THE BAD NEWS BEARS GO TO JAPAN (1978) **1/2 Even those of us whose favorite institution is Little League baseball know that the thing is fraught with characters who should be more peripheral. Even we, know that all is not pure. But it's usually not quite as bad as the hacks who end up coaching the Bears. Despite that reality, or because of it, the films stand for nothing so much as the proposition that very different people should be able to get along with each other, the way the kids do. So it's a schematic attack on dogma? In part, and also a celebration of the American way that shouldn't even start to look like any sort of harrowed nationalism (if it looks that way to you, you've been conned--like the people who think that racial differences are best addressed by refusing to address them). Of course, it was probably easier to be patriotic, in a celebratory way, fresh from America getting out of Vietnam and dumping Nixon, not to mention the glorious bicentennial parties. So it's not a baseball film so much as one about the potentialities of the burgeoning youth culture, and a casual warning of the challenges to be surmounted (watch Tony Curtis lose control of his own scam when big money moves in). Tony is ok, it's not his best comedy but it's better than Some Like It Hot. Better performances are put in by Jackie Earle Haley (as the embodiment of dazed '70s Zeppelin youth going multicultural; again, a kinder, more sensitive portrayal than the prototype of the American tourist lout), Scoody Thornton (as the ultimate triumph of faith), and Clarence Barnes (whose entrance is the best scene). There's nothing wrong with vaguely encountering large ideas, so long as you don't pretend that you're doing something else. They're there to play some baseball, but the veterans know that can lead to all sorts of things.
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