Just perfect...

best movie i've ever seen.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

"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.

As an 11 y/o when the original BNB was released, my opinion of the remake is as follows. This movie not only sucks,it swallows. Kid in a wheelchair? For crying out loud.So pc it hurts.Billy Bob Thornton is the only decent character in this tripe.Too bad some of the original cast were not invited to make at least a cameo. It is a trueism that most re-makes fail to hold a candle to the original. This one demonstrates that,cubed! Thanks for trying guys, but maybe one day we as a society will awake from all of this myopia, cut the chase and begin to allow filmmakers to "capture a moment" as it is/was, rather than insist that self esteem or some equally irrelevant concept must be applied to the process. Another addition to the wimpification of our once great film industry! Flame away all of you Dr feelgoods.

Boozing rat exterminator Billy Bob Thornton (as Morris Buttermaker) was once a major league baseball player… for about three minutes. Then, he got ousted for punching an ump. Presently, low-cut Marcia Gay Harden (as Liz Whitewood) hires him to lead son Ridge Canipe (as Toby)'s Little League team, against tight-shorted rival coach Greg Kinnear (as Roy Bullock). Can Mr. Thornton transform a "ragtag group of inept players" into a group of successful ballplayers? Well, duh...The filmmakers were obviously struggling to see how many times they could get the letters "s", "h", "i", and "t" to appear consecutively in the script. Yes, "Bad News Bears" is a tailor-made PG-13-rated pre-teen pseudo-comedy. Yet, it manages to funny. You can watch it if you're post-teen, and occasionally laugh. Sammi Kane Kraft (as Amanda Whurlitzer) and the age appropriately cast baseball team are the most valuable players, overcoming clichés with natural performances.***** Bad News Bears (7/22/05) Richard Linklater ~ Billy Bob Thornton, Sammi Kane Kraft, Greg Kinnear, Jeffrey Davies

I love Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa and the Bad News Bears remake to 2005 after a 29 years since the original film. The film has changed to modify today's world where computers rule the world which I said at 10 years old to an skeptical neighbor and where even a handicapped wheelchair-bound boy can play baseball. Thornton plays Buttermaker, the major league baseball player who turns coach rather than get a jail sentence. The mother of one his players is played by the divine Marcia Gay Harden. I think the kid from Bad Santa also has a role as does Greg Kinnear who plays a competitive coach. I love watching the kids learn the sport by killing insects since Buttermaker is an exterminator and they sponsored by a strip club. They start getting better in the beginning. They are lovable losers who face ridicule and humiliation every day at school. Suddenly, they get help with a girl pitcher and a guy who's a rebel.