tieman64
"Because the commodity society can only function on the basis of disembodiment, its members are consumed by a hunger for images of the body, including one's own body image." - Peter Sloterdijk "The Longest Yard" (1974) with kids, Michael Ritchie's "Bad News Bears" (1976) revolves around a group of young, seemingly incompetent baseball players and the foul mouthed coach (Walter Matthau) who leads them.The majority of Ritchie's early films focused on the competitiveness and ruthlessness of a then contemporary United States. Consider "Smile", a satire which focused on interstate beauty pageants and which contained the line "Boys get money for making touchdowns, why shouldn't girls get money for being cute?" That question's answer is, in a way, present in "Bad News Bears", which focuses on the way in which sports, and human relations in general, suffer when commodified.Significantly, all the baseball players on Matthau's team are deemed rejects or incompetents. They're discarded, branded useless by a goal and profit oriented culture. Matthau attempts to build his team into a suitable product, but meets resistance. The kids literally can't play. What Ritchie then goes on to suggest is that this is okay. His multiracial cocktail of kids, like a band of turn-of-the-century immigrants fresh off the boat, reject a world based on gain and push. They make their own American dream, their own community, and then reject the game outright. For the kids, sports is, or should be, a vehicle for creativity, self-expression, affirmation and cultural growth, be its players black or white, male or female (the film's star pitcher is a young girl). This is a one-sided view sports – sport and competition can be viewed as an art, a performance, drama, something aesthetic and refined – but such a stance is necessary for Ritchie's allegory, and was common in sporting movies of the era (see "Slap Shot").Odd for a "children's film", Ritchie's kids are jaded, foul mouthed, world-weary and lost in a wasteland of Jack-in-the-Boxes, Pizza Huts and McDonalds. They're coarse, obscene, some are on the pill, others are already seeing shrinks and most find themselves surrendering their identities to forces far greater than they are. The adults, meanwhile, remain proudly oblivious to the problems of the kids. Competition triumphs. Let the twerps shape up or ship out.Ritchie's "Downhill Racer" featured a battle between an egotistical racer who refused to give up his personal values for the larger values of a team and community. "Bears" does something similar. But though it bashes the contradictions between the logic and values of capitalism and the values which the United States as a nation professes to represent (honesty, fair-play, truth, unity, freedom, equality etc), it also celebrates the possibility of personal accomplishment and achievement. The way the film pulls in opposite directions leads to its confused ending, the contradictions of US life far too complex for Ritchie's simple narrative.Released in 2005, Richard Linklater's "Bad News Bears" is a remake of Ritchie's film. Linklater makes a few changes, and casts Billy Bob Thornton as our foul mouthed coach, but for the most part his film is a shot-for-shot remake of Ritchie's. In both films the "coach" character initially sees his own daughter as but a utensil, his relationship with her a tool used toward a very specific end. Likewise, both films find their kids becoming a kind of "microcosm of the disenfranchised" (minorities, third worlders, girls, women, working class kids, alienated geeks etc), the children working together to reject American-bred success-at-all-costs competitiveness on behalf of their own little half-baked revolution. Like Ritchie, Linklater then sells anarchy and community under the ironic gaze of a patriotic American flag. Such middle fingers clash uneasily with the needs of a mainstream movie, though, as both versions of the "Bad News Bears" see the kids simultaneously losing AND winning, our heroes jointly losing their baseball match and celebrated for thumbing their nose at traditional sportsmanship and WASP manners. This kind of "have it both ways" ending was also typical in the 1970s.While Linklater is a gentle soul who clearly identifies with his material, his remake is nevertheless much too similar to its predecessor. Linklater's also stuck in a world of Little Leagues and suburban misfits, when today the situation he delineates is far more amplified. Today, it's not just a national pastime which has become a showcase for corporate ownership and corporate values. No, contemporary human beings are so colonised that everything - from our conceptions of time to even the simplest human actions - is now conceptualised in terms of the logic of capitalism. Our very language and thought processes reinforce a tendency to view and treat all objects, relationships, and conditions as presumptively subject to exchange. This mania is treated well by directors like Olivier Assayas. Linklater, meanwhile, remains stuck in the 1970s.7.9/10 - Worth one viewing.
bobsgrock
Quite often, the quality of a movie depends heavily on the expectations of the audience going into see it. In the case of the 2005 remake of The Bad News Bears, expectations were most likely lower than the average baseball film. Though it is helmed by the enormously talented and creative Richard Linklater, little of his talent is utilized in this otherwise bland and, at times, disjointed tale of a group of ragtag Little League rejects who form together to create an unlikely winning combination.Billy Bob Thornton as the alcoholic coach Morris Buttermaker is at times likable and sympathetic while at others he is a complete and utter wretched person. Though this would work in some scripts, here it feels cheap and rings false, with Buttermaker and most of the rest of the cast being used by the plot as puppets. Hardly any of these characters' actions feel genuine or reasonable; rather they seem to be acting in a movie.The best part of the film, the championship game which takes up the last twenty minutes or so, reveals some nice touches but still is not quite capable of capturing the right balance between salty adolescence and sympathetic losers. Greg Kinnear's antagonist also seems to fall into the all-too big category of bad guys being bad simply for the sake of being the protagonist's obstruction. Whether this is a better film than the original 1976 must be decided by the audience, but it certainly fails to be any more surprising or memorable.
