link
A film about the drama that occurs behind the scenes of a national football league. A pretty diverse cast that included: Aaron Eckhart, Cameron Diaz, Jamie Foxx, Jim Brown, Matthew Modine, and perhaps my favorite of the supporting characters, James Woods. (Woods was even better in True Crime, the film Clint Eastwood directed that year.) Of course you can't go without Al Pacino pacing the sidelines doing his best scream and look intense, angry, etc. etc. etc. Kind of the antithesis of his character in
The Insider which also came out that year.
Any Given Sunday was a continuation of a theme Oliver Stone's worked at american culture and society of the late 20th century. At this point he'd focused on J.F.K, media violence and culture (Natural Born Killers), Vietnam (Platoon, Born on the 4th of July, and Heaven & Earth), 80's greed (Wallstreet), Richard Nixon (Nixon), music and drugs (The Doors)
One thing I do recall about seeing the film in the theater for the first time was that it had the Gladiator teaser trailer. It wasn't necessarily the teaser that was so cool to see at that point but that the teaser trailer's soundtrack was the main theme from
Conan the Barbarian. For some reason it just made the teaser work. It was a short, taught, minute and a half of quick cuts and violence/action that really worked, for me at least because of the use of the
Conan theme.
link to the
teaser