bettycjung An enjoyable dramatization of this famous battle of the sexes. Hunter and Silver were wonderful as King and Riggs. Worth catching. If you liked this movie, then catch a more current retelling in the Battle of the Sexes with Stone and Carell.

kgowen-1 Amen, sister! Can I get a witness? Hallelujah, I'm saved! Yes, he orthodox gospel of feminist rectitude is proclaimed at full volume in this trying-to-be-relevant-but-mostly-fluffy made-for-TV movie.My daughter has recently taken up an interest in tennis, so I dropped this lightweight drama in my Netflix queue, not expecting much either way. As it turned out, this could have been a really bad movie, but thankfully it's not. What saves it (hallelujah, it's saved!) from being just another dreary feminist harangue is good performances from Holly Hunter as Wimbledon champion Billie Jean King and Ron Silver as the aging hustler Bobby Riggs. I was going to further criticize this movie for unequal treatment: making King an actual human being but portraying Riggs as a nothing but a one-dimensional buffoon (after all, who doesn't want a dastardly villain who is easily dispatched?), but the more I read about Riggs, the more I came to realize that that was the way he was in real life.This is not a fine-cuisine-and-red-wine type of movie; it's more like a Burger King meal deal. Fun, but not to be taken too seriously, and not with all the heavy-handed preaching.

QQQ-2 One of the worst sports films in a long time, When Billy Beat Bobby is a mutant of a movie. Unevenly waffling between drama and comedy, fact and farce, it takes a fairly normal subject--a famous tennis match--and makes a weird mini-spectacle of it.Completely miscast, Holly Hunter doesn't quite fit into Billy Jean King's tennis shoes, she looks too strange and unnatural--as if she should have been in Hannibal instead (The muscular character Margot Verger was omitted from the horror flick for fear of offending certain women). Ron Silver broadly overacts as Bobby Riggs, has too close a resemblance to Austin Powers, and sounds too much like Sylvester the Cat. Fred Willard as a TV sportscaster helps only to skew the film into Fernwood 2-Night territory, and every other person is reduced to a sexist/racist/handicapped/ethnic caricature.The story and style is clumsy and unsteady. Is it trying to be Rocky, the Karate Kid, or When Harry Met Sally? When Billie Beat Bobby does not know what it wants to be. The 1970's setting seems to come out of an old Mad magazine, and everyone looks and acts grotesque as if they were directed by David Lynch, or John Waters-lite. The fake-Stanley Kubrick technique breaks into bits of sports-film cliche, bits of nostalgic kitsch, bits of comic exaggeration, and other odd bits that don't move, fit or jive. It has about as much respect tennis-players as a black-face minstrel show has for African-Americans.What it all ends up in is When Myra Breckinridge Beat the Nutty Professor with an American Graffiti/Animal House epilogue tacked on. It even cheats the viewer out of any beleivable tennis action--most of the shots are of closeups and fans in the bleachers. When Billie is best forgotten, it may be remembered for being what Dan Aykroyd on SNL used to call "Bad Performance Theatre!" At least it was broadcast on ABC TV, so you got your money's worth of curiously awful cinema.

bobshef Holly Hunter as Billie Jean King gives her usual great performance, and Ron Silver is absolutely brilliant as Bobby Riggs. The story told me a lot I didn't know about the things that went on leading up to the match. One major revelation was what Bobby Riggs inadvertently did for women's tennis and women's liberation.