BEFORE: Wrapping up the baseball films with a look at Little League ball. I can't really link properly out of "Knuckleball!" either, so I may have to suspend my rules to accommodate documentaries. But Derek Jeter was also in "Anger Management" with Woody Harrelson, who was also in "A Scanner Darkly" with Keanu Reeves (last seen in "Johnny Mnemonic"). So that's something.
THE PLOT: An aimless young man who is scalping tickets, gambling and drinking, agrees to coach a Little League team from a housing project as a condition of getting a loan from a friend.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Bad News Bears" (Movie #94)
AFTER: At first this seems like a modernized version of "The Bad News Bears", only set in the projects for more relevance, and with the lead coach character made younger for more appeal. And in a sense that's what it is, since it doesn't seem to aspire to be any more than that. The plot also reminded me of "Here Comes the Boom", with the main character trying to go further out of his way to help everyone in a cascading chain. He needs more players on the team, so he has to promise their parents he'll help them with schoolwork, so he needs to get permission from the teacher, and she needs something else, and so on.
And in the process he learns to put others first, and not be always thinking about himself, and thus he redeems himself from being the self-centered gambling addict we see at the beginning of the film. (How DARE those Chicago Bulls not cover the spread! It's like they didn't consider my needs at all!) And I'm fine with that as character development, really.
But in the process, it delivers an odd message - it's OK to bet your way out of owing money to a bookie? Just place bigger and bigger bets, and when one of them pays off, you can cover all the other bad bets! Meanwhile, since he had a way of earning money by coaching the team, it would have been a stronger message if he'd paid down his debt week by week. Also, he didn't feel the need to teach the kids the mechanics of the game, or at least we didn't see it, so it seemed like he was only interested in dropping off the equipment and letting them figure it out. Or, even easier, just taking them to a major-league game, and letting them just pick up the fundamentals from watching.
Also, somehow it's OK to lie about a kid's age if you're short one player? Again, that's a strange message to be sending out to the kids, that it's OK to break the rules if you need to. I agree that the other coach seemed to have it in for our hero's team, but that doesn't make it OK. And why the sudden turn-around made by the other coach? Why did he suddenly decide to look the other way, rather than take a forced forfeit?
Furthermore, the film takes some liberties with the editing of the final few games in the season. It's an odd choice to show the a decisive game-changing moment only in flashback, and then to not show any footage from the final game at all - almost saying that the final game doesn't even matter, when in fact it should be the most significant game of all.
NITPICK POINT: The film is set in Chicago, but the coach takes the kids to Tiger Stadium. In Detroit, which is taking kids across state lines without parental consent. That would seem to constitute a felony. I look forward to the sequel where this guy was sued by the parents and has to coach a baseball team while in prison.
Also starring Diane Lane (last seen in "Man of Steel"), John Hawkes (last seen in "Congo"), Michael B. Jordan (last seen in "Chronicle"), D.B. Sweeney (last seen in "Memphis Belle"), Michael McGlone (last seen in "The Bone Collector"), Mark Margolis (last seen in "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective"), with a cameo from Sammy Sosa.
RATING: 4 out of 10 slices of pizza
No comments:
Post a Comment