared to Harvard and Yale. I always thought it was because Yale and Harvard had richer kids, smarter kids, tougher kids. Really it's just because Harvard and Yale treat their students like human beings, and not like cattle. And that's what I learned from watching Harvard "beat" Yale.

steve-974-698135 Two former powerhouses of football meet on the field 30 years after their heyday. Both teams, while generally inept, have somehow managed to compile perfect records against the other inept teams in their generally inept conference.One team plays well. The other stumbles. At the end, the inept team that was winning gives up a buttload of points to the inept team that was losing. This results in a tie.Almost all points are scored because of -- because of -- well, because of inept mistakes.A Harvard fan decides to create an inept film about this inept game and gives it the inept title Harvard Beats Yale.Outside of graduation day at the Hollywood division of the Betty Ford Clinic, never have so many minor talents had so much praise heaped on them simply for waking up and breathing.Watch this film if you like to hear people say, We tried hard; they tried hard; it broke my heart.Stay away if you like football, people who don't whine, or quality.This film gets two stars: One star because lots of eggheads got beat up that day; and one star because the voices in my head go quiet when I'm extremely bored.

GeneSiskel George Gipp and fiery halftime speeches do not figure in this film. Rather, what is fascinating about it is to hear a bunch of 60-somethings, Ivy League football players whose athletic careers mostly concluded on a Saturday afternoon in 1968, talk intelligently about what an exciting game with a story-book ending meant to them in the context of those times. The interviews are excellent, with an overlay of retrospection and introspection totally missing from post-game interviews on, say, Fox Sports today. The game footage that we see interspersed between those interviews -- undefeated Yale, ranked an unheard-of sixteenth in the country, played its traditional rival Harvard, also undefeated, in the final game of the season -- is interesting enough but not likely to hold the attention of non-sports fans. Of course, 1968 was a watershed year in a tumultuous decade, before "women were invented," as a Yale player puts it, so the game could not be played without accounting in some way for Viet Nam, student protests, ROTC on campus, political assassinations, class differences, sex, the fleeting nature of fame, and the necessity and unexpected results of growing up. Oddly enough, the words of Tommy Lee Jones, who played guard for the Harvard team and roomed with Al Gore, are among the least insightful. Producer, director, interviewer, and cinematographer Kevin Rafferty is a cousin of George W. Bush, but you would not know it from his film. There is something of the spirit of "The Fog of War" in this documentary which I greatly enjoyed. Full disclosure: I graduated from Harvard College in 1966, will never wax nostalgic about my years there, and remember Harvard football as a laughable excuse to enjoy autumn sunshine in New England.

RondoHatton Pegasus3 should change their name to "Clueless1". The title of this documentary QUOTES a headline on the Harvard Crimson after this game. If Pegasus3 found this a very boring documentary, that is their prerogative, but this isn't just about football, it's much more a peek into one of the most turbulent years in American and world history. Just look at 1968: the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, riots on college campuses, the protests by Tommie Smith & John Carlos at the Olympics in Mexico City, 1968 was a benchmark year for youth. Sure, the comments of the players are mostly about the game, but their insights into what else was happening at the time were great, such as the Yale player who was the roommate of George W. Bush telling that he had a picture of Bush hanging off the goalposts at Princeton(for which, we find out, Bush was arrested, and BTW, talk's cheap, let's see the picture!!), and another Yale player telling & showing us that he was dating Vassar co-ed Meryl Streep at this time. We find out that Tommy Lee Jones was the roommate of Bush's opponent, Al Gore. I remember hearing about this game after it occurred, but I never knew exactly what occurred, and though the title may say "Harvard Beats Yale", I love the fact that all the players feel like winners for experiencing it. Although I can't see how something called J. Hoberman of the Village Voice could mention a piece of junk like either version of "The Longest Yard" in the same paragraph with this great little film. Of course, Hoberman is from New York, and I don't think they've played college football in New York since back before Columbia lost 29 games in a row. I love college football. I lived through 1968. I loved "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29".