Oeuvre is an in-depth examination of the entire body of work of an important director.
Now here’s a movie that’s clearly a product of its time — one of the myriad Hollywood remakes of the 2000s with a post-Bad Santa Billy Bob Thornton coasting in one of his several roles as a misanthropic dickhead in a position where he has to deal with other people. And, for some reason, Richard Linklater stepped up to the plate to wrangle this whole thing.
The story stays the same: Billy Bob Thornton is Morris Buttermaker, an alcoholic ex-minor leaguer who finds himself coaching the worst team in little league playing against the best team in the league. According to half-assed research, many of the kids remain the same: the brothers who don’t speak English, weirdo spaz Timmy Lupus and Kelly Leak the troublemaker who, strangely, looks like Jackie Earle Haley now. It’s entertaining but forgettable fare, as so many remakes are. There’s some laughs, some sports movie tension and then you mail it back to the Netflix warehouse and never speak of it again.
Having not seen the original, one imagines that the remake smooths out some of its rougher, meaner elements. Being a 1970s movie, the thing probably doesn’t have a nice bone in its body and is most assuredly full of racism and cursing. For one thing, I know in the original the kids drink real beer instead of the non-alcoholic stuff. There’s nothing funny about kids drinking non-alcoholic beer. Being a product of 1970s cinema, it seems foolish to remake this movie because the bad news-ness of the Bears will surely be tame compared to the original. The movie would be best improved if it was rated R and full of profanity, because as of now it sits in weird middling territory as a hybrid of Bad Santa and The Sandlot, and a movie about the worst team in Little League could use a bit of extremity, and not in terms of a descent into a scene at a skate park with a pop punk band called The Bloodfarts (seriously).
Thornton’s Buttermaker is a bit of a dick but nowhere near Bad Santa levels of dickery. Sure, he drinks and seduces one of the players’ moms, but the mother in question is Marcia Gay Harden, so who could blame him? He even tries to reconnect with the daughter of an ex-girlfriend, albeit with ulterior motives. He’s more rough around the edges than he is bad news. Sure, he clearly maintains tight control on the team to relive his glory days as a minor leaguer, but he goes to so few extremes to pursue it that when he inevitably realizes that, hey, Little League should be about having fun, it feels slight. Considering that the coach of the Yankees is evil suburbanite Greg Kinnear, the film could have had Billy Bob puke on a baby and he’d still seem like a pretty okay dude. And remember, in the original Buttermaker was played by Walter Matthau, and that guy hates everyone.
Richard Linklater manages to stay somewhat invisible behind the camera, though it’s hard to watch characters just talk and not think, “Of course! Linklater!” Movies like Bad News Bears muck up a filmography because either you write it off as a great director slumming for a paycheck or you try to shoehorn ideas about his filmmaking into what could just be intended as a commercial product.
One can imagine that by this point Linklater gets how Hollywood works. It’s easy to sell out or let your intended career slip away from you once you become the right kind of indie darling. The trick is to make the movie the kind of movie you want to make and somehow forge a living because the kind of movie you want to make is probably not the kind of movie they want you to make. So, either you can say “Fuck it, I’ll make your kid baseball movie and then your talking dog playing football movie” or you say “Fuck it, I’ll make your kid baseball movie and that vile corporate money you’ve given me will be funneled into something you’d never in your life ask a director to shoot.” Okay, then — how do you explain why Linklater followed Bad News Bears with A Scanner Darkly?
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