More on Bad News Bears

Several readers have raised some issues on my Bad News Bears review that I think merit some further discussion. A couple of readers have taken me to task for taking my 8-year-old daughter to a PG-13 movie, and another user surmises that I must not have grown up in the 1970s, because if I had I would know that it was common back then for kids to ride in cars without seatbelts.

First, I did grow up in the 1970s, riding around in the back of my parents' pickup with no seatbelt. My oldest daughter is 19 and in college. Bad News Bears is a remake of a film made in 1976, but it is not set in 1976. It's set in the present, almost 30 years later. So while in 1976 it may have been common and acceptable for a guy to cruise around with eight or nine kids crammed, unseatbelted, into a convertible, in 2005 it certainly is not, and he wouldn't have gotten six blocks without getting pulled over. As for the language - yeah, kids cuss. I did, my friends did. And if it had just been a little language sprinkled throughout the film - a few "dammits" and "buttfaces" and even the occasional "penis breath" or "asshole", okay.

As I said in my review, Bad News Bears is not really a kids' movie at all. It's rated PG-13, it has strong language and some content that some parents might find inappropriate for kids. I took my daughter to it, as I do to most of the family films I review. She's seen several PG-13 films, and she and I have been fine with almost all of them. She was not traumatized by hearing the language in Bad News Bears; we are not a prudish family, we are big fans of the First Amendment right to free speech, and she hears language like that fairly often.

What she had more of an issue with was that little kids were using that kind of language, and that the language was so in-your-face throughout the film. If it had just been the adults, I doubt she would have batted an eye, but the kids in this film cursed in virtually every sentence from beginning to end. Roger Ebert, who actually gave the film an overall positive review, notes in a parental advisory at the end of his review that the language in this film pushes the limits of the PG-13 rating, and I would have to agree with that. I've taken my daughter to PG-13 films where I wondered afterwards why it got a PG-13. This did not happen to be one of them - it's only the lack of the "f-word", I think, that kept this movie from being rated "R".

The other thing that bothered me about the profanity in this movie is that I felt it was just superfluous. When I watch a movie, I like to see that the writers and the director have made choices in the filmmaking process that make sense; I don't mind nudity in a film, for example (actually, it might be a draw for me), but I do want the nudity to be relevant to the plot of the film, and not just there because they think some actress's boobs on screen will sell more tickets. Same thing with profanity - the excessive profanity in Bad News Bears is part of what got the film a PG-13 rating, and it did absolutely nothing to enhance the film. It would have been as good a film - even a better film, with significantly less language - especially from the kids.

My bigger beef with Bad News Bears, though, really lies with the way the film was marketed, and with the guidelines the MPAA has for trailers. The trailer for this film (very heavily edited) was shown at virtually every kids' film we'd been to in the weeks preceding the movie's release date. The filmmakers and movie theaters were very clearly aiming at families with kids in the marketing of this film. The original film, in 1976, was pretty edgy for the time (it has a PG rating, by the way), but my dad took me to see it when I was eight - the age my daughter is now - and he and I were fine with it.

The MPAA requires that trailers for PG-13, R and NC-17 films, if they are shown at kids' films, have to edit out any scenes for which the film got the PG-13, R or NC-17 rating. For Bad News Bears, the trailer pretty much showed the only scenes in the film that were not PG-13. As parents, when making a decision about whether a film is okay for our kids, many of us rely on trailers, along with reviews, word-of-mouth from people we know who have seen the film, our own judgement, from our past experience with PG-13 films, and our subjective judgement as our kids' parents about how mature they are and what they can handle, to determine whether a film is suitable for our kids.

As a parent, I don't expect other people to police what my kids watch. That's my job. But I do expect the marketing to be fair; if I'm expecting to go see an R-rated flick with violence and nudity with my husband on date night, I don't want to see Bambi. Likewise, if I'm taking my kids to see Bad News Bears, or any film that heavily targeted to families with kids, I don't expect to see something barely teetering the line between PG-13 and R. The milder language the kids use in ET? Sure. Excessive language more appropriate to a film targeted at adults? Not so much.

Unlike the families who walked out of the film, we stayed for all of it. And after the film I did what I always do with my kids: talked. I talked to my daughter about the film, got a read from her on how she felt about it, discussed any concerns she had, listened to what she had to say about the film overall, then took her home so she could bury her nose in Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince. She was fine, and I was fine, but I still think the way the film was marketed was just inappropriate given its content.

Had I been going to see Bad News Bears expecting a movie verging on an R-rating, I wouldn't have brought my daughter. I would have probably enjoyed the film a lot more, because Billy Bob Thornton is an excellent actor, and his performance in this film is quite strong. As a professional film reviewer, I never read reviews of movies I'm reviewing until I'm done writing my own review, and I don't talk to anyone who's seen the film until after I've seen it myself. It's the only way I can go into the film with minimal expectations about how I will like it, and ensure the ideas I write about in my review are purely my own.

Bad News Bears has not been marketed as a film for adults and teenagers. It's been marketed as a film for kids. The showing we went to was a packed house, and it was packed full of families there with kids 12 and under who were, I expect, thinking they were taking their kids to a nice remake of a film that evoked pleasant childhood memories for them. There were no packs of teenagers at the film at all, very few adults there without any kids. The people who were there were the people the film was marketed to, and that marketing did the film, and the parents who took their kids to see it, a disservice.