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Deep Focus #5
The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training: A Novel Approach to Cinema
In 1977, The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training had a moment in the sun. A glowing junk sculpture of American genres—sports flick, coming-of-age story, family melodrama, after-school special, road narrative—the film cashed in on the previous year’s success of its predecessor, The Bad News Bears. Arguing against the sequel’s dismissal as a cultural afterthought, Josh Wilker lovingly rescues from the oblivion of cinema history a quintessential expression of American resilience and joy.
Rushed into theaters by Paramount when the beleaguered film industry was suffering from “acute sequelitis,” the (undeniably flawed) movie miraculously transcended its limitations to become a gathering point for heroic imagery drawn from American mythology. Considered in context, the film’s unreasonable optimism, rooted in its characters’ sincere desire to keep playing, is a powerful response to the political, economic, and social stresses of the late 1970s.
To Wilker’s surprise, despite repeated viewings, The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training continues to move him. Its huge heart makes it not only the ultimate fantasy of the baseball-obsessed American boy, but a memorable iteration of that barbed vision of pure sunshine itself, the American dream.
Rushed into theaters by Paramount when the beleaguered film industry was suffering from “acute sequelitis,” the (undeniably flawed) movie miraculously transcended its limitations to become a gathering point for heroic imagery drawn from American mythology. Considered in context, the film’s unreasonable optimism, rooted in its characters’ sincere desire to keep playing, is a powerful response to the political, economic, and social stresses of the late 1970s.
To Wilker’s surprise, despite repeated viewings, The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training continues to move him. Its huge heart makes it not only the ultimate fantasy of the baseball-obsessed American boy, but a memorable iteration of that barbed vision of pure sunshine itself, the American dream.
128 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
July 18, 2021
I was reading about Josh Wilker’s book, Cardboard Gods, when a Goodreads search let me to this. Like Wilker, I saw this sequel before seeing the original. For some reason my parents took my brother and I to see it on their own initiative. We rarely went to the movies. I think the only other movie we saw that summer was Star Wars. Wilker went to a lot of movies that summer. It was his go-to activity when he visited his father in Manhattan.
To paraphrase Pauline Kael, we tend to like every movie when we are young because it's all new.
We only learn to dislike movies as we get older and start to notice repetitiveness. Therefore, certain movies at certain times can be formative and hold a higher place in our minds than better movies we see later. This movie is such for Josh Wilker.
Wilker is not going to tell you this is classic cinema. He will say that it hits important themes and there's unexpected subtlety at times, although at other times it’s rushed and as thoughtless as you’d expect. The kids all jumping in a converted van and driving to Houston without adult supervision is the classic American road movie and a male fantasy. I do remember thinking this was the most subversive part of the film, wondering if my parents were going to tell me never to try it. A subtlety comes in the character of Oglivie. He has gone through puberty enough to be a quasi-adult and he impressed at how the filmmakers make passing references to this. It's also the reason he suspects that Oglivie is not seen in the wretched 3rd installment.
With no Walter Mathau and no Tatum O’Neill, Jackie Earle Haley’s Kelly is the main character. Kelly’s broken home and reconciliation with his father in Houston is a key plot point that motivates Kelly from one city to the next. Wilker takes a detour of sorts when discussing Haley by bringing up the actor’s long absence from the screen and his return in the 2006 movie, Little Children, a film for which he won an Oscar nomination. It's interesting if you've seen both films, but it feels like an attempt to flesh out a book length essay on a thin film.
Although there are hints of the author’s political leanings in the book, it eventually becomes a major theme. The feisty Tanner is watching Ronald Reagan as George Gipp on TV to make parallels between their injured teammate, Timmy Lupus, and Knute Rockne’s ill-fated star. Ronald Reagan had lost the Republican nomination in 1976 and his party lost the general election to Jimmy Carter, but this might have been shot before any of that happened. Wilker is very much not a Reagan guy and he uses Reagan’s presence in the film as a harbinger for the excesses of 1980s.
Wilker seems to agree with Jimmy Carter’s vision that the shared decline of the 1970s was morally superior to allowing individuals a variance into individual prosperity. In short, the 1980s were bad because of Wall Street and greed. This was a consistent message from the 1980s and we’d still be hearing it had Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush won the presidency. It’s an example of what a paradigm shift Trump and the 2016 brought. Democrats collect more Wall Street money now and the subject is not brought up unless you're a Bernie Bro. I think we can safely say that the accusation has been retired when even Bernie is voting for the Wall Street guy.
