February 25th, 2008
1. Bull Durham (1988)
Writer-director Ron Shelton has always championed outsiders and irreverent fringe-dwellers of the sporting world, and thus has little tolerance for the golden-hued sentimental bullshit that clogs the majority of films on the subject. Countless Field Of Dreams clones spoon-feed audiences the usual squeaky-clean pabulum about America's pastime, but there's only one Bull Durham, which loves the game just as much, but strips away the tacky mythology and tells it like it is. That means hanky-panky and trash talk in the locker room, and grizzled veterans like Kevin Costner's Crash Davis, who immediately knows that when his AAA contract gets bought out, that means he has to "hold some flavor-of-the-month's dick in the bus leagues."
2. Any Given Sunday (1999)
Oliver Stone took on Vietnam in the hysterically overwrought Platoon, and the media in the even more hysterically overwrought Natural Born Killers. In the same way, he again merged the chocolate sweetness of hysteria with the peanut-butter tanginess of overwrought filmmaking for his big-balled football epic Any Given Sunday. So, football fans, what's the dirty truth behind your blessed game? If the first 15 minutes of Any Given Sunday are to be believed, it involves projectile vomiting, projectile shitting, projectile bloody-tooth spitting, and America's sweetheart Cameron Diaz saying "fuck" a lot. And Stone, a true-blue vulgarian known for treating restraint like a wet-nap at Famous Dave's, doesn't stop there. Why stop with a few gratuitous shots of Elizabeth Berkeley's crotch when you can have twice as many shots of big, fat football cocks flopping around the locker room? If you're going to cast walking Viagra ad James Woods as a team physician, you might as well give him classy dialogue like "Stay here and get butt-fucked by 12 Neanderthals."
3. BASEketball (1998)
Nobody does proudly profane quite like Trey Parker and Matt Stone, though they merely star in this 1998 flick about a quasi-sport that blends baseball and driveway basketball. David Zucker, the man behind the Naked Gun series, and more importantly, the inventor of the game of baseketball, is largely responsible for this movie. Regardless, it feels like a Parker/Stone joint: There's titillation (via cheerleaders who are clad in nightgowns at most, and lingerie at the least), locker-room scenes with leg-long penises, and, of course, foul language. There's plenty of potty-mouth in BASEketball, thanks to the game's allowing for psyche-outs: "We've gotta say totally fucked-up shit to make sure the other guy misses." That means everything's fair game, from "I fucked your sister" to detailing the rape of your opponent's dead grandmother. And who can forget "Thanks a lot, Dr. Dickhead! You totally fucked me there!"
4. The Bad News Bears (1976)
At heart, Michael Ritchie's 1976 slob-sports classic Bad News Bears is so good-natured that it could almost be an After School Special. A ragtag bunch of losers with elementary-school educations—because they're all in sixth grade—learns to work together as a team and play baseball well enough to almost beat the hated Little League Yankees. It's a winning underdog comedy about the emotional geometry of suburbia amid a '70s culture of divorce and malaise. It's also so, so potty-mouthed. At one point, one of the Bears refers to his own team as "a bunch of Jews, spics, niggers, pansies, and a booger-eating moron," and he ends the movie by telling the Yankees, "You can take your trophy and shove it straight up your ass." This isn't a "look at the cute kids talking dirty" movie, it's a "kids today are already corrupted little adults" movie. The vulgarity adds verisimilitude.
5. Cobb (1994)
Another Ron Shelton film, Cobb, is even nastier than his Bull Durham: It's a biopic on one of baseball's all-time greats that seems intent on driving his Hall Of Fame reputation into the ground. Cobb paints Ty Cobb as a miserable bastard who tries to bully a writer into printing the legend, and ignoring the abusive lout in front of him.
6. White Men Can't Jump (1992)
And in White Men Can't Jump, Shelton leaves the professionals behind for the shadow league of street basketball, where players are often as creative with their mouths as they are with the ball. Talking smack isn't sporting, but in Shelton's world (and the real one), it's a colorfully ugly part of the game.
7. Cockfighter (1974)
There's really no way to make a movie about the seedy world of underground cockfighting tournaments without getting raw, but what's striking about Monte Hellman's involving portrait of loners and outcasts is the cloud of bitter nostalgia hanging over the proceedings. Cockfighting ain't what it used to be, and erstwhile old-timer Warren Oates is having a hell of a time keeping up with the dirty tricks and double-dealing required to stay on top of the game and become Cockfighter Of The Year. Hellman and screenwriter Charles Willeford, who wrote the novel from which the film is taken, don't pass any moral judgments on the cruelty of forcing animals to harm each other for gambling purposes—which, for the record, is very, very wrong—but they do cast a sympathetic eye toward people who sully themselves by entering into business deals with criminals. The problem with being a cockfighting fan is that in order to indulge your passion, you have to deal with the kind of sleazeballs who like cockfighting.
8. Death Race 2000 (1975)
The favorite sport of America's totalitarian future in Death Race 2000 makes monster-truck rallies look like Amnesty International-hosted tea parties. "Gallant" motormen Frankenstein (David Carradine) and Machine Gun Joe Viterbo (an exceedingly meat-headed Sylvester Stallone) run ahead of the pack in the annual Transcontinental Road Race, won not just with speed, but with points earned for vehicular homicide. Senior citizens count for 100 points each, so an old-folks home lines 'em up for Carradine to plow through in an annual "euthanasia day" tradition. Newscaster Junior Bruce (Don Steele) covers the race with a grin that may well be the most punchable thing in cinema history, and his colleague Grace Pander (Joyce Jameson) interviews the overjoyed widow of the race's first "score." The race's popularity points to a sickness that goes beyond mere sadism; as Frankenstein tells his standard-issue blonde dollop of a navigator, winning it is "the only standard of excellence left."
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