SF Indie Fest: Blackball & I Am John Stamos

Blackball, directed by Mel Smith -- who gave us Morons From Outer Space and Bean -- is your basic slobs vs. the snobs movie, or, since the movie is British, the yobs vs. the snobs. This time the eternal battle is set beneath the backdrop of the very quaint English game lawn bowling. Lawn bowling is kind of like bocce and played mainly by those English types who wear muttonchops, smoke pipes, and have funny-sounding hyphenated names. On the snob side is Ray Speight, played by Farmer Hoggett, er, James Cromwell, who has been County Bowls champion for the past twenty-four years and is well-known for his love of forbidding things and writing rules. On the yobs side is Cliff Starkey, played by TV actor Paul Kaye. He’s young (a running joke is how old most bowls players are, with one of Cliff’s opponents being said to have gone crazy because he achieved stardom at the too early age of 45), wears funny clothes, teases all the other bowlers, and does trick plays. There’s the inevitable conflict between Cliff and Farmer Hoggett over rules and Cliff is banned from the sport. Enter Vince Vaughn as an American agent who hears of Cliff’s banning and talks Cliff into playing off his bad-boy image to make millions. And so Cliff becomes the rock n’roll bowler, gaining fame and riches by being "extreme," except not nearly as obnoxious as that sounds. This, of course, all leads to the inevitable climatic game with lots of tears, hugs, and lessons learned along the way.

The movie is such a slobs vs. the snobs genre flick almost every part of the movie reminded us of other movies. The riffing on a small game being turned into major event totally made us think of Dodgeball; the hero shocking his snotty superiors by his rock n’ roll attitude totally made us think of Happy Gilmore, and the generically nondescript hot blonde love interest totally made us think of, well, every one of these movies ever made. Which is fine -- genres are genres and there’s nothing wrong with it. A lot of these movies, in fact, went on to make gazillions and take such a place in pop culture that just reading the words "Gunga galunga... gunga, gunga-galunga" will bring the warm fuzzies to almost every male under the age of 50.

If there’s any problem with the movie, though, is that it’s just too British. It’s more cheeky than crass, more Full Monty than Caddyshack. Nobody does crass and loud and obnoxious like us, and this movie needs to be more crass, loud, and obnoxious. It needs more Happy Gilmore. The hero, who's supposed to the rebel guy, reminds SFist too much of Brecklin Meyer and not enough like Adam Sandler and so he just doesn’t come off as that, well, bad. And that could be the first and only time SFist will ever say that we wished something could be more like Adam Sandler. SFist also has to wonder why National Lampoon picked the movie up as it’s not nearly remotely tasteless. It’s actually kind of sweet and goofy. There’s not one bodily function joke, not one party scene, and not one bare breast to be had. Still, these movies are catnip to SFist and as this one has its cheeky fun moments, we enjoyed it. Especially in that nobody gets paralyzed halfway through and spends the rest of the movie begging to be euthanized. We hate that.

Also appearing with Blackball is the short film I Am John Stamos. It’s about one of those chubby, not quite handsome character actors who always has to play the goofy neighbor type wishing that he could be like John Stamos. Wouldn’t we all? The next day he wakes up and finds that while he looks normal in the real world, when caught on camera he looks exactly like John Stamos. This leads to some minorly crazy hi-jinks as he starts building a career as John Stamos. We suppose this movie is supposed to be kind of clever in that self-referential, meta, Charlie Kaufman/Spike Jonze kind of way but we totally missed it.