The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (the astrodome!)

I woke up insane today and needed a book to get me through the sleepy hours before work, because I wanted nothing more than to hide under the covers like my cat. Yesterday, I got a book from the library about "The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training," an obscure piece of criticism, that I stumbled upon searching for the movie, but was intrigued. "The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training," was probably one of my favorite movies of all time, or right up there, and I think a lot of people from my generation would think that born in 1968. There were three Josh's in my class, and the author's name is also Josh (Wilker), and I had a gut feeling I'd be able to relate to his vision, but more than anything was impressed that someone out there in kicksville devoted his life to writing about a movie that most serious critics would laugh off as inferior to the original, that may or may not have been great, and B movie schlock, but the movie is really more than that, and like Josh I saw it when it came out in August '77 during the baseball season, right after the King had died, and was changed. But that didn't mean I was going to like the book, and to be honest I considered immediately returning it when I got it on hold. Well, thank God I didn't, because I read almost the whole 124 small pages today, and felt changed, so thank you Josh Wilker, whoever you are. You really are some kind of kindred spirit on the astral plane.

I feared the book was going to be eggy like so many Gen X critics who've had way too much schooling and are too postmodern to create anything new, but it was pure poetry disguised as criticism, the best kind. Then, I was scared that the book, part of the Deep Focus series put out by Soft Skull press, with the byline "A Novel Approach to Cinema," was going to get too personal, because there were a few sections where Josh drifted into a first person kind of narrative, and while I liked the writing, it wasn't as meaty as the big ideas this brilliant brother of mine, who I've never met, was starting to tap into about MY generation!!!! I mean this guy from Chicago ended up writing about my generation better than I ever have and through criticism, or what the series aptly called "A Novel Approach to Cinema" because it really read like a short novel, or an epic poem, or the best dissertation of all time, or something so perfect, I wished I had written it, but I'm not jealous (I swear I'm not!!!!). I'm just happy someone wrote it.

I think the best art I always find is by accident, and this book is no different. I just read "Ball Four" another great poetic work, but from another generation, when it was in vogue to turn journals into books, and the binding structural conceit would be that the days would be like chapters, but that has been done to death. In many ways, I've thought the novel has been dead for a while, and Wilker lucidly explains how the late Seventies were the end of American economic expansion and everything has been shrinking ever since, or folding in on itself, like all Countries or people in decline, and I really think we've entered the era of the novella, or the mini novel, a form the boomers and their predecessors abhorred, and refused to publish. So, the first thing I like about "The Bad News in Breaking Training" is that it is readable in a day, but a big day, not a small one, when one's life is touched by art.

I'm a BIG Pauline Kael fan and spent years reading her movie reviews that are the best written in the English language, as interpreted by Americans, but Kael was writing for newspapers or magazines, and posed as a critic, though she was often accused of writing about anything but the movie she was reviewing, and this is the point I want to hit with Wilker. He took Pauline Kael's passion, vision, and poetry, but personalized it in his 'novel approach' much more than she ever did, and therefore I see this book as a crucial link in the evolution of American film criticism, and the first I've read since the Sixties! (Siskel and Ebert were great but mainstream!) In true Kael tradition, Wilker chose a B movie, a sequel, a franchise, and one that most people taking them seriously would ignore, but at their own ignorance. Kael was famous for hating the word film (one of my least favorite words in the English language), an no one in their right mind would ever call "The Bad News in Breaking Training" a film (ha!). It was the movie to end all movies, or like Wilker points out a road movie, a coming of age movie, and a sports movie, all wrapped up in one neat ball (meatball!). Like a Kael piece, or any film criticism, it's more fun if you've seen the movie, and I've seen the "Bad News Bears in Breaking Training" so many times it would make an owl's head spin off! But I haven't seen it in years (and I mean years), so reading through the book was like reliving the movie, and what a great one to relive! It was like reliving the '68 season in "Ball Four," but way more personal, because it wasn't a tale of the year I was born, like Bouton's book, but the decade I inherited, shadowed by the decade to come, the Eighties, when America turned conservative on a dime. The free living lifestyle symbolized by Leak behind the wheel of the van with his shades on was to be never more, so the "Bad News Bears in Breaking Training" was one of those unconscious tributes to what was and what was to be, a rare work of art, but like all great works of art, unconscious of itself, and Wilker makes this clear through the prism of "The Bad News in Breaking Training," and explains a generation in an almost novel like way, that poetically frees itself from criticism, while being grounded in criticism. A work of genius.

Wilker was right and "The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training" really was like "Over the Edge," another favorite of mine, that I may have seen more times than the "Bad News Bears in Breaking Training," but they were equal (Kurt Cobain used "Over the Edge" as an inspiration for "The Smells Like Teen Spirit" video, that my friend Josh Mills was at and Shawn Yanez made them leave!!!!! ("I bore so easily," Yanez wrote in an FB comment, before leaving the social network). I guess the novel approach to cinema is that the review is super long, so it has to become personal at a certain point, or a reflection on America, especially since we know that the author/critic chose the movie out of a deep place in his heart, and by the end bleeds the essence of the celluloid, all cut up in his mind. This is as great a poem to America as any I've read, and that would include Hart Crane's paeon to the Brooklyn Bridge at the turn of the century, simply called "The Bridge," but not simple at all. There's also nothing simple about what Wilker along with Soft Skull press has done here, really remarkable. Together (?), they've realized that a movie can represent something as great as a bridge to a generation born a century later, and can inspire something truly poetic, even if it isn't exactly a novel or criticism, but that's good. Nothing definable is ever threatening but this little book is a bomb, a cherry bomb! I'd literally direct anyone who wanted to understand what it felt like to be born in '68, the year Kennedy and King were assassinated, to read this thin wispy work of solemn grace, because it say's everything I ever could sanely say, and better than I could. Maybe I wrote an actual story that says as much, but not something this opaque, or refracted. "The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training" eclipses even the slightest germ of this blog, but that's not fair to Wilker. He has done something important for me, by publishing this, and I hope to repay the favor one day, but I haven't finished the book!