With the hiring of Tony Danza, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's directorial debut is now an Angels In The Outfield reunion

By Sean O'Neal | April 20, 2012 | 5:14pm

Aux Features Film

Like so many who came of age in the 1990s, Joseph Gordon-Levitt appears to have never gotten over Angels In The Outfield, the remake of a 1951 film in which a pitiless God continues to ignore the thousands of prayers from the diseased and dying while dispatching an entire army to help a shitty baseball team win the pennant. Gordon-Levitt—who played that film’s adorable white foster kid who somehow needed convoluted divine intervention to get adopted—will continue to process his conflicted feelings about that movie’s entire premise by reuniting with co-star Tony Danza on his upcoming directorial debut, which once again finds Gordon-Levitt playing a guy with a sports-addicted father who doesn’t care about him or the rest of his family.

Moving on from playing the pitcher who’s going to die pretty soon in Angels, Danza joins Gordon-Levitt’s as-yet-untitled film as that father, whose indifference toward his son no doubt contributes to Gordon-Levitt's character being a “porn-addicted modern-day Don Juan.” The story (also written by Gordon-Levitt) finds him trying to become less of a selfish person with the help of “mentor” Julianne Moore and, especially, his girlfriend Scarlett Johansson, who are two pretty good people to have in your life if you’re trying to shake a porn addiction. Anyway, perhaps Gordon-Levitt and Danza can carve out some time on set to discuss why God would go to the trouble of sending angels to help a baseball team, yet force them to stick to a rule of “not helping in championship games,” and whether this is indeed evidence that God is arbitrary and cruel.