Drinking's Not Required, But Is Encouraged

I had no idea what this would be, other than it probably involved softball. And it does. Artie Lang plays Artie, a 35 year old unemployed alcoholic who still lives with his mom. His only passion (besides smoking and drinking) is the softball league he’s in, where his team routinely faces off against Mangiani’s, some rival of Artie’s from high school. Mangenelli feels much more successful, if you define that as being able to run for mayor while waiving membership fees at his gym for women if they have sex with him. Their teams get in a huge brawl in the first game, as they always do, and it’s decreed whichever team finishes with a worse record will be ousted from the league. And Mangenellii’s team has won the championship 4 years running.

There’s the typical sports' movie plot of the band of misfits trying to come together to save their team, and there’s also Artie’s storyline, where he tries to grow up a little and stop being so consumed with how much better that other guy has it. He meets Linda, they hit it off. Artie’s drinking less, gets a job, the team starts to win. Then he lets his old demons get the better of him and almost pisses it away, and one of his oldest friendships in the process, there’s some soul-searching, big showdown game at the end, pretty standard stuff. Most of the other guys on the team aren’t characters so much as rough outlines with just enough the film can do recurring jokes. Here’s the sensible best friend who eats healthy and won't stay out as late partying because of his fiance, so all his friends call him whipped and intimate he’s gay! Here's the guy who won't stop going on about his quest to hit .700 in the softball league! Here's the guy with an unfulfilling family life and anger issues! Here's the old guy who cusses a lot and smokes cigars while playing! OK, Dirt was actually kind of cool. At least he was smoking cigars. Artie's out there smoking some shitty, cheap cigarettes and drinking liquor during the game.

There were some funny bits, in among the many, many jokes about sexually transmitted diseases, and all the terms in what I assume is Italian I didn't understand (I know most of them were insults, but not all). And I’m a sucker for the typical underdog sports movie stuff, which is why I own some movies I frankly have no business owning. I was a little surprised Artie actively decides to try and get things together on his own. He likes Linda, he decides to try and be better, which is not an approach I think he’d taken with any previous girlfriends, but she seemed pretty OK with him as he was (she tells him at one point her shrink said he was good for her self-esteem, which is kind of terrifying, but she had some issues). 

I wouldn’t exactly recommend it, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be after the first 5 minutes. It helped when Artie gave Mangenelli shit for being a Dallas Cowboy fan who lives in Jersey, especially after Mangenelli tried to defend it with, ‘They’re America’s Team!’ Speaking as someone who got sick of hearing the Cowboys referred to that way throughout the ‘90s (when they were beating the hell out of Arizona twice every year), he can jam that argument in a garbage disposal, and stick his hand in there with it.