Eddie: shitty movie, no chimps!
Written by: Rob Van Winkle, CC2K Staff Writer
Recently, with a whole day to myself, I allowed my visions of dutiful writing and life-planning to melt gloriously into an afternoon of pitiful procrastinating and movie-watching. As I flipped through my choices, I noticed that a movie called Eddie had just started. Steeling myself for a film featuring TV’s Joey getting out-acted by a chimpanzee, I changed channels, only to find that I was wrong. Ed was the shitty sports movie you once heard of, featuring a talentless ape (and a chimpanzee). Eddie was the shitty sports movie you’ve never heard of, featuring Whoopi Goldberg.
Despite that dull warning buzzer going off in my head, I decided to watch.
When I was finally able to get my jaw to close again after hours of it locking painfully in the “shocked horror” position, I realized that, like most men, I am easily swayed by the banner of a “sports themed” movie, and in this case, I was suckered but good.
In summary, the story centers around the New York Knicks. At the beginning of the movie, they are a pathetically bad team. (Okay, STOP! With JUST THAT FIRST SENTENCE, the movie’s title, and the star…guess the entire plot. Good guess.) The players are either old and enfeebled, young and (hilariously) stupid, foreign, or prima donna ball hogs. The owner is a brash Texas billionaire played by Billy Bob Thornton. (No wait. It was Frank Langella, trying so hard to look and talk like Thornton that, for this article at least, so it will be), and the coach is a bitter and irate Dennis Farina (playing an asshole, for a change.) Their record is awful, their attitude is even worse, and the box office is suffering mightily. To gain publicity, Thornton begins a stunt at home games by which three fans are picked randomly, and if they can sink a shot from the foul line at halftime, they will get to be the honorary coach for the rest of the game. Somehow, despite her nosebleed seats, Edwina Something gets her shot, and makes it! She eventually gets kicked out, but the fans (and the papers!) like her a lot, and the owner knows a good box office draw when he sees one. Two or three implausible scenes later, Eddie (as she is known) is the new head coach for the Knicks.
However, things don’t go well to start. The players don’t take her, or the game, seriously (practices are for naps and photo shoots), and the press treat her like garbage. When things seem there worst, Eddie begins to take charge. She learns Russian to better coach her center, gives marital advice to her guard, and benches her superstar player (in favor of…the aging veteran!) when he fails to pass the ball one time too many. To everyone’s surprise, the team starts to win. And win. And win.
Soon they are fighting for a chance to go to the playoffs, with one game to go. Everyone is ecstatic, and Thornton offers Eddie a million dollar contract, and keys to her new penthouse apartment…in St. Louis! That’s right, he intends to SELL the team, provided they make the playoffs this year. Eddie has a choice: blow the game (and her fledgling career) if she wants to keep her beloved Knicks in New York, or coach them to a win and lose them forever. What’s a girl to do? (Whatever you come up with, it is almost certainly at least as probable as what does happen.)
Eddie, it is clear, is just one of the sub-genre of films that I am calling Sports Themed Chick Flicks (STCF). The allure for studios of the STCF is easy to see: women will go to see a movie about love, or relationships, or family; guys will go for the sports-based-setting. It is, in other words, a date movie that both parties can agree on, and might actually go see without having someone special to see it with. There are a ton of such movies out there these days attempting to bridge this gap, with For Love of the Game, Tin Cup, Jerry Maguire, Forget Paris, and Fever Pitch jumping immediately to mind (there are dozens of others).
Typically, these movies suck, at least from the male perspective, and I think I know why. Love and relationships, as we all know, are unpredictable at best. If you invent a story about some outlandish thing someone did to impress someone else, chances are you know someone who has a relative who did it. Since we all know this, we (and by “we”, I mean “women”) are willing to forgive romantic movies their various absurdities. After all, they reason, I once ______ for a guy, so it’s at least possible that someone would —______ for the person they love.
However, sports are a different creature entirely. Sports are governed by rules, and even casual fans know most of them. When you start bending the rules of plausibility with sports in a movie, it serves to undermine the entire premise, and most every guy in the audience will tune out.
Eddie is perhaps the most egregious offender of this particular issue. After just one viewing, here are some of the sports-related problems:
1. The “Honorary Coach” contest was predicated on sinking a shot from the foul line – This is simply ridiculous. This is not hitting a live baseball, throwing a pass 20 yards downfield to an open receiver, or even hitting a slap shot into a goal on ice. This is a FOUL SHOT. Little kids make these all the time. Making a theoretically highly sought after prize predicated on this feat is akin to offering someone a hundred bucks if they can guess which hand is hiding the penny.
2. The guy who shoots before Whoopi throws the ball over the basket – This itself is not so bad, but BEFORE he takes that Oh-So-Hard foul shot, he spins the ball on his finger, rolls the ball in a circle formed by his arms, and even throws it up and catches it on the back of his neck. He is, in other words, VERY GOOD at basketball. If this is the case, he MIGHT miss the shot, but he would simply NEVER miss it that badly. Even Shaq doesn’t miss foul shots that badly.
3. The players never get taken out of the game – One of the players on these fictional Knicks is a superstar who is a ball hog. Another is a veteran with bad knees and a heart of gold. When things get to the breaking point, and Eddie gets mad enough, she takes out the former in favor of the latter. Everyone is stunned, and Marv Albert (!) then says “The Knicks superstar player (I think his name was Stacy) has just been benched for the first time this season!” What? How could ANYONE thinking to make a basketball have included this scene, or this line at the least?
4. The team improves only after Eddie starts meddling in their lives – Yeah. Star players LOVE it when the coach becomes the parent. I bet it happens all the time:
PHIL JACKSON: What’s wrong Kobe?
KOBE BRYANT: I miss my wife terribly, coach.
PHIL JACKSON: Well then you should go out and fuck a groupie, son.
KOBE BRYANT: Really?
PHIL JACKSON: Absolutely. No one will ever know, and you can do all the filthy things that your wife won’t allow!
KOBE BRYANT: Thanks, coach.
(They kiss)
5. The Knicks make it to the playoffs.
As you can see, the sports-based plot devices in this movie are so outrageously unlikely and implausible, that even IF women wanted to see it, and even IF they were able to get their men to see it with them through the allure of sports, then they would still lose, because those same guys would surely warn all their brethren that this is only a chick flick in STCF’s clothing.
In conclusion, balancing a movie so that both genders will like it equally is an extremely daunting task, and no one really expects it to be pulled off. Having said that, men will go see movies with their women anyway; not because of one element of said film, but because of the chance that they might get laid if they do. For this reason, Hollywood should stop throwing half-assed attempts at sports themes into movies, and expecting that to be enough.
Or, if that won’t happen, then women everywhere should make an agreement: for every time a guy is forced to watch poorly thought out and executed sports segment in a chick flick, some woman somewhere MUST allow some guy to fuck her because his friend talks her into it. After all, I saw it in a movie once; it must be true.