Bad News Bears

After the not totally horrible Rebound and the Will Ferrell freak out Kicking and Screaming, which wasn't as great as it should've been, we now get the best kids in sports movie of the year so far, Bad News Bears. The team behind the remake of 1976's Walter Matthau movie of the same name (which I've never seen) is formed by Richard Linklater at the helm, Billy Bob Thornton in the Matthau role, and Bad Santa's scribes Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. The two of them wrote the remake with Bill Lancaster who also wrote the original.

Linklater loves the crossover between the indie and studio movies world. And he also loves to work no matter with who. He's done teen movies (Dazed and Confused), adult movies (Tape, Before Sunrise/Sunset), and kids movies like School of Rock. Now Bad News Bears is supposed to be a kids movie too, but believe me this is way on the border to a R Rating. There are no fucks, but shit, dick, asshole and their derivatives are used as often as possible.
The humor is sick too, like having a kid in a wheelchair in the baseball team, and making fun of him all the time. There's also some mild insults to blacks and Hispanics. But don't worry, it comes out funny.
Linklater also brings his A-game with the music as in all his movies, though some crappy band destroys Joan Jett's Bad Reputation during the end credits.

Billy Bob Thornton is back in Bad Santa mode but without the suit. He rocks as Morris Buttermaker, a former baseball player who only go to play 2/3 of an inning in the majors and has lived off of that ever since. He's got his strippers, his booze and his Cadillac and that's all he needs. For money he works as at pest control company spraying houses to kill rats, and he's horrible at it.
If there's one question I have about the movie is why the hell does he take the coaching job, cause I don't think it was ever explained. But he takes the job, to coach a team of (as always) pathetic loser kids at the South Valley Little League.

Thornton is great as usual, and the kids help a lot to the point where I think the movie wouldn't have worked without them. They're awesome. Troy Gentile is great as the aforementioned wheelchair-bound kid named Hooper as is Jeffrey Tedmori as Persian kid Garo. There's also good work by Timmy Deters as Tanner, the kid that wants to fight everybody even though he's not big at all; Brandon Craggs as Engelberg, the big fat kid always fighting with Tanner; K.C. Harris as Ahmad Abdul Rahim, the black kid; Jeff Davies as Kelly, the kid who can actually play very good; and Sammi Kraft as Amanda, Buttermaker's daughter whom he abandoned years before and is now trying to reconnect with even though he doesn't want to accept it. She's brought into the team to pitch and she's also a very good player.

Linklater is a genius, Billy Bob rocks and Greg Kinnear's puts a small but very funny performance as Buttermaker's rival coach Bullock. What's better is that the kids are real, except Kelly's first scenes, in which he starts as motorcycle riding badass even though he's supposed to be no more than 15 years old. But they yell, scream and insult each other and even adults all the time, throwing stuff at them, and is all really fun and entertaining. Still, one more thing's for sure, Bad News Bears is no little kids movie, so everybody should see it.