Soft Skull Press has been publishing a series of small books known as Deep Focus: A Novel Approach to Cinema where Name Authors write eloquently on what they consider to be seminal films.
Chicago-based author Josh Wilker chose the semi-forgotten THE BAD NEWS BEARS IN BREAKING TRAINING, the quickly-thrown-together 1977 sequel to Michael Ritchie and Bill Lancaster's classic 1976 original. (Needless to say, Ritchie and Lancaster--as well as original stars Walter Matthau and Tatum O'Neal--didn't return for the second film.)
Wilker, who was nine when he saw BREAKING TRAINING, does a fair amount of rhapsodizing about his own boyhood, along with some side detours into philosophizing about a 1970s he was too young to completely experience.
For those who remember BREAKING TRAINING, the hapless Bears play a more professional Little League team in the Houston Astrodome in the small window of time between an Astros double-header.
The powers that be want to halt the children's game early in order for the grown-ups to begin playing their second match of the day. Both teams are shooed off the field by baseball officials--except for the perpetually idealistic Tanner (Chris Barnes), who stands his ground and refuses to leave.
Wilker talks about Jimmy Carter's much-mocked "malaise" speech from the summer of 1979 and its plea for "common interest and the restoration of American values" over what was already the looming spectre of Reagan-era self-interest and "I want more than you'll ever have."
Here's my favorite passage of Wilker's in the book:
I keep coming back to refuse disconnection, and I keep coming back to refuse the end. And now we come to the climax of the movie. Not the ultimately negligible, if structurally necessary, moment when Carmen scores the winning run, but the part that actually precedes that false climax, the part that begins when all seems to be lost, when the team is told, right in the middle of an early inning, that the game is over. There are initial groans and protests about this, but they are all impotent, even Mike Leak [William Devane as the estranged father of Jackie Earle Haley's Kelly Leak] giving up after arguing for a while with the ump. Everybody has given up and accepted the end, with one exception.
Tanner's still out there, standing alone.
[fast-forward through a passage about Watergate and Richard Nixon's resignation revealing "a system driven by corporate interests and not by the will of the people, contrary to the nation's dream of democracy."]
"Where's everybody going?" Tanner asks. "We're not finished!"
Two men in suits advance toward him. They are not evil. They are not stand-ins for Nixon. They are, in a way, worse. They are functionaries, apologetic but assertive, pointing to their watches and invoking the god that rules the country, money. The game is a commercial-driven diversion between the commercial-driven diversions of the first and second games of a doubleheader. The important thing turns out to be the commercials. They, and what they sell, and the corporations that rake in the profits, rule. Everyone else has to get in line. I'm sorry, the men in suits explain, but that's just the way it is. And they advance toward Tanner to remove the last dissenter from the field.
Now re-read Wilker's words above--substituting "poetry", "MFA degrees", "prestige", "coffeehouse poets [imagine it being said with a sneer]", "creative writing programs", "journal-entry writing", etc. etc. when you feel it necessary.
Trust me, you'll see a synchronicity.
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