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.
Karl Self
The original "Bad News Bears" is one of my personal favourites. I can watch it time and again and it never fails to give me a blast. When Richard Linklater's 2005 remake came out the reviews were so negative that I didn't watch it on purpose -- why spoil a wonderful memory? I finally caught up with the remake last night and actually enjoyed it. The negative reviews had got it wrong. Richard Linklater captured the spirit of the original and time-tunneled it thirty years (if you catch my drift). The role of grumpy coach Morris Buttermaker, played by Walter Matthau in the original, suits Billy Bob Thornton to a T. The other roles are also well cast, Greg Kinnear as the uptight Little League coach Roy Bullock and Marcia Gay Harden as the cougar baseball mum stand out. Most importantly, the kids also stand the comparison to their 1976 peers.The original was noted for being edgy and non-PC (a term that wasn't even invented back then). Coach Buttermaker is a relentless alcoholic who drinks and drives, and even hands out cans of beer to his wards, and wild child Tanner refers to his fellow players as a bunch of "Jews, sp#cs (and) n#ggers". Some detractors criticise Linklater for selling out to political correctness because he doesn't repeat these scenes verbatim. They overlook that a remake is not the same as a rip-off, and that the rewritten script packs enough edge, for example when Buttermaker makes the kids fill in for him in his day job as an exterminator.It's sad that nonprofessional reviewers seem to be prone to howl with the wolves and denigrate a perfectly good remake as an epic failure.
Tecun_Uman
There was no way that this film would be as good as the classic from 1976, no way. That being said, I had rather low expectations. I mean, were they just going to remake the original but with different actors? Would they do an original take on the story? Well, they kind of stay loyal to the original with a few variations. Billy Bob Thornton is no Walter Matthau, but he gives a good effort and has some great lines. The real weakness with film is in the supporting cast, which is vastly inferior to the original. Greg Kinnear pales in comparison to Vic Morrow and is rather marginalized compared to the original. However, the real problem with this film involves the kids. Tatum O'Neil and the kids that starred in the original were very accomplished and so much more entertaining. The Bears in this film are just weak. None are very accomplished as actors and it shows, big time. Not one gives a really decent performance. Added to this is the poor edit job. I mean, we see the Bears lose every game, then, they win one game and in the next scene, a character says we are one game away from the Championship. What!? How is that possible? I guess the more I talk about this movie, the more I realize that it is vastly inferior to the original, despite the Thornton performance.
