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List Price: $9.98 | | Label: Paramount
Salesrank: 8402
Released: February 12, 2002 |
| Our Price: $2.64 |
| Used Price: $1.26 |
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MPAA Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
First of a trilogy of films takes an unflinching look at the underbelly of little league baseball in Southern California. Former minor leaguer Morris Buttermaker is a lazy, beer swilling swimming pool cleaner who takes money to coach the Bears, a bunch of disheveled misfits who have virtually no baseball talent. Realizing his dilemma, Coach Buttermaker brings aboard girl pitching ace Amanda Whurlizer, the daughter of a former girlfriend, and Kelly Leak, a motorcycle punk who happens to be the best player around. Brimming with confidence, the Bears look to sweep into the championship game and avenge an earlier loss to their nemesis, the Yankees.
Description of The Bad News Bears:
This likable 1976 comedy gently skewers the whole post- Rocky mania for movies about losers who find their mettle or salvation or purpose in life in competitive sport. Walter Matthau stars as a drunk who becomes manager of a pathetic little-league baseball team. When he brings in a talented girl pitcher (Tatum O'Neal), the crew have an actual chance at winning some games and maybe a championship. But director Michael Ritchie (Downhill Racer) undercuts the romance of it all with the team's foul-mouthed tendencies and Matthau's own decadent spin on mentor-coachdom. Similarly to Ritchie's wicked comedy Smile --which lampooned the fervor surrounding beauty pageants--The Bad News Bears pokes fun at another American institution. --Tom Keogh
The Bad News Bears Reviews:
Another classic 70's movie 
2008-04-10 - Im not going to tell you all about this film, or tell you who is in it, or what they did, etc. Everyone knows Walter Matthau plays an ex-ball player who drinks, smokes and swears to much thru the movie, and also that Tatum O'Neil plays his ex-girlfriend's daughter who he gets to pitch and all the other stuff, like Tanner swearing and saying the "N" word, and such. All this has been said and reviewed in earlier post. I saw this movie when it first came out in 1976. I was 9 turning 10 years old that year. I cant believe its been 32 years now. WOW! Im gettin old. I believe that this movie is a time capsule. Its an era and time, long gone by. Sure, there is little league baseball today, but its not the same as it was back then. People who were kids back then (like me) can tell you that the whole scene was different back then, not like today. Sometimes I wonder if kids today really want to play, or their parents push them so hard to play, and the parents are the ones that really get off on it. Back when I was a kid, we wanted to play. Now, its big sponserships, and this and that. Differnt times back then, different vibe. I catch myself putting this movie on every once in a while to catch that vibe again, and to be transported back in time, to a more simple time and place.....Get this movie....
Bad News Bears 
2008-04-06 - It's nice to purchase movies I watched as a child. This one is the best of all three.
hey Keogh, it's not avant gard - duh
2008-03-10 - The Amazon essential video review by Mr. Keogh seems to miss the mark on a review of this movie. Making any similarity or connection to Rocky is a fallacy at the least. Especially considering it's released in the same year. There were a few good movies to come out around the American bicentennial which includes "Bugsy Malone", "Deathrace 2000", and "Rollerball". Trying to classify this movie as "post Rocky" shows that this guy has no idea what he's talking about. The biggest mistake Mr. Keogh makes is by claiming that the director "undercuts the romance" using profanity and decadence?????!!!!! This is one of the most idiotic statements I've ever read in an Amazon movie review. It shows that this guy's childhood was not only enclosed and sheltered, but experienced in some communist state outside of America.
The movie was originally rated 'R' and even then it wasn't that easy for kids to get in without a parent. The story represents the imperfect world of working class kids (something Mr. Keogh obviously knows nothing about) and how they can overcome the stereotypes of the yuppie middle class. At the same time, it empowers a girl to be the leader of a team that was actually more interested in looking up to a boy who was a rebel on a motorcycle. A great movie, a great comedy, and a great lesson is social ethics.
When Comedies, Kids, and Everything Was More Laid Back. 
