February 25th, 2008
9. The Longest Yard (1974)
Everybody who's seen the original The Longest Yard remembers Burt Reynolds tooling around in his badass Maserati, on the run from the cops, but not as many remember that he's on the lam because he just beat up his girlfriend. Similarly, while everyone remembers the high-spirited slapstick hijinks of the movie's climactic football game between prison guards and prisoners, few recall the movie's bleak worldview, which is all about who can exploit whom, and who can inflict the most damage along the way. The Longest Yard is one tough sports comedy, full of blood, broken bones, and an unceasing stream of foul language. Its sharp edges are meant to cut.
10. Major League (1989)
It takes less than five minutes for the bad words to start flying in this tale of the hapless Cleveland Indians and their new owner, who will do anything to bring attendance down so that she's allowed to move the team to Miami. (For those keeping score, the Florida Marlins didn't exist until 1993.) "These guys don't look too fucking good," one construction worker tells another. "They're shitty," says the subtitle as a pair of Japanese groundskeepers talk about the team. The rags-to-riches element and the rekindled romance between Tom Berenger and Rene Russo make Major League a heartwarming film, but writer-director David S. Ward does a good job of letting ballplayers talk like ballplayers—at least in the four-letter-word department. Potty-mouths can be found in the library, homes, and even the broadcast booth, but the cussing on the field produces some of the movie's most memorable lines, including the manager's assessment of Wesley Snipes' character, Willie Mays Hayes: "You may run like Mays, but you hit like shit."
11. Murderball (2005)
"We're not going for a hug. We're going for a fucking gold medal." That quote by paraplegic wheelchair-rugby (i.e., murderball) player Scott Hogsett just about sums up the hardcore attitude of the sport's competitors, who spend much of the documentary trying to knock each other's spinal-injured asses out of their seats. Led by Mark Zupan—who, with his tats, shaved head, and goatee, not to mention his CO2-tank-propelled wheelchair stunt in Jackass Number Two, is a punk icon—the murderball squad fights, sends disabled people sprawling helplessly on gym floors, then hurls obscenities at them. Oh, the team also gets their collective freak on: Members talk openly about the mechanics of quadriplegic sex, even to chicks at bars they're trying to get in the sack. But the most profane part of Murderball might seem to be how the players exploit their disabilities for laughs. Most people are likely to agree with the woman pranked by a guy missing all his limbs and stuffed in a small box: "That was real fucking funny."
12. North Dallas Forty (1979)
Where today's sports films are informed largely by childhood fantasies of athletes as golden gods, Ted Kotcheff's raunchy, knowing football comedy North Dallas Forty takes its cues from the real-life experiences of Peter Gent, a former Dallas Cowboys receiver who used his career as the raw material for the semi-autobiographical novel that inspired North Dallas Forty. The eternally rumpled Nick Nolte, who seems to have been born with a hangover and a five o' clock shadow, is perfect as Gent's surrogate, a battered veteran held together by painkillers, booze, and steely determination. North Dallas Forty explores its seedy gridiron milieu with candor, wit, and clear-eyed, richly earned cynicism. Forty depicts athletes as the horny, drunken, proudly hedonistic, ferociously flawed human beings they are rather than the one-dimensional heroes we want and sometimes even need them to be.
13. Raging Bull (1980)
Nearly every scene in Raging Bull, Martin Scorsese's biopic of middleweight boxing champ Jake LaMotta, features the foulest of foul language, distributed with machine gun-frequency. But even if it didn't, it wouldn't exactly be an inspiring bit of kid-friendly uplift. Adapting LaMotta's memoir of the long, dirty road to his championship and the personal toll it exacted, Scorsese and star Robert De Niro deliver a warts-and-all—mostly warts, in fact—picture of a man whose drive to succeed left no room for happiness. Their LaMotta is simultaneously singular in his self-destructiveness, and a product of a particular time and place, a man who uses Bronx-instilled street smarts and brute drive to achieve the American Dream while giving little thought to the consequences.
14. Semi-Tough (1977)
Early in Michael Ritchie's riotous pigskin laugher Semi-Tough, deceptively sly football player Burt Reynolds tells a horrified publisher that he and his colleagues could care less about sports; they're in the game mainly because they enjoy "showering with niggers." Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson play teammates, buddies, and roommates battling for the affection of liberated '70s gal Jill Clayburgh. Alas, the path to Clayburgh's heart winds through an EST-like New Age course led by Burt Convy, a New Age con man prone to shouting things like "Assholes! Ass! Holes! You're all assholes, every one of you. Your lives don't work!" at his bullied, gullible acolytes. Semi-Tough is adult both in its language and its surprisingly mature approach to New Age fads, romantic relationships, and shifting concepts of masculinity. But it's also fueled by a defiantly adolescent contempt for authority, conventional and otherwise. The new Will Ferrell comedy Semi-Pro borrows from the title of Semi-Tough and the plot of Slap Shot without retaining the testicular fortitude or guts of either.
15. Slap Shot (1977)
George Roy Hill's 1977 cult classic Slap Shot is in many ways the quintessential dirty sports comedy. Nancy Dowd's script set a new standard for wall-to-wall profanity; binge drinking; lovingly depicted violence of the hockey-player-on-opponent, hockey-player-on-fan, and hockey player-on teammate variety; impromptu ice-rink stripping; and all-around bad behavior. Reuniting with his Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid director, Paul Newman radiates rakish charm as a long-in-the-tooth player-manager who breathes new blood into his sorry team by recruiting a trio of feral brutes (stick-wielding folk heroes the Hanson Brothers) to physically assault the opposing team. Led by its standout trio of dorky psychopaths, Newman's motley assemblage of not-so-loveable losers quickly becomes the meanest, dirtiest, brawlingest team in the league. This lets the film to simultaneously satirize and satiate hockey fans' insatiable bloodlust, while spoofing professional sports' tendency to appeal to mankind's basest instincts. (Blood good! Home team smash strangers from other city!) A direct-to-video sequel starring one of the lesser Baldwins followed a mere quarter of a century later. 2002's Slap Shot 2: Breaking The Ice was poorly received, but at least it boasted an R for "Strong Language" (including 85 "fucks," according to the good folks over at the Internet Movie Database) and not the chicken-shit, pussy-ass PG-13 most wimpy fucking sports comedies are saddled with these days.
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