The Screengrab : the bad news bears go to japan

Morning Deal Report: “School of Rock” Rolls Again

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Hellboy II: The Golden Army raised hell at the box office over the weekend, taking in an estimated $35.9 million. The public’s appetite for digitally rendered Brendan Fraser proved larger than I would have guessed as Journey to the Center of the Earth garnered $20.6 million, good for third place behind Hancock in its second weekend. Eddie Murphy made Mike Myers feel better about things as Meet Dave crashed and burned with only $5.3 million, one of the worst opening weekends in the history of the Murphyverse.

Richard Linklater should really have better things to do than a sequel to School of Rock, shouldn’t he? (I won’t even suggest that screenwriter Mike White does.) Nevertheless, the director is attached to School of Rock 2: America Rocks, as is original star Jack Black as rockin’ substitute teacher Dewey Finn. Variety reports that White’s screenplay “picks up with Finn leading a group of summer school students on a cross-country field trip that delves into the history of rock 'n' roll and explores the roots of blues, rap, country and other genres.” Could be worse, I guess. Linklater could be remaking The Bad News Bears Go to Japan.

In even less surprising news, Jon Heder will play “a Napoleon Dynamite-like oddball who becomes contaminated with a substance that gives him what might arguably be considered superpowers” in Loudermilk, per the Hollywood Reporter. The comedy was pitched to Universal by Heder and his brother Doug, and will be rewritten and directed by Craig Zobel (Great World of Sound). In the funniest sentence I’ve read this morning, Doug Heder proclaims, “Loudermilk is definitely intended to set the tone for Greasy Entertainment.”

Related:
Hellboy: The Letting Go
Eddie Murphy Exhumes "Beverly Hills Cop"

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: June 28-July 4, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Hey gang, we're taking the day off to roast some weenies and blow a few bottle rockets off the roof of Screengrab headquarters. But that's no reason you can't celebrate your independence by catching up on the week in Screengrab!

Do your patriotic duty and check out America the Beautiful: 15 Movies That Show What's Right with U.S. (Parts One, Two and Three)

Celebrate your Independence Day with, er, Independence Day. Either that or cheer on our national pastime with The Bad News Bears Go to Japan.

Here's an All-American Gal for ya! OK, a South African All-American Gal, but still: Charlize Theron Is a Sexual Creature.

If you have the day off, why not catch up with Wall-E? We investigated director Andrew Stanton's Retro-Futurism and pondered whether Wall-E and Silent Running were Separated at Birth.

When I'm grilling my burgers, I like to crank up the Superfly soundtrack, especially if it's a Long Hot Summer.

No celebration of what makes America great would be complete without The Joker, The Smokers and The Midnight Tokers. (At least, we assume they were toking something to conceive a sequel to 300.)

You know who wasn't American? Derek Jarman. However, Don S. Davis was.

And finally, we hope you all are taking a much-deserved Requiem for a Day Off.

Summer of ’78: “The Bad News Bears Go to Japan”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78!

The Bad News Bears Go to Japan

Release Date: June 30, 1978

Cast: Tony Curtis, Jackie Earle Haley, Tomisaburo Wakayama, Dick Button, Regis Philbin

The Buzz: Bad News Bears! Japan! Whaddaya need, a roadmap?

Keywords: Baseball, Sequel, Japan

The Plot: The Bad News Bears go to Japan. That’s about it, but I’ll try to be a little more specific. The Bears little league team – or at least the members of the team that returned for the concluding film of this essential trilogy – see a news report indicating that the United States will not be sending a team to Tokyo to compete with the Japanese little league champions. The Bears decide they’re the team for the job, and go on TV to tell Regis why they should represent our national pastime in the Land of the Rising Sun. Degenerate gambler Tony Curtis sees the program and decides the Bears are his meal ticket; he’ll take them to Japan in exchange for the lion’s share of the profits from a potential network telecast. Once the team reaches Tokyo, the Bears disappear for large chunks of the movie, which is heavily padded with travelogue material: a karate exhibition, a wrestling match, a game show talent competition. Curtis’s gambling partners fly in three ringers for the big game in order to ensure a U.S. victory, and a brawl breaks out shortly after the match-up at the Tokyo Dome gets underway. The network broadcast falls apart, but the two teams later meet up in an old-fashioned sandlot showdown.

The Test of Time: As I proceed with this series, it’s becoming clear that I spent the summer of ’78 reading a lot of novelizations. I’ve already mentioned Damien: Omen II and Jaws 2, but I also had the Fotonovel of Heaven Can Wait and I definitely had all three Bad News Bears novelizations. Although the original Bears was one of the seminal movies of my childhood, I don’t think I ever saw the sequels on the big screen. I’m sure I wanted to see the first sequel at least, but I had limited options at that age. If it wasn’t playing at the Navy base or in the tiny two-screen theater at the mall in Ellsworth, Maine, I didn’t have much choice. In retrospect I’m glad I didn’t see The Bad News Bears Go to Japan at the time, because I had better things to do in 1978, and now I apparently don’t. The one thing I’ll say on the movie’s behalf is that it didn’t dip nearly as deeply into the waters of cultural insensitivity as I was expecting. That’s not to say it’s a nuanced look at Japan circa the late ’70s, but it’s not as offensive as it could have been. It is, however, horrible. It’s so bad that most of the original cast declined to participate. I’m not just talking about Walter Matthau and Tatum O’Neal here – I mean like the kids who played Tanner and Lupus. Can you imagine how badly Tony Curtis’s career must have been going if he agreed to star in a movie that the kid who played Lupus turned down? The few Bears who do return have pretty much outgrown their cuteness, particularly pudgy catcher Englebert, now roughly the size of Haystacks Calhoun. The Bears aren’t given much to do aside from Kelly Leak (Jackie Earle Haley), the onetime bad boy who has now been Fonzied into a sensitive punk and who gets a perfunctory romance with a Japanese girl. I’m glad Haley had that little comeback a couple years ago, because it would be sad if this was the last thing he’d ever done.

Fashion Highlights: Kelly Leak still has the look with his shiny disco shirts and bell-bottom jeans, but Curtis is tragic in a wide-collared leisure suit with gold chains. Let us not even speak of his flared baseball uniform pants.

2008 Equivalent: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, just because it’s an unrequested and unnecessary threequel that will undoubtedly suck.

Previously on Summer of '78: Heaven Can Wait