2008-01-25 - "The Bad News Bears" inspired a franchise of movies and the entire kids' sports comedy genre when it was released in 1976. Now it's a trip back in time to an era when preteens smoking and swearing was PG-rated family entertainment. It's amazing how much attitudes have changed in 30 years. As we are now at the opposite extreme in what is considered normal behavior in middle-class youngsters, "The Bad News Bears" seems like a breath of fresh air. And its message to adults who compete through their children's' achievements is more timely now than it was then.
When a local politician (Ben Piazza) can't convince any parent to coach his son's Little League team, he hires former minor-league pitcher Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau), now a drunken "broken-down third-rate ball player". Buttermaker steels himself to coach the hopelessly untalented kids by spiking his ever-present beer with whisky. But he grows fond of the boys and regrets the constant ridicule they endure. So Buttermaker decides to turn the Bears into winners by recruiting 11-year-old Amanda (Tatum O'Neal) to pitch and a delinquent hot shot named Kelly (Jackie Earl Haley) to dominate the outfield.
This movie has a laid-back tone that doesn't hit us with any real intensity or messages until late in the season. It encourages the children's idiosyncrasies and indulges Morris' alcoholic malaise. Tatum O'Neal exudes charisma as reluctant tomboy Amanda. Her sass and childish self-possession steal every scene she's in. "The Bad News Bears" should be mandatory viewing for the "soccer mafia", as parents who claim every inch of unused grassland for soccer fields are referred to in my area. In the end, this is a fun film that says it's ok to have fun. It's not necessary to have a cow about everything. English subtitles are available on the Paramount 2002 DVD.
Greatest Movie Ever Made
2008-01-23 - I saw the Bad News Bears back in the 70s, when I was a kid. Just recently I've been watching it again, for what must be the first time in about 31 years(yikes). Well, apparently, back when I was a kid, all the things in the movie seemed perfectly normal and healthy. The 70s'll do that to a child. See, what people who object to the movie's profanity, crude innuendoes about the sex life of an eleven-year-old girl (Played by Tatum O'Neal, who casually informs the coach that she knows some eleven-year-olds who are on the pill) racial slurs (a kid that looks like he's seven, who has a real toilet mouth on him, at one point complains that the team is full of, "n*ggers, sp*cks, jews, and a spaz") and the coach's obvious serious drinking problem, which leads him to spike his Budweiser with Jim Beam sitting in his car in the little league parking lot in the first scene, which leads to him getting a light for his cigar from a twelve-year-old delinquent ("thanks, mister") who himself is to be found chain-smoking throughout the movie... as I say, what anyone who objects to these things must keep in mind is that the 70s were a very different time. A strange time. A depressing time. A time when heavy smoking and drinking were not stigmatized as they are today. A time when having a car-load of kids sitting on the rear hood as you swerve down the road while drinking a beer was not demonized as it is in these excessively prohibitionist times. The movie must be seen as a message from another, much grittier, much more dangerous, but somehow depressing rather than exhilarating time. Anyone who was a kid in the 70s never really gets out of it. Because the 70s are a Witch Mountain you never fully escape from, even though you've got that guy who looks like Uncle Bill from Family Affair helping you. I think I can speak for anyone who was a kid in the 1970s when I say that in my mind there's a Bicentennial Celebration still going on. And Evel Knievel is still jumping his rocket motorcycle over the Snake River Canyon. And K.C. and the Sunshine Band is still playing. I don't think anybody who wasn't a kid in the 70s can know what it was like to be there in that corner of time and space in the world. To watch Starsky and Hutch and take it quite seriously. To read Ramona the Brave - where Ramona's dad was unemployed and then finally gloriously got a job as a bag boy at the supermarket. To not bat an eye about any of this. To worry about the twin plagues of the metric system and the killer bees that were both on their way over, inexorably, and would someday get here and combine... if they didn't get lost in the Bermuda Triangle on the way. Well, I guess the metric system did.
So like I say, though I might want to leave the 70s, the 70s are like that crystal from outer space that steals your mind. And though, like Logan, I want to bust out of that mall and find my way to Peter Ustinov, I know that I never will. Because I just can't make sense of it. I can't make any sense of it at all. And until I can do that, until I can fathom what the 70s meant and what they stood for... I can never really leave. Maybe tomorrow... tomorrow... tomorrow... I'l go to Control Data Institute and talk to IRAC and see if he can help me find a way out.
