Check Book: The Big Green

World Cup Fever in Unexpected Places

Marie Bardi, Blank Check, and JJ

Jun 29, 2026

IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:

THE BARDI PARTY REPORT

Happy Monday, folks. I struggled with what to write about this week. I didn’t see Supergirl, so I didn’t feel like I could comment on how it bombed at the box office (You can read Griffin and David’s thoughts on the film elsewhere). I also haven’t seen The Invite, which is supposed to be great, and I didn’t buy anything during the Criterion sale because I’m not allowed to buy any more discs until I finish watching all of my prior blind buys. And, let’s face it - there’s nothing else I could say about WALL-E that hasn’t already been said by David, David, Griffin, and JJ.

So, I asked my husband last night - “what should I write about on Monday?” And he said, “Maybe World Cup stuff? You’ve been into that.” But how to connect World Cup 2026 to movies?? Is there a movie that captures the blind confidence of Americans learning about “football,” the thrill of rooting for the underdog, the drama of penalty kicks, and the inescapable narrative of America’s immigration policy casting a very dark shadow over the proceedings? What if I told you YES.

Let me get this out of the way - 1995’s The Big Green is not a good movie. It has a stellar 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. After watching it for the first time last night, I did not give it a heart on Letterboxd. But it was, weirdly enough, the first movie that came to mind when I decided to watch something soccer-related for this newsletter. Despite never seeing this movie until last night, the film’s poster - an image of Ham from The Sandlot splayed out like a giant baby, getting a soccer ball straight to the nuts - is burned in my brain.

There were a bunch of these family-oriented sports movies in the 90s, starting with The Mighty Ducks in 1992. They all follow a similar formula - a ragtag group of unathletic, multi-ethnic kids form a team, they’re often coached by an inexperienced and unexpected adult with his/her own shit to prove, there’s normally one kid on the team who’s ACTUALLY really good, and there’s a rival team with much bigger kids and better funding who eventually get their asses handed to them by our heroic underdogs. My favorite of the genre is 1994’s Little Giants, a film that taught me about the annexation of Puerto Rico. The Big Green follows the Little Giants’ script to a tee, with some interesting adjustments. I’d consider Little Giants to be soft-woke; yes, its a film about peewee football, but it’s also about gender equality and the pervasiveness of sexism in sports. The Big Green, though? DEEP WOKE. This is a children’s movie that takes place in a dying Texas town where the kids openly talk about how their schools suck and their parents are unemployed alcoholics, and where the evil coach of the rival team literally CALLS ICE on Juan Morales, The Big Green’s star player. As we’re watching the movie last night, my husband goes, “Oh no - is Juan an undocumented immigrant?? Is that gonna be a thing??” and I was like, “No way, this is a Disney movie.” LO AND BEHOLD, it becomes a very big thing. The climax of The Big Green involves Steve Guttenberg (very miscast as a guileless town sheriff / soccer coach) tracking down Juan and his immigrant mother after they’ve run away to escape ICE, offering to sponsor their visa and set them up with an attorney, and therefore setting up Juan to play in the championship match against the very evil and Nazi-coded Knights.

With all of the news about the Iranian national team being given very restrictive visas that have them staying in Tijuana for their US-set games, plus the disgusting way official US Government social media accounts have used the USNT players in videos comparing their defensive “wall” to the walls on the border…I have been having trouble separating politics from my new-found enjoyment of the sport. In choosing to watch The Big Green, I was expecting an escape from our political reality, and instead was forced to reckon with it. Even as someone who lived through the 90s, I forget how progressive the 90s sometimes were. Let Juan play.

MONDAY FUNNIES BY JOE BOWEN

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE DOSSIER

The Star Treatment

By 2008, Ben Burtt—the multi-Oscar-winning sound designer behind film like Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T.—was already a legend to a particular kind of person. (Mostly film industry professionals or, well, nerds.) But with Andrew Stanton’s 2008 film WALL-E, for which Burtt was asked to serve not just as the sound designer but also as the film’s credited lead vocal performer, the accomplished below-the-line craftsman approached true stardom for the first time, just as he was entering his 60s. “I suddenly found myself taken in limousines and staying in five-star hotels and having handlers and being a rock star,” Burtt told Variety amidst the film’s awards season campaign in December 2008. “Of course, I’m not used to that. When does a sound editor ever find himself walking red carpets in 10 worldwide cities?”1 The answer: really just when they voice WALL-E, it turns out.

