BAD NEWS BEARS REMAKE

I have a file in "my documents"  of ideas for this blog.  One of them was "Ten Reasons You Couldn't Make 'The Bad News Bears' Today.   Then I read that a remake of this classic film is indeed being planned.  Billy Bob Thornton is attached as the lead and the script will be written by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, who penned the Thornton-helmed hit Bad Santa.

I love the original Bears.  Although it's recognized as a crowd-pleasing hit, I don't think it's given the artistic acclaim it deserves.  The risks that it took just seem so out of bounds today that I have trouble envisioning the new film being remotely as iconoclastic.  I will present my list now, but now title it "Ten Things I bet Will Get Changed in the Remake of "The Bad News Bears."

10 .  Buttermaker gives the kids beer and isn't flayed alive for doing so.  They just might keep this for the remake and pat themselves on the back for being brave.  Granted, it is taking a legitimate risk, but I just think some of the other things the movie did are much ballsier.   Serving alcohol would circumvent the post-70s MADD and SADD movements since all of the kids are too young to drive. 

9. Kelly Leak smokes and isn't shown to get lung cancer by the end of the film.  Smoking has a much greater stigma attached to it today than drinking.  Kelly will most likely be a bad ass and curse, but I suspect he won't light up. 

8.  "This is for Allah, and it's going way out there, sucka!"   This line has about as much chance of finding its way into the remake as a new scene where Ahmad hijacks Kelly's motorcycle and suicide drives it into the White Sox's dugout.

7.  Coach Turner hits his son in public and isn't sent to prison to share a cell with a Mike Tyson lookalike.  I'm not saying that Hollywood has become so sanitized that it no longer is willing to show people do bad things, but they've really upped showing the "consequences" of them - certainly when it involves kids.  Yeah, in the original, Turner's son gets mad at him and allows the Bears to almost catch up, but the White Sox win the league, which is what really matters most to Coach Turner.   In the remake, look for agents from Child Services to be waiting on the sidelines at the conclusion of the championship game.

6.  Amanda fails to get Buttermaker to reconcile with her mom.  This is standard stuff these days.  Hollywood believes that getting old flames back together is their duty, except in sitcoms where they are a device for illustrating the strength of the love of existing couples.  I'm sure the exec on this will want to "explore the relationship" further, not realizing that its omission allowed original moviegoers to spend more time with the kids, which is what makes the film. 

5.  Amanda taken out of final game due to her arm giving out.  In the age of Title IX lies that we live in today, this just won't fly.  Look for Amanda 2.0 to fight through the pain and finish the game.  It's also quite possible that Amanda won't be the only girl on the team. 

4.  Kelly beats Amanda in the air hockey game.  Amanda is sent in to hustle Kelly.  He turns the tables on her, hustles her and makes her go on a date with him to a Rolling Stones concert as his prize.  This one is even more certain than the last item of not finishing the game.  There, at least she was hurt.  Here, she just gets beat.  No way that happens this go round.  Since Amada 2.0 will have watched Mia Hamm peddle Doritoes, she'll now have the self-confidence to win this contest. 

3.  The team the audience is rooting for loses at the end.  The wonderful films of the 70s were willing to have their heroes lose.  I suppose Rocky is the clearest example of that.  The new Hollywood mentality insists on winners.  Perhaps just how far Hollywood has gotten from the 70s can be found in the 1993 Searching for Bobby Fischer.  In final showdown in that film, Josh Waitzkin squares off against "Jonathan Poe."  The Josh character employs both the play-from-your-heart technique of streetwise, speed chess player, Vinnie (in taking his queen out early) AND the cold, calculating, academic approach he's gained from the brow-beating Bruce Pandolfini (seeing a winning position that's twelve moves ahead).  At that moment, Josh (filled with the selfless love he's gained from his mother) offers his opponent a draw, which is refused.  Josh then storms through the endgame which his opponent is happy to play through until he's lost. 

That climax is non-stop lies.  First of all, it's completely ludicrous that the game would continue to that point.  LONG, LONG before the march of the pawns to get queened, anyone with even the slightest grasp of chess would have resigned.  The over-explaining Hollywood of today feels it has to show the game come to an end.  Second, the notion that you need both the "heart" of Vinnie (Lawrence Fishburne) along with the "mind" of Ben Kingley's is completely untrue.  Speed chess only develops bad habits.  Moreover the portrayal of Bruce Pandolfini is monumentally distorted.  Yeah, he believes in learning all kinds of academic stuff, but he's also an incredibly gregarious individual, who's not cold at all.  The fact that his true persona doesn't play into the simplified drama of Scott Rudin development is the only reason he's presented that way.  Prepare to be surprised if you rent the 1996 documentary Chess Kids, which features the real life Josh Waitzkin and Bruce Pandolfini. 

Lastly, and I'm sorry to go off on this whole thing for so long, but the REAL-LIFE game between Josh Waitzkin and Jeff Sarwer (who the Jonathan Poe character is based on), indeed featured wildly dramatic moves, but was infinitely different.  Sarwer was punishing Waitzkin badly, but Josh was a half point up going into the championship game. The inventive move of moving a knight off to the side yielded a dramatic and much-needed DRAW, not a win.  But Josh won the title with the draw, since he had the overall lead before the game began.   In today's Hollywood, forget allowing heroes to lose - a TIE just isn't good enough, even when it means a win.       

2  The Bears lose and are allowed to be bad sports about it.  This is a separate risk from the one above and is even more brave.  In the remake, they'll probably win and the "risk" that the studio will be proud of is that they gloat about it.