Remember the Titans (2000) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

I'm not sure why, because it's a helluva good flick, and a true story.

I think it may be related to what people prefer in sports movies:

Some sports movies are really about sports. While they can't ignore the fact that athletes are people, and thus various human interactions occur, the primary focus is what happens in the life of a player or team on the field and as a consequence of playing the sport. North Dallas Forty is a good example of this type of movie.

Back around 1971, a school district was realigned, a high school in Virginia was integrated for the first time, and the politically inspired personnel shifts caused a white coach to lose his job, and to end up as the assistant to a black coach on a newly-integrated team. The team ended up winning the state championship, which was convenient for the story, but that isn't the point of the tale. The real focus is on the journey, and not on the destination.

Is it unsubtle and emotionally manipulative? It is possible to make those points, but to do so seems precious, because all literature and story-telling is about compression to achieve some type of emotional or intellectual impact, and about imposing form and structure on events which are essentially chaotic before the writer starts assembling them. This is the illusion of literature, and when you really boil away all the bullshit and get to the marrow, it is why we like literature in the first place. The compressed form of a play or novel gives us an emotional or intellectual distillation that is either absent from reality, or at least invisible to those of us who lack the talent to see it. If you were to try to describe the essence of what these kids and their coaches did in real life, you'd have made the same choices the filmmakers did. They picked a few characters, the key themes, focused in tight, and created a tidy little mass-market gem.

Does it gloss over the ugliness of racial hatred? Yes, this is the one real glaring weakness of the movie. The initial reluctance of the team members to accept one another doesn't include any real deep-seeded racism with all the attendant hate. We don't see the attitudes produced by a lifetime of conditioning, but just simple little misunderstandings that can be overcome within a couple days of emotional manipulation by the coaches. People never seem to hate each other as much in this movie as they do in real life, or say the ugly things they say in real life. As I see it, that also hampers the film from delivering its maximum emotional impact, because if the kids had to overcome something uglier and deeper, their ultimate triumph would seem that much more impressive.

But again, I think it's important that we think of the film not in terms of "superficial for a racial analysis". It makes more sense to think of it as "deep for a football movie". It is intended to be a feel-good crowd pleaser, a mass entertainment with a sensitive inner core. And I believe it succeeds on those terms. It isn't "Schindler's List", but not every film can use the Holocaust as a backdrop. If it panders to mass tastes and easy answers - well, so does Schindler's List, and they were both supposed to make money, you know. If the studio boys can make their cash cows show social consciousness, I much prefer that to mindless shoot-em-ups. Let's be thankful for movies like this from the studios, given the other evil things they might have done with the money. Let's consider the glass half full, not half empty.

The entire feature-length commentary is made by a couple of old non-movie guys named Bill Yoast and Herman Boone. Who they hell are they? Well, back around 1970, one of them was a white coach who lost his head coaching job to the other man, the new black head coach. They made quite a team, and quite a friendship that has lasted 30 years, long enough for somebody to make a movie about them.