What’s Aged the Worst?
Mitch Kramer's performance; his pitching, which needed a cutaway; Wooderson's interest in high school girls; the hazing and bullying; the lack of accent work beyond McConaughey
In the discussion (13)
Approx. transcript time · 00:38:15Read transcript
- Number one is Mitch Kramer, the biggest flaw in the movie: a bad, miscast performance, which leads to his pitching, where a cutaway was needed and makes Freddie Prinze in Summer Catch look like 1999 Pedro Martinez; even in the cutaway he releases the ball beside his neck as if he had a herniated disc.
- Texas baseball could not have him as its innings eater; Everybody Wants Some (transcribed as Everybody Wants Him) is read as Linklater's reaction to botching the Mitch Kramer casting, since its players looked like real ballplayers, maybe the most credible baseball movie ever, including the mustached one, Tyler Hetchling (as transcribed) from Teen Wolf, who looks like Mike Trout.
- A counterpoint: 70s and 80s ballplayers were not athletes like Bryce Harper or Mike Trout, and Houston pitcher Mike Scott, a Cy Young winner, looked like a science teacher; the reply is that Scott was a cheater who tried to cheat the Mets out of the 1986 World Series.
- The counter to the counterpoint: Criterion making-of footage of Wiley Wiggins having a catch with Richard Linklater is one of the saddest things, since he cannot catch from three feet away; research says he claimed he had played baseball, could not, and they edited around it, which raises what Mitch Kramer brought to the movie versus a 12- or 13-year-old River Phoenix or another good child actor of 1993.
- The defense: even as a bad actor he has something, since eighth grade is awkward and his lack of confidence and signature nose-and-face touching read as nervousness, so the bad acting works in his favor; the rebuttal is that River Phoenix could have done that, and the what-if game is mocked with James Dean and the Doors Val Kilmer as Mitch Kramer.
- Kristen Hinojosa (as transcribed), who plays Sabrina, the other eighth-grade girl, is liked for playing it low-key in a movie full of big performances; Mitch needed to be cooler and to be seen pitching, since he is set up as the Randy Pink Floyd of four years later, and Pink at least carried himself like a quarterback.
- A tangent assigns football positions: Don a defensive end, linebacker or maybe safety, Cole Hauser clearly the best player and a left tackle or defensive end captain, Mel on defense, O'Banion the best player on the defense and a good blocker, Wooderson a tailback or, given his key-catching skills, a Jerry Rice wideout in a pre-West Coast ground-and-pound offense, and Pink a scrambling quarterback like Manziel, a young Jim Zorin (as transcribed) or Tarkenton rather than Stabler.
- The disagreement over Mitch Kramer is left standing: one side calls the defense the wrong opinion, the other says it is okay that he is a bad actor, something they would say in almost no other case.
- Wooderson's interest in high school girls, including the implied statutory issue, has not aged well and he may be a predator; the clip of him asking a freshman about this year's crop of girls and his line about getting older while they stay the same age is played.
- The hazing and bullying have also not aged well.
- Not a lot has aged badly: in the version of the country we live in now none of this is acceptable and society has changed, but as a period piece the costumes, music and performances hold up, it is full of stars and not riddled with problems. — Sean Fennessey
- When Mitch Kramer is raised again, Kramer's pitching is conceded as bad, and the Wiggins catch footage is now wanted; a side trip into the 1986 World Series box set, which includes the Astros-Mets NLCS games six and seven and Scott's chicanery, follows.
- Cole Hauser is not a convincing Texan, few in the cast were and it did not matter, but there is little accent work besides McConaughey, which may be what has aged worst.