Either sports-movies-with-plots-you’ve-seen-17-times-before get you or they don’t. They’re almost a genre. But the good ones are always a bit different…they always pay off in some unforeseen way. I was afraid that Remember the Titans would make me nod off, but it didn’t. (And yet…frankly…thinking back upon Remem- ber the Titans, I can’t remember very much.) I thought Friday Night Lights would be the same old stuff, but it had a lot of good actors and that grainy-funky photography and had those bleak Odessa, Texas, backdrops and the team lost the big game at the finale…and it turned out to be fairly exceptional. You could see what Dreamer: Based on a True Story would be from ten miles away, but it was smoothly made and agreeably acted and it didn’t rankle. That said, I haven’t seen Jerry Bruckheimer’s Glory Road (Disney, 1.13) but it’s an African-American Hoosiers set in Texas with Josh Lucas as Gene Hackman. Set in ’65 and ’66, Lucas plays a Texas Western coach named Don Haskins who led the first all-black starting line-up for a college basketball team to the NCAA national championship. The big hurdle was racism. Forty years ago there were virtually no black college players in the South, and with schools that had black players there was an unwritten rule that you could play one black player at a time at home, two on the road, and three if you were losing badly. Anyway, Haskins can’t find any decent white players so he recruits blacks from northern cities and brings them to Texas Western to play basketball and you know the rest. But I hear it’s pretty good (and that Jon Voight has another terrific supporting role a la Michael Mann’s Ali under ten pounds of makeup). Bottom line is that Disney wouldn’t be having a big nationwide sneak this Saturday if the movie wasn’t connecting.