Critics had every reason to object when Billy Bob Thornton remade The Bad News Bears a few years back. After all, Walter Matthau had already defined the role of foul-mouthed Coach Buttermaker, a cranky alcoholic who oversees a team of misfit little leaguers, in the perfectly serviceable 1976 original. Now we get yet another variation on the formula, this time starring Sam Rockwell as the last man you’d want coaching a varsity girls basketball team, in The Winning Season.
Strange that this second film from Grace Is Gone writer-director James C. Strouse could be so different from his debut (in which John Cusack played an emasculated widower who refuses to cope with the death of his wife in Iraq), and yet so similar to an entire subcategory of the underdog sports comedy. Some would argue that the girls basketball angle sets The Winning Season apart, but what little originality the film has going for it is the element it shares with the largely unseen (and widely unloved) Grace Is Gone –– namely, its observant yet underplayed attention to a fragile father figure.
Everybody’s talking about how the WGA strike may affect this year’s Sundance marketplace (Variety and Scott Foundas among them), but studios looking to make up for a lack of in-house product with appealing-looking indies may want to think twice before opening the checkbook. It’s easy for buyers to forget that Hollywood still knows nothing about what moviegoers really want, and it’s very easy to waste a whole lot of money bidding on a film that isn’t going to be worth it’s purchase price. This week, the Onion’s A.V. Club features a list of Sundance flops — those movies that were a big deal at the festival yet failed at the box office. It’s probably meant to just be a fun look back at the errs of the marketplace, but really it functions as a warning to this year’s buyers. What they think is the next Napoleon Dynamitecould really be the next Tao of Steve(which happens to have sparked a hilarious discussion in the comments section — possibly featuring Donal Logue himself). The Hollywood Reporter and David Carr in the New York Times add to the list by pointing out some of last year’s deals gone bad, specifically those for Joshuaand Grace is Gone.
It’s not a matter of whether or not these films were good (I think Tadpoleis great, actually) or whether not they could be enjoyed by regular folk (most of them were audience favorites at Sundance, and those audiences included regular folks). I don’t even think it’s a matter of whether or not the distributors knew how to market those films, though in some cases it didn’t even seem like they were trying. Instead it’s a matter of how different the context is at Sundance than it is in the real theatrical market. If you’ve ever been to a public screening at Sundance, you know how excited those regular folk audiences are for anything. You can tell by their praise-filled “questions” during the Q&As. You can tell by the fact that many of them aren’t seeing a lot of films — at least relatively, considering the number of films playing at the fest — and so don’t have good frames of reference.
If you have a recent picture of yourself in a costume and can make the appropriate value judgements about John Carpenter flicks, you could attend Harry Knowles’ 24-hour film festival.
Film theorist Rudolf Arnheim died, but commenter Marco didn’t have anything to do with it.
You can download a free issue of Film Quarterly that includes out takes from the script of Mark Rappaport’s From The Journals of Jean Seberg. I read them on the subway and they were awesome.
Think Tyler Perry’s a hack and Judd Apatow’s a genius? Armond White says that’s because you’re white.
On FilmCouch: Paul and Kevin mull over Mike Mills’ depression in Japan doc Does Your Soul Have A Cold? and finally got around to seeing The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford — no thanks to Warner Brothers. And Karina tries to explain why a four hour Tom Petty documentary directed by Peter Bogdanovich makes perfect sense.
Adam Kempenaar from Filmspotting sent us excerpts from a roundtable discussion with John Cusack at the Chicago International Film Festival. Cusack discusses Grace is Gone, a new movie where he plays a widower taking his daughters on a road trip after learning his wife was killed in Iraq. If it sounds like this role is off-type for him, it is. Especially when you consider that the 80’s most swooned over slacker’s main draw was to “get into the head of a real believer, someone who has put a lot of his energy and time and faith into needing to believe that the country has a righteous purpose…”
Thanks to Adam Kempenaar for the coverage. His highlights with John Cusack follow after the jump.
The Weinstein Company has apparently bumped the release date of Grace is Gone from October to December, and our favorite hyper-reactionary conservative film blog, taking a cue from the New York Post, says it’s a victory in the War on Terror.
In this post on his NYP movie blog, Lou Lumenick speculates first that the move might have something to do with the fact that the film was rejected from the New York Film Festival, which would have ostensibly given TWC a medium-profile platform from which to roll out the film in October. Lumenick (who is enough of a fan of Grace that his endorsement appears at the top of the film’s poster) then tosses out the possibility that Harvey Weinstein may have bumped Grace in reaction to “the soft opening numbers” of Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah. It’s that suggestion that engenders this quip from Libertas: “Wouldn’t it be nice to think that every studio holding some vanity pro-Al Queda movie is right-now-as-I-write-this trembling at the inevitability of the red ink coming?”
Maybe that would be “nice,” but the thing is, Grace is about as far from a “vanity pro-Al Queda movie” as you can get.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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The Weinstein Company has apparently bumped the release date of 
