Movies based on a true story have to take artistic licenses. There is no way that real life fits neatly into an interesting two-hour movie. So when you view these movies it's hard to tell what really happened. But so what? People want to be entertained, not necessarily educated. Accuracy is for documentaries. But at least this movie has a few blurbs of what happened to the real people in real life.

"Remember the Titans" is a Disney movie. When I think of Disney I think of G-rated cartoons, not live action. There are lots of live-action Disney films, but not too many lately. Most of the adult films are being done by Disney's Touchstone division, which doesn't have a kid-image attached to it. So I'm surprised that this movie was made by Disney itself, even though it's rated PG.

What we have here is a movie about football and racial integrity. The time is 1971. The place is Alexandria, Virginia. TC Williams High School, a formerly all-white school, is going to be integrated this year. Bill Yoast (Will Patton) is TCW's football coach. A man who is up for the state Hall of Fame for his coaching success. His players are worried about having to play with blacks the players' parents are none too happy with the prospect of their sons possibly being replaced by black players.

Into this milieu arrives Coach Herman Boone (Denzel Washington). Coach Boone has been an assistant coach for a few teams in North Carolina, all highly successful. But he was passed over as head coach for a white man, so he left. The school board has hired Boone to be head coach at TCW, to satisfy the public demand to have a black coach at one of the local high schools. Coach Yoast is understandably upset and refuses to step down and be the defensive coach for Boone. But his players convince Yoast to stay on by declaring that they will sit out the season if Yoast isn't head coach. Not wanting to see his players throw away their football careers, Yoast agrees to be an assistant coach.

After this we have an hour where the new black players and current white players go to the pre-season training camp at a local university. We learn more about Coach Boone and his style of coaching as the players slowly bond together and learn to see past their prejudices. After than they start school and we see if their new bonds survive the strain as the rest of their classmates try to break them apart. There is also the football season with some great action scenes and some amount of strategy shown, but mostly that's a backdrop to the people story.

This is a very old plot: two sides that hate each other learn to see past their differences and find a common ground, which is then tested by other people who aren't as enlightened. But in this movie it's done very well. The acting is quite good, with lots of people sharing the screen time (this is not a Denzel Washington movie). The story is tight and focused, perhaps a bit too much so. It's quite engaging and it could easily have been a half hour longer and I wouldn't have noticed.

This is Denzel Washington's only movie this year, and it's a good one. He's done a fair number of movies, most of them quality dramas. I remember first seeing Washington in "Glory" during college. He was the up and coming young black actor and Morgan Freeman was an established veteran. Since then I've seen 12 of his 23 movies, with my favorite being "Crimson Tide" back in 1995.

Will Patton has been a sort of character actor who's been around for 20 years. I've only seen him a half dozen or so movies, maybe the first one being "The Postman", although that's rather recent. Maybe "No Way Out" when it was shown on tv a few years ago. Nothing remarkable really, none of the roles I've seen him in have been all that large in my mind.

Recommendation. Watch this movie. Even if you don't like football it's still a great movie and there isn't that much actual football anyways, mostly training camp scenes. As I've said, it's a well done movie, even if the basic plot is tried and true. Not really a kids film nor a date film. It's just a nice story that makes you feel good at the end, like it wasn't all for nothing.