Steven Russell - Blog Post 5 - Nonverbal Analysis

     After watching the half-time speech for the movie "Any Given Sunday" posted at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO4tIrjBDkk  and looking for non-verbal effectiveness, I am slightly conflicted.  I own this movie & have seen it several times.  Al Pacino's halftime speech is one of my favorites.  However, for this assignment, I watched the speech without sound and simply watched both coach & player's faces/demeanors throughout the approximately 4 minute motivational talk. 
     After trailing in the 1st half, Pacino's character appears before his team looking dejected and worse for ware.  He stares at the ground as if searching for the words to inspire his team of warriors.  However, his own life has become as distracting from the game as many of his player's lives also have.  After seemingly coming to his ropes end, Pacino comes clean and pools both life and football together.  As the speech goes on, the players respond to him and you can see determination creep back into their eyes.  It is his genuine self-disclosure that seems to reach his player's inner-hearts and their shared misery stands as a rallying point and battle cry.  Pacino has them backed into a corner and then convinces them to fight their way out of it, both in life & in football. 
     The coach is played perfectly by Al Pacino as he has a natural charismatic way about him.  An accomplished actor, he uses animated hand & facial expressions to convey a real sense of emotionality.  Slow motion camera pauses of him expressionless also aid in creating a sense of "where do we go from here now?"  Combining real images from the locker room with past memories and things not identified in the movie add a sense of mysticism and draw listeners in for a closer look and interpretation. 
     The shark's team motto "whatever it takes" can be seen throughout the locker room, and the speech itself can be surmised to say that in football, and in life, we must all do, "whatever it takes".  This a wonderful artifact the director used repeatedly throughout the movie to prime the audience and in  particular to coincide with this speech.