Bad News Bear In Breaking Training was an opportunity for the author to write an essay on the time period which encompasses both his childhood experience and his reflections as an adult. Your enjoyment of it is enhanced by your living through this time period at a similar age. I fondly remember conversion vans and mini bikes although Jimmy Carter brings up memories of Ted Koppel and his endless hostage updates. Dad, can we watch Johnny Carson instead?
To paraphrase Pauline Kael, we tend to like every movie when we are young because it's all new.
We only learn to dislike movies as we get older and start to notice repetitiveness. Therefore, certain movies at certain times can be formative and hold a higher place in our minds than better movies we see later. This movie is such for Josh Wilker.
Wilker is not going to tell you this is classic cinema. He will say that it hits important themes and there's unexpected subtlety at times, although at other times it’s rushed and as thoughtless as you’d expect. The kids all jumping in a converted van and driving to Houston without adult supervision is the classic American road movie and a male fantasy. I do remember thinking this was the most subversive part of the film, wondering if my parents were going to tell me never to try it. A subtlety comes in the character of Oglivie. He has gone through puberty enough to be a quasi-adult and he impressed at how the filmmakers make passing references to this. It's also the reason he suspects that Oglivie is not seen in the wretched 3rd installment.
With no Walter Mathau and no Tatum O’Neill, Jackie Earle Haley’s Kelly is the main character. Kelly’s broken home and reconciliation with his father in Houston is a key plot point that motivates Kelly from one city to the next. Wilker takes a detour of sorts when discussing Haley by bringing up the actor’s long absence from the screen and his return in the 2006 movie, Little Children, a film for which he won an Oscar nomination. It's interesting if you've seen both films, but it feels like an attempt to flesh out a book length essay on a thin film.
Although there are hints of the author’s political leanings in the book, it eventually becomes a major theme. The feisty Tanner is watching Ronald Reagan as George Gipp on TV to make parallels between their injured teammate, Timmy Lupus, and Knute Rockne’s ill-fated star. Ronald Reagan had lost the Republican nomination in 1976 and his party lost the general election to Jimmy Carter, but this might have been shot before any of that happened. Wilker is very much not a Reagan guy and he uses Reagan’s presence in the film as a harbinger for the excesses of 1980s.
Wilker seems to agree with Jimmy Carter’s vision that the shared decline of the 1970s was morally superior to allowing individuals a variance into individual prosperity. In short, the 1980s were bad because of Wall Street and greed. This was a consistent message from the 1980s and we’d still be hearing it had Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush won the presidency. It’s an example of what a paradigm shift Trump and the 2016 brought. Democrats collect more Wall Street money now and the subject is not brought up unless you're a Bernie Bro. I think we can safely say that the accusation has been retired when even Bernie is voting for the Wall Street guy.
Bad News Bear In Breaking Training was an opportunity for the author to write an essay on the time period which encompasses both his childhood experience and his reflections as an adult. Your enjoyment of it is enhanced by your living through this time period at a similar age. I fondly remember conversion vans and mini bikes although Jimmy Carter brings up memories of Ted Koppel and his endless hostage updates. Dad, can we watch Johnny Carson instead?
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August 18, 2011What an intelligent and passionate book about a film I will never, ever watch! After I finished reading it, I dreamed I was at a bar near the beach, ordering a mai thai and about to give my copy of the book to a family friend who likes baseball. I've never had a mai thai and have no idea what it's made of but hope to surprise myself by ordering one in the near future.
This is Soft Skull's strange version of the 33 1/3 series or alternately the BFI film monograph series but each book is about a B-movie. I was really engaged by the sampler of the series which had excerpts from the Jonathon Lethem and even more interesting Christopher Sorrentino's one on Charlton Heston's Death Wish, which is a weird look into 70s social politics. This was placed onto the dollar rack at Unnameable Books by a customer but the store was still kind enough to sell it to me for a buck even though it had just come out. So far there's been some interesting thoughts on the nature of continuity errors in the film and Michael Eisner's transition to Disney and the work overall deals with hope and fakery.
This is Soft Skull's strange version of the 33 1/3 series or alternately the BFI film monograph series but each book is about a B-movie. I was really engaged by the sampler of the series which had excerpts from the Jonathon Lethem and even more interesting Christopher Sorrentino's one on Charlton Heston's Death Wish, which is a weird look into 70s social politics. This was placed onto the dollar rack at Unnameable Books by a customer but the store was still kind enough to sell it to me for a buck even though it had just come out. So far there's been some interesting thoughts on the nature of continuity errors in the film and Michael Eisner's transition to Disney and the work overall deals with hope and fakery.
March 19, 2023
Like the author, I watched the sequel before the original and was always fascinated by this movie good bad movie. It answered the biggest question I had of the movie “What happened to the original Engelberg?” (he lost weight and didn’t want to regain it for the movie). Other than that, it’s just okay.
