MOST VALUABLE PLAYERS:
Sports is a huge deal for people, we love to watch them, we love to play them, it doesn’t matter if it’s at the pee-wee levels or at the professional level. Because they are such a big deal the majority of funding for high schools will go towards the sports departments while other areas like drama and theater departments go with very little funding. That is until the Pennsylvania and New Jersey areas decided that the kids who put so much of themselves into their work that they deserved to have some recognition. That spawned the Freddy Awards, a live event that has taken on a life of its own as these kids get awarded for doing something that means so much to them. Now it’s the theater departments that are getting all the glitz and glamour and it is shown in the documentary Most Valuable Players.

DOCUMENTARY ABOUT HIGH SCHOOL THEATER:
I thought Most Valuable Players was going to be one of those boring documentaries that wouldn’t hold any interest for me. I couldn’t have been more wrong. This documentary was surprisingly fun to watch and pretty informative. It’s all about how the high school arts and theater departments don’t get the same amount of fame and money that sports does in the Pennsylvania area so they decided to make an awards program for the students. With the Freddy Awards are somewhat like the awards shows that are for mainstream movies but for high school theater.

Though the documentary don’t focus fully on just the awards show and how it works, it gives a wide view of what the kids do to get ready for their shows at the high school, talking about their teachers, the teachers talking about the students, what they are dealing with to get money for the theater program, and what it’s like to be nominated for the Freddy Awards. There’s also more talked about here but what’s important to know about this documentary is that it shows the emotion, the pain, the love, and how much these kids put into being in theater.

What makes this documentary so interesting is that it shows the emotions of these kids and teachers as they do so much for their passion. This is not the documentary that only tells a story with some talking heads and b roll footage, it tells a story from people that could be someone you know or knew and it brings you along on their journey. It’s edited well where the flow goes easily and smoothly from interviews into footage and back into interviews. Because of the smooth flow between scenes, going from a interview into natural sound made watching it just as easy. Plus for a documentary the lighting is really nice. I was expecting it to be somewhat dark or possibly with noise because of the low budget, but this looks just as good as some of the major network documentaries that air on national networks. My own grip about Most Valuable Players is that it could have been about 15 minutes shorter. It didn’t get boring, but at an hour and half long it got a little long by the end. I think I could have done with a little less of the high school scenes and more of the awards show.