Don’t Give Up

Burtt wasn’t the only titan finally getting his due—or at least a new variation of his due—with WALL-E; there was also the musician Peter Gabriel. From 1982 to 2002, Gabriel contributed ten original songs to film soundtracks. Among them were “Out Out” for 1984’s Gremlins, “Lovetown” for 1994’s Philadelphia, “While the Earth Sleeps” for 1995’s Strange Days, “That’ll Do” for 1998’s Babe: Pig in the City, and “Animal Nation” for 2002’s The Wild Thornberrys Movie. But not a single one of those ten songs resulted in an Oscar nomination for Gabriel. (“That’ll Do”’s nom went to Randy Newman.)

That changed with “Down to Earth,” Gabriel’s end credits song for WALL-E. “My virginity is lost,” Gabriel disgustingly relayed to Variety on Oscars nominations day. Even more disgustingly, he continued, “It was painless and pleasure was involved.” His next metaphor was much less upsetting: “With musicians and film people, it’s like cows grazing in the field and the grass always seems greener on the other side of the fence. So in some ways it’s a more exciting adventure being in the film world than in my own back yard.”2

But the adventure ended with Gabriel in the Kodak Theatre crowd instead of up on its stage. When Gabriel learned that producers Bill Condon and Laurence Mark planned for the year’s three nominated songs—the other two both coming from A. R. Rahman’s score for Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire—to be performed as a medley, with “Down to Earth” receiving just 65 seconds of airtime, Gabriel declined to perform. “I’m an old fart,” Gabriel relayed in a video posted on his website, “and it’s not going to do me any harm to make a little protest.”3 Ultimately stepping in for Gabriel was John Legend, who performed with the Soweto Gospel Choir.

Another Seed Sown

In June 2008, Stanton told Variety that part of the appeal of making WALL-E was that it was so markedly different than his first film, 2003’s Finding Nemo. “I spend four years on these movies,” Stanton explained. “I don’t want to do them twice.”4 Hmmm, we’ll check back on this in a couple weeks.

WHAT IS THE TEAM INTO THIS WEEK?

David Sims, Host: “My Hammer rec this week is the William Castle movie The Old Dark House, a remake of a much better James Whale movie that is VERY silly. But it’s got lots of great British character actors stumbling around a haunted mansion trying to murder each other and a bumbling American. It’s so fun!!!”

Griffin Newman, Host: “I’ll recommend THE PLAGUE! Presenting the inherent sociopathy of how tween boys socialize in the style of a horror movie is an idea so good I cannot believe it took this long for someone to land on it. Thankfully, Charlie Polinger’s execution was worth the wait. An insanely strong debut that has me excited to see what he does with Poe’s THE MASQUE OF RED DEATH next. (Also, this definitely would have made several Blankies categories for me had I not caught up with it so damn late!)”

Marika Brownlee, Director of Operations: “My recommendation is the Poolside Grape Pops Polar Seltzer flavor which really does beautifully capture the essence of a grape popsicle. People (me) are calling it the seltzer of the summer!! ”

JJ Bersch, Researcher: “I’ve been sick with my Summer Cold for the past week so I’ve done pretty much nothing but watch the World Cup and play Persona 3 Reload. So I recommend the World Cup and Persona 3 Reload.”

AJ McKeon, Associate Producer: “Have recently gotten back into basketball cards and with the World Cup going on, Hayes has gotten into the Panini stickers. I can’t necessarily recommend it since it’s a problem, but it is kind of fun.”

Joe Bowen, Checky the Comic: “A book on my shelf that I regularly pull off to re-read sections of is “Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge” by Mark Yarm. Grunge is far from my favorite music genre, but this book vividly captures a specific moment in time when Seattle music was the center of the world. Yarm is able to pull all these individual stories together to really explain what grunge meant to people and how it felt to get caught up in it all. Insightful, hilarious, and genuinely moving!”

Alan Smithee, Pseudonymous Editor: “I can’t imagine that anybody reading this newsletter needs this recommendation, but I’ve recently been diving into the back catalogue of Patrick H. Willems video essays, and I have to say: good stuff! Patrick is, it turns out, smart about movies! And that smartness extends to how we conceives of, films and edits his videos. They look good and sound good and ARE good. So, I recommend that you, the one Check Book reader who hasn’t already watched all of Patrick’s videos, go watch all of Patrick’s videos! And subscribe to Nebula maybe!

GRIFF NOTE: Patrick graciously jumping in as guest on the Supergirl ep of CD. Cannot wait to hear his thoughts on that one.”

THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST

Put on your pod-day clothes, there's lots of world out there! We're joined by David Ehrlich to discuss WALL-E this week - a film many consider to be Stanton's (and Pixar's) crowning achievement, and a film David Ehrlich's son has watched upwards of a million times.

CRITICAL DARLINGS
It’s Pride Week on Critical Darlings, and we’re joined by the co-host of the podcast (and Best Supporting Actress expert) Colin Drucker to break down two new wide-release gay movies: RuPaul’s spoofy Stop! That! Train! and the Australian conversion therapy horror film Leviticus.