August 19, 2022
One of the best baseball movie books I've ever read.
August 24, 2016
In 1977, Paramount Pictures, on the brink of collapse, hired a young Michael Eisner to turn things around. His stated philosophy was to make films with a "cheeseburger heart", i.e. not too hard to think about and easy to consume. The first movie he greenlit was a sequel to "Bad News Bears", a dyspeptic,funny , cynical picture about an alcoholic coaching a baseball team of pre-adolescent misfits. That sequel, "The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training" is a cloying, poorly made exercise in sentimentality. Seriously, I sat through it; it's awful. Josh Wilker's eponymously titled book is an exploration of why we like bad movies, and it's a gem.
Wilker knows it's a bad movie, but it holds a special place in his heart, because of the time and place he saw it. As a 12 year old learning to play baseball, it was a "cheeseburger heart" movie seemingly made for him. But "The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training" (book) isn't just an exercise in nostalgia; Wilker deftly takes the reader through Kerouac's "On the Road", the Minutemen's "Double Nickels on the Dime", the cinema of the 70's, the post Nixon politics of Jimmy Carter, Vietnam, and the question of "authenticity" (theres that word again). Funny, erudite, and heartfelt, "The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training" makes a compelling case that any art, even bad art is worthy of analysis, and even perhaps love.
Wilker knows it's a bad movie, but it holds a special place in his heart, because of the time and place he saw it. As a 12 year old learning to play baseball, it was a "cheeseburger heart" movie seemingly made for him. But "The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training" (book) isn't just an exercise in nostalgia; Wilker deftly takes the reader through Kerouac's "On the Road", the Minutemen's "Double Nickels on the Dime", the cinema of the 70's, the post Nixon politics of Jimmy Carter, Vietnam, and the question of "authenticity" (theres that word again). Funny, erudite, and heartfelt, "The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training" makes a compelling case that any art, even bad art is worthy of analysis, and even perhaps love.
July 18, 2016
The Bad News Bears is an underdog story, and by choosing to write about its sequel Josh Wilker has an uphill battle. But he succeeds in ways I wouldn't have expected.
Wilker brilliantly connects the dots, linking the film to personal experiences, American politics, the 1980 Olympics, punk bands from Pedro, divorce rates in America, road movies and the teen rebellion movie OVER THE EDGE.
He finds depth in a maligned sequel and he takes on "sequelitis" head-on. His book will point out the movie's flaws, but not in a way that's obnoxious -- in a way that accepts the production's shortcomings. I haven't read any film studies quite like this.
The same way Tanner Boyle doesn't want baseball season to come to a close, I didn't want this book to end.
I'm looking forward to reading more from Josh Wilker.
Wilker brilliantly connects the dots, linking the film to personal experiences, American politics, the 1980 Olympics, punk bands from Pedro, divorce rates in America, road movies and the teen rebellion movie OVER THE EDGE.
He finds depth in a maligned sequel and he takes on "sequelitis" head-on. His book will point out the movie's flaws, but not in a way that's obnoxious -- in a way that accepts the production's shortcomings. I haven't read any film studies quite like this.
The same way Tanner Boyle doesn't want baseball season to come to a close, I didn't want this book to end.
I'm looking forward to reading more from Josh Wilker.
June 8, 2015
I wrote a blog about "The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training" a few days ago that more than justifies a review, and will cut and paste it.
1) A must for Bad News Bears Fans
2) A must for fans of film criticism
3) A must for readers interested in new ways that film criticism is leaking into poetry.
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
1) A must for Bad News Bears Fans
2) A must for fans of film criticism
3) A must for readers interested in new ways that film criticism is leaking into poetry.
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
September 24, 2015
This is the best of the deep focus books I have read (yeah, I know there were only five) but this is a great combination of detail on the movie, personal memoir and a nice discussion on how a lousy movie can mean so much to a people. It was well written and moved along, though some of it was over the top, I still had a good time, though I remember the movie well enough from childhood to know that I don't want to watch it again.
September 2, 2011
Fantastic book, though I'm the perfect audience for it. I saw the picture when I was 5 or 6, before I saw the original "Bad News Bears" and it's always held a special place in my heart. Wilker does a great job of defending the film and connecting it to 70s political and popular culture. This film series from Soft Skull is badass.
January 11, 2012
I grew up in the 70's, played Little League, and had feathered hair. Josh Wilker's enthusiastic ode to the 2nd Bad News Bears movie nails the spirit of the 70's on so many levels. Coming of age. Road trip. Divorce. Changes in parenting styles. The end of Carter and the beginning of Reagan. Sitting on the toilet with a bucket of KFC. Highly recommended.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews