Watch Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 For Free

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

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.

In the spectrum of potential audience size, Kevin Rafferty's moment by moment review of a 40+ year old Ivy League college football game must be close to the lowest end. Game footage from Harvard's television station accounts for somewhere between 3/5ths to 2/3rds of the documentary's run time with men in their late 50's talking about the game accounting for all of the remainder. Now it helps that one of these men was former Harvard offensive lineman and current movie legend Tommy Lee Jones who seems oddly somber and off put about having to discuss the game despite the fact that his team is Rocky Balboa to Yale's Apollo Creed. It also helps that some of the discussion involves future Presidents, Vice Presidents and other screen legends. Beyond the shine of celebrity, the proceedings also benefit from the darkness of war, specifically the Vietnam war and the coming together on a sports team of veterans of it with active protesters of it. However, women, residents outside the Northeast United States and those born after the Beatles broke up will struggle to find relevancy in this tale of an old football game. In short, see Rafferty's "Atomic Café" instead, an absorbing study of just how crazy the cold war got.

..............and if he/she did they sure didn't bother to try to understand it or what the movie had to say! This is one of the best movies of the year so far. It has twists and ironies that make us think about what games and human interplay have to teach us as well as the participants in the event. Some of the players came in not knowing what to expect, some came in sure they would win and others in the course of the game refused to give up on the game, themselves and their teammates! One of the players throughout the movie was presented in a way that we as viewers thought we would wind up intensely disliking him but in the end he wound up learning so much from this game that it helped him become the person he is today - in his own words, a "better person". This forced the viewers of the film to learn something about themselves as well. The movie has humor, pain, arrogance, humility and a full range of human emotions as well as nuttiness and thrills. Pegasus3 missed so much about this movie that it does appear they didn't really see it. E.g., they say that it was a close game?? Well gee, it WAS A TIE GAME...how much closer could it be?? And the player talking about injuring another player (who was his friend BTW)... he actually thought he HAD injured him in the game to get him out of the game BUT as we see in the footage on the play where he was sure he had accomplished this he was nowhere near the play!! What irony! And the fact that P3 didn't even understand the title....the most ironic of all. He asked if he missed something? Well only the entire point of the movie - that Harvard "won" the game simply by tying the score in the end when they weren't even expected to come close! They won by doing so much better than they were expected to do. Contrary to the writers comment the title DID sum up the movie! All in all - a well-made, interesting and ultimately great movie. The players themselves summed it up best - it was only a game but what a game and what FUN it was to play in it. GO SEE IT!

If you like documentaries that examine a memorable event and crawl inside the heads of those who participated in it to put things in context and reveal attitudes, Director Kevin Rafferty's film will score a touchdown with you.It's 1968. Yale is an all-male school with a preppy-elitist reputation. Their football team is an undefeated homogeneous group that is expected to easily hand Harvard its first defeat of the 1968 season--and dash its conference championship hopes--when Yale travels to Cambridge to play the last game of the season. The Harvard team is anything but homogeneous. It has a player recently back from Viet Nam where he survived the battle of Khe Sanh and another who is a member of the radical SDS, protesting the war and picketing campus buildings.The game is going the way everyone expected: Yale has turned the game into a 22-6 rout by half-time. In the second half a desperate Harvard coach changes quarterbacks. Things don't change much until 42 seconds before the final gun. You already know the final score; it's not much of a spoiler when the title of the film tells you the ending. It's what happens in those last 42 seconds, and the recalled memories of what was going on in the heads of the Harvard and Yale football players forty years ago, that makes the movie worth watching.These aren't polished actors with scripted lines, they are aging men recalling four decades later what was almost certainly the most memorable game they played in during their football careers. It's interesting—and sometimes amusing--to listen to and watch the reminiscences, the bravado even this long after the game, and how sometimes people remember things the way they wanted them to be rather than the way they were (like when Yale linebacker Mike Bouscaren talks about putting Ray Hornblower out of the game with a tackle). Rafferty captures all of that while inter-weaving scenes of the actual football game. Letting us listen to the former players, Rafferty makes it clear that sometimes in football, as in life, you don't have to score more points to be the winner. The title of the movie, as the film's epilogue discloses, and anyone who has read a review of the film knows, comes from the headline in the Harvard Crimson student newspaper following the game: "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29." It is understandable Yalies might not like this movie. The game was viewed as a loss by anyone that knew anything about college football. And although Rafferty didn't bring it up, even Yale head coach Carmen Cozza was quoted after the game as saying it felt like a loss. It probably still feels that way to Yale fans. To the rest of us though, this is an entertaining and insightful movie.Incidentally, the University of Florida found itself in a similar situation when it came to Tallahassee to play Florida State University in 1994. Leading its arch-rivals 31-3 going into the final quarter, UF watched helplessly as FSU scored 28 unanswered points to pull out its own 31-31 "win."