Bad Parents

This movie made me physically ill. Stupidest thing I have ever seen. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes rates a 10 compared to this piece of refuse.

Bad Parents takes a fine, if obvious premise that traveling youth soccer is a vicious jungle and tries hard to make a full movie out of the carnage. But too much emphasis on the repressed sexual needs of the moms, and a terribly misguided reaction to a state finals loss pushes this film over the edge from funny to pathetic.

As a rule it's only funny if it's funny. If you want to make is serious, that's in play, but then you should consider being realistic.

I was a soccer parent for several years. The truth in this film is strong in spots, but it got bent like Beckham in my opinion.

Just saw this at the Austin Film Festival.

Plot lines are dropped. Narration goes nowhere. Much of the story stutters and starts and does not end. There are lots of plot holes and unexplained and unresolved issues with story lines, characterizations, and the writing was not strong enough to really make me care what happened, it just made me angry that it didn't finish.

The sound mixing and editing was unbearable. The lines recorded in post were so evident and that it was literally blaring in the middle of the character's conversation. Almost no attempt to incorporate them into the prerecorded dialogue.

Characters are not fleshed out and unlikable. No one has a redeeming quality. The casting was misdirected (why does the black/white biracial couple have a child darker than the black parent?). People are introduced into the movie and then never seen again.

There was a lot of potential. Disappointing.

The whole entire movie I was uncomfortable. I cringed the whole movie and was just disgusted.

For a comedy, then "Bad Parents" was disturbing devoid of laughs and funny moments. As for the drama, well, this movie is sort of the kind of movie that will cause you to get worked up over the characters in the movie, as they really infuriate the audience with their arrogance, their lack of interest for the kids game, and how it becomes a matter of prestige for the parents to have their kids in the game.

The story is about a small town who puts together a girls soccer team. The coach, which is an arrogant schmuck - to say the least - decides to put the girls into two groups; an A group for the obviously talented players and B group for the less talented group. This has the soccer mom's worked up and struggling to get their girls into the A group. The pressure becomes more and more intense as the girls progress to the semi finals.

I will say that the concept idea for this storyline may have worked well on script paper, but it didn't translate well into physically being on the screen. Or perhaps it was just the directing of the movie that was questionable.

The characters in the movie well nicely enough fleshed out and detailed, though most of them come off a snobs, arrogant individuals and people who don't have any consideration about the well-being and fun of their children in the soccer games, and as people who just want to have a prestigious place on the A team. As such, then you really hate and loathe most of the characters in the movie, and they will ignite a spark of anger and resentment in the audience.

Somewhere along the line, the comedy dropped out of this movie entirely, and there were no laughs at all to be found anywhere.

It should be said that they do have some good actors and actresses on the cast list to portray these annoying characters and roles. I decided to watch the movie solely because of Janeane Garofalo, but must admit that this movie was not among her better movies.

Now, I am not overly familiar with soccer moms and the world that they exist in, but I am sure that this movie took all that and put it to the extreme, because the movie was really over the top.