The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com Tuesday, November 13, 2007 - 5 Ohio State fans give a Michigan fan a piece of their "ind at last year's showdown in Colurnbus. The new documentary "Michigan vs. Ohio State: The Rivalry" examines the rivalry's cultural undercurrents. Beyond the gridiron Doc sees Michigan- Ohio State rivalry as less about football, more about culture By NATE SANDALS Daily Sports Editor Anyone who has spent alate Novem- ber afternooninAnnArbor or Colum- bus knows "The Game" is an event best experienced in three dimensions. Television does it no justice. HBO's new sports documentary, "Michigan vs. Ohio State: The Rival- ry," which airs tonight at 10:30 p.m., doesn't recreate the madness you'll see in the Big House this Saturday, but it thoroughly portrays the cultural phenomenon that has sprung from The Game. In 60 minutes, "The Rivalry" cap- tures the underlying differences that make Michigan vs. Ohio State so much more than a football game. As Michigan students it's not hard to rec- ognize the fanati- cism that goes into Michigan vs. the rivalry, but the Ohio State: documentary makes it accessible even to The Rivalry those who haven't Tonight at been inside the Big Tonightat House. 10:30 p.m. "The Rivalry" HBO shows that the Michigan-OSU game acts as proxy for a hatred that extends well beyond the football field. Despite only being divided by an arbitrary line drawn by a surveyor in the 19th century, Ohio- ans and Michiganders are different, and "The Rivalry" doesn't shy away from that fact. The core of the documentary is the delineation of the cultural, social and economic differences between Michi- gan fans and Ohio State fans. HBO is right to make this the centerpiece. The Wolverine faithful will be happy to see themselves cast as the intellec- tual elite of the Midwest, while their neighbors to the South are shown, quite frankly, as part of a less-edu- cated set. The film's weakness is in its por- trayal of the most important part of the rivalry, the 10 Year War. The matchups between Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler are the stuff of leg- end, and rightly so. While "The Rival- ry" has humorous, even hilarious, footage of each coach at his happiest and most angry, depending on each year's outcome, the discussion doe'sn't translate well into the cultural differ- ences the documentary tries to stress throughout. "The Rivalry" also features Schem- bechler's final filmed interview before his death. There are no outstanding insights into his life or the rivalry as a result, but the knowledge that it was his filmed during his final trip to MichiganStadiumispoignantenough. The documentary doesn't overdo the melancholy, but it comes close. Some will argue the documentary slants in favor of Ohio State - thereis much more footage of Ohio Stadium than the Big House, more time with Jim Tresselthan Lloyd Carr - butthis is a result more of circumstance than bias. The documentary was filmed around last year's epic match-up fea- turing the two undefeated teams, and while it still hurts to see those scar- let-painted hooligans tearing up the field nearly one year ago today, it's no secret Ohio State won the game. To the victor go the spoils, at least for this hour. But things would have been dif- ferent had Michigan won last year's game. No doubt, Michigan fans would have been pleased to see endless shots of crying Buckeyes had the game turned out the other way. "The Rivalry" is another in a long line of well-produced sports docu- mentaries from HBO. On film, you can't capture the magic of The Game, but HBO proves you can reproduce the power of culture in the greatest rivalry in sports.After you watch, Sat- urday won't come fast enough. Redford's ineffective political capital By IMRAN SYED Daily Arts Writer . Shaped by the explosive leftist movement of the 1960s, Robert Redford is the indelible Holly- wood liberal. But hell-raising just ain't what it used to be in the Viet- nam days. An entire gen- eration may have come to know ** Redford as a political instiga- LiOfs for for for his roles Lambs in films like "The Candidate" and At Quality 16 "All the Presi- and Showcase dent's Men," but United Artists does any of that capital translate to a new era, a new war, a new corrupt White House and, most * important, a new generation of America's best and brightest? "Lions for Lambs" - a commen- tary on post Sept.11 politics in America directed by and starring Redford - provides at best a mud- dled answer to that question. With a trio of parallel storylines that are a little too easy to follow, "Lions for Lambs" features Red- ford as the aging Professor Mal- ley at "a California university." He The future of TV? Bleak O fall the single-syllable words to chant in pub- lic, "strike" is probably the least fun. "Fight" is an old classic because, well, it's kind of fun to watch people fight. I guess that's a little fucked up, but it's dif- ficult to deny the simple pleasurest of egging on public, { non-WBC sanctioned bouts. And ACAEL if "Arrested IAN Development" has taught us anything it's that a large group of people simul- taneously chanting "speech" to no one in particular at a family function makes for good televi- sion, if nothing else. But "strike" is a different ani- mal. It's not even an imperative command like the others; you're just repeatingsomethingyou've done. We get it. And from an outsiders perspective it means not getting somethingyou want for an isdefinite amount of time, which is why the strike that rocked the entertainment world last week is so devastat- ing. After what seems like years of posturing by both sides, the Broadway stagehands are final- ly on strike. It's unclear how PTESY OFU UNI long it will take to bring the stagehands back to work, but the likelihood of seeing Oprah's play this weekend is slim. Oh, and the Writers Guild of America is on strike, too. At this point it should be clear to anyone who's been fol- lowing the Guild's situation that the near future is bleak. Cur- rently the writers receive basi- cally none of the revenue that's generated through new media outlets including DVDs, Inter- net downloads and streaming advertisement revenue, and they're not going backto work until that's resolved - well, at least that's what they're saying It's not just news. The strike is going to affect you. now. The Guild certainly has a legitimate argument consider- ing the rapid development of new media in the industry, but the two parties aren't even in negotiations anymore, and net- works will always be able to fill See PASSMAN, Page 8 "Marathon? She ask me about a marathon has a slacker student named Todd who he thinks can be brilliant, so he calls him into his office to discuss why Todd seems to have given up on college and the future. The discussion that follows is a fine example of everything that's wrong with America, according to the aging hippie generation - Todd is defensive, argumenta- tive and completely uninterested in taking advice and working to change America's "bullshit" political culture. So, Prof. Mal- ley decides to tell him about "the last two students who gave him hope." Natu were ec underr Ev zec so who or becaus But they worked hard, excelled in orally, those two students schoolandcomeSept.11,answered conomically disadvantaged, the call by joining the military epresented minorities - despite strong disapproval from Malley, a former Vietnam veteran who had protested the war upon ren righteous his return. As Todd and Malley sit chatting, those two soldiers al needs some (Arian and Ernest) are deployed on a secret special operation in phistication. Afghanistan. The operation goes awry, and two of America's bright- est young minds are injured and trapped on a hostile mountaintop sly got into the university during a merciless blizzard. e of sports scholarships. See LIONS, Page 8