Films for Peyton

You’re Peyton Manning. You just had another MVP regular season followed by another playoff collapse, and you’re heading into the off-season filled with dejection and doubt.

The good news is that there’s more than just your fame, money and beautiful wife to console you: There’s the healing power of film. I’m not going to recommend any “inspiring” football tear-jerkers, because I wouldn’t wish that saccharine dreck on my worst enemy (that lets you off the hook, Jay Cutler).

Right now, you need to get as far away from football as possible, and Frank Tashlin’s rock ’n’ roll comedy The Girl Can’t Help It never fails to lift my spirits. It’s got Little Richard, Fats Domino and Jayne Mansfield’s ta-tas. You’d have to be a terrorist not to love it.

Now that I’ve got your mind off the Super Bowl, let’s talk about the Super Bowl. What happened there, man? On that game-sealing pick six, did you forget you called the exact same play one minute earlier? Perhaps you were stuck in a semi-amnesiac memory loop, in which case I prescribe group therapy with Memento and Run Lola Run.

There is a tendency to cast blame after a difficult loss (the Colts’ G.M. already threw your o-line under the bus), but scapegoating isn’t problem solving. Just look at Stanley Kubrick’s masterful World War I film Paths of Glory, in which soldiers are randomly executed for an officer’s mistake. Check out John Ford’s elegant World War II drama They Were Expendable for a look at dignity in defeat.

Lastly, watch the overlooked 2003 Owning Mahowny, a powerful study of gambling addiction with career-best work from Philip Seymour Hoffman. Look in the robotic glaze of this degenerate gambler’s eyes, and you’ll start to understand all of the degenerate gamblers like me who wasted their money betting on you.