The Air Up There

Wasn't it Will Rogers who once said that the reason you don't see too many great basketball movies is because there ain't any? Okay, he didn't really say that, but he might have after seeing The Air Up There.

It's not such a bad movie — it just isn't much of anything. The Air Up There tries to be an uplifting comedy, but mostly ends up being dull and pointless. The whole movie is so lacking in focus that even the line that explains the title goes by with barely a notice.

Kevin Bacon plays an assistant basketball coach at St. Joseph University. He has a bum knee, a bad attitude and a big mouth. He's supposed to go to Boise to recruit a new player, but follows a hunch and winds up in Kenya, instead. He's seen pictures of a tribal chief's son who's 6' 8", and knows how to slam dunk. All Bacon has to do is teach him how to play the rest of the game.

Well, Bacon does have a few other problems. He has to win the tribe's trust,
reconcile the chief with one of his sons and coach the whole village through a winner-takes-all basketball game against the greedy copper company that's threatening to steal the tribe's land. (If you can't guess how the movie ends, you're just going to have to splurge for a ticket. Though if you can't figure out who wins the game, you probably can't figure out how to drive to the theater.)

Wouldn't it be easier to just buy the player a new car and give him straight As?

Angels in the Outfield

Long ago, when the world was in black-and-white, there was a sweet, if minor, fantasy film called Angels in the Outfield. It was a light weight concoction starring Paul Douglas as the manager of the Pitts­burgh Pirates, a gruff, but lovable, guy who discovers that his team full of stumble bums is suddenly, magically able to slug their way to victory. It was all due to angels, who could be seen only by one little girl.

In Disney's even less impressive remake of the movie, ev­erybody can see the celestial beings — and as celestial be­ings go, they're pretty dull. (Angels shangels. They look more like the cast of one of those Fox TV shows with a zip code for a title.) Sometimes the unseen should be just that, and remain a provocative piece of the viewer's imagination.

The new version of Angels in the Outfield never succeeds in becoming anything more than low-grade Capra-corn. Danny Glover plays the manager of the L.A. Angels, a team that can't play any better than the Pirates could 40 years ago. This time, it's a boy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who finds himself acting as a go-between when a heavenly band of utility infielders intrudes into the pennant race.

Even in its original version, this story provided only mild entertainment, and the new production often moves slower than the bottom of the ninth stretch. There's also one point that neither version of the tale deals with very well, which is the subplot involving the looming public disgrace of the manager, when word gets out that he believes in angels.

Which is where the story becomes truly ludicrous. Let's face it, anybody who's familiar with sports knows that as long as the team is winning, nobody cares if the manager stands buck naked at homeplate and talks to Martians. Anything goes if it produces a winning streak.