Beer League 2006

I watched Beer League the other night and let me just say that watching a movie where Ralph Macchio is swearing is like having your mother critique your sexual performance while she's smoking pot with your family's priest who happens to he having rather copious intercourse with the next-door neighbor's goat; now picture that with everyone involved wearing stiletto heels. Eh, close enough.

It's just weird. And before you start knocking Ralph Macchio, he only really took about 5 years off in the mid ninetees, and other than that, he's pretty much been working on and off for the past 26 years. Sure, he hasn't got a ton of noticeable work to show for lately, but Beer League was actually a pretty damn fun movie to see him come back to.

Basically, the entire movie is about this guy Artie DeVanzo (Artie Lange) who is a pretty hardcore loser who happens to have this utterly cute little snatch patch of a girl Linda Salvo (played by Cara Buono) who has the nicest ass I think I've seen on film since Scarlett Johannsen's ass in Match Point (which as always was amazing...).

Artie belongs to a softball team on a league in his local new jersey town, and, after initiating a rather retardedly fought skirmish during their first game, are told if they don't beat the other team by the end of the year, they can find a new league.  The first thing you notice when you watch this movie, is the completely random assortment of actors. Like Jim Breuer for instance, who is kinda somewhat ishy famous from Saturday Night Live; he played a brilliant role as the asshole "Football Guy". He was completely as irritating as I've ever seen him in anything else he's ever done (not that he's done all that much, of course).

And then there's Seymour Cassel, who plays the pitcher on their team, and is the glue that holds the team together.  His best line in the movie was "I've fucked guys bigger than you in prison!" Seymour here has had quite the impressive resume as far as things he's done, as he's been acting in small roles since 1959 mostly on tv shows. Seymour is one of those awesome actors who ya know who he is, just don't know where the fuck from. And as it turns out, he's from every fucking thing that's been on tv in the past 50 years. Go figure. You might also have seen him (if you looked really closely, that is) in Life Aquatic (with Bill Murray). That was a very cool movie. I like anything done by Focus Films personally.

So where were we. Ralph Macchio plays Artie's...cousin was it? I dunno, but Artie is his best man in the wedding in the movie. And somewhere between playing horrible softball and smoking and drinking non-stop, Artie decides to toss "Maz" (Macchio) a bachelor party. Now, I've been to a few bachelor parties in my time, but when you have one that includes an "erotic dancer" who can fling ping pong balls from her pussy across the room as an extra feature?! Now that's a fuckin bachelor party.

Of course, it was somewhat made for tv, kinda, so you won't find really all that much tits and ass anywhere; although Artie's mom (who was played BRILLIANTLY by Laurie Metcalf who was the unfortunate soul unlucky enough to have her career defined in the nineties by being Rosanne's beaten down sister in the "Rosanne" sitcom) interrupting Artie constantly mid-coitus is fantastic.

The highest marks in the movie have to go to Cara Buono who played the part of Linda Salvo, Artie's girlfriend. Anyone who can act the role of someone actually interested in Artie, that fat fuck herpes infested retard of a person, deserves a fucking oscar.

Oh, and by the way, lastly. I have no clue where this came from, but this movie is the first one that I've seen that has more than one herpes references than anything I've ever seen. Dennis Mangenelli, played by Anthony DeSando (did some soprano stuff several years ago, etc...) starts out with herpes, apparently, then fucked Artie's girlfriend 2 years before he met her, so she has it, and then artie now has it, and of course she had some random affair with Tim, who play the token black guy by Jerry Minor...

I know almost a third of everyone reading this (statistically speaking) has some form of herpes, but do we need to make it cool all of a sudden? I thought that was a little weird that most of the main cast of characters wound up getting herpes in the movie...

So on a scale of one to ten:

Laughs, a pretty impressive 8 (mostly because of Macchio)
Tits and Ass, 4 (four hookers makes not a t&a movie)
Violence, 1, duh.
Piss your pants rating, 4
Obscure people in the movie, 9.5
Plain weird shit, 6 (mostly Seymore Cassel's script)
Sports in a movie about a sport, 3 (softball really isn't a sport, and Artie Lange had a stunt double throw every ball)

Total points is 35.5, divided by 8 is 4.43ish...

Overall rating (lessee, carry the six, divide by eight...)

4.5.

Never judge a movie by some stupid rating system. I thought it was good for a mid week movie rental, personally.