Rob Reiner IS "Screwie"!

Rob Reiner as “Screwie” getting hit in the head by Yankee Irving - the worst player on the sandlot (if only). Image Credit: IDT Entertainment

Rob Reiner IS “Screwie”!

Just when you think it couldn’t get any worse for the exploits for Actor turned Director turned ousted Bureaucrat … Rob “Meathead” Reiner remakes himself into “Screwie”, a not so funny “Borsht Circuit” style comic baseball.

The beauty of this voice-over role for Rob is that it utilizes a talent he picked up while being the commissioner of California’s improperly and potentially illegally run First Five cigarette tax money funded education program (currently under investigation). Rob had a failed attempt at “Screwing” Californians into paying for universal pre-school for all (Proposition 82) too now failing at a voice-over role as a baseball appropriately named “Screwie”.

This from the New York Post -

BRONX BUMMER
Even Derek Jeter couldn't put life into the mild baseball flick "Everyone's Hero."
By KYLE SMITH – New York Post - September 15, 2006
Rating: ****
(two stars out of four stars)

CHECK out the loser in the Yankee cap who can do nothing but strike out. "The Alex Rodriguez Story"? No, "Everyone's Hero," a tame CGI cartoon for the simple-minded: the very young, the very old and Yankee fans.

The 1932 World Series is about to begin in The Bronx, where a kid named Yankee Irving is the worst player on the sandlot. His only friend is another misfit: Screwie (Rob Reiner, channeling Jackie Mason), a talking baseball fouled out of Yankee Stadium who dreams of being a home-run ball - or at least breaking a window.

When the kid's dad, a janitor at the stadium, allows him inside the locker room to peek at Babe Ruth's bat, the bat gets stolen. The boy is the chief suspect, so the father gets fired. But the real thief is a pitcher for the Chicago Cubs acting on orders from the Cubs' manic owner, who is desperate to win the Series and spends his spare time torturing bobblehead dolls of the Babe.

The magic-of-baseball movie has been dying ever since the fans started to notice that the team that wins the most championships simply buys them in a drunken spree every winter. But "Everyone's Hero" manages to give peewees a history lesson about the Negro Leagues and connect on a few decent jokes. Reading the newspaper, Screwie says, "There's a horse jumping off a diving board. Oh wait, that's Eleanor Roosevelt."

Rob Reiner as “Screwie” in drag – delivering a “tour de force”. Image Credit: IDT Entertainment

There is something here to bore everyone from age 8 to 80 (bland ballads, straight-line plot, a boring villain from the evil-redhead school).

But tiny tots will enjoy the booger jokes and pratfalls, plus the scene where the kid actually gets to play for the Yankees.

Retirees will lap up both Reiner's Catskills shtick - which is older than Julio Franco - and the way the kid slowly learns the fundamentals of the game while trying to recover the bat and save the Yankees and his dad's job. (The bat also talks, by the way - in the voice of Whoopi Goldberg, who trades insults with the baseball: "Your stitches are gonna need stitches.")

Strangely, though, the script mangles the '32 World Series (then why specify the year?) and doesn't even mention its most memorable (supposed) event, Ruth's "called shot."

The movie credits Christopher Reeve, who has been dead for two years, as lead director, which is a pretty shameless publicity ploy even by Hollywood standards. Reeve may have been a swell guy, but he wasn't an animator.

(The production notes say Reeve, whose son pointed out the short story the film is based on, did "much of the storyboarding and prep work" - you can do that by puffing through a tube?)

The oft-repeated message of the film is "keep on swinging." Keep on spinning, is more like it.

EVERYONE'S HERO

**

Louisville sluggard. [ed. OUCH!]

Running time: 85 minutes. Rated G (all ages).
Reference Here>>

After this movie, every time “Meathead” opens his mouth on something political, or tries to have everyone else pay for something HE believes in … Rob Reiner IS “Screwie”!

Try as hard as you may, you just can’t make this stuff up.

Rob Reiner's best line in the movie trailer? "Ow!, My head!, My butt!, My head!, My butt!, My head!"