List: Gilmore’s Best Baseball Films

Posted on April 4, 2008 at 9:21 am

My friend Hoppy Gillmore of Fargo’s Froggy 99.9 has posted his list of the all-time best baseball movies, one for each inning. Here’s his list, with some comments from me in italics.
9. The Bad News Bears
Anyone who played Little League ball has lived this movie. Thanks Coach Flieth for spending your summers on the diamond with us!
I know people love this one, but it is not on my list. I’m all for anti-hero movies that subvert the usual underdog formulas, but hearing kids use bad language and seeing adults misbehave in front of them just isn’t that funny.
8. The Sandlot
If you ever played neighborhood ball as a kid you’ve lived this movie as well. For me it was the empty lot next to Paul and Mitch Heinen’s house in Hillsboro.
I love this movie — it’s my DVD pick of the week!
7. A League of Their Own
“There’s no crying in baseball!” I never knew about this piece of baseball history until I saw the movie.
There may be no crying in baseball (one of my favorite lines ever), but I cry in the last scene of this movie every time I watch. Ignore the sibling rivalry theme and enjoy the love of the game and the brilliant performances from everyone — Tom Hanks, Geena Davis, Bill Pullman, Madonna, and Rosie O’Donnell.
6. For Love of the Game
This one’s good for women too because there’s a love story built into the story of baseball. Even my wife will sit down and watch this one.
Agreed!
5. Major League
“Juuuuust a bit outside!” According to Chris Coste’s new book, The 33-Year-Old Rookie (http://www.chriscoste.com/) this could be a very accurate portrayal of minor league ball.
Silly fun, and I love it when they play “Wild Thing.” (But stay away from the sequel.)
4. 61*
Yeah, I’m a homer. Billy Crystal’s tribute to who will ALWAYS be the single-season home run king.
Terrific movie.
3. The Natural
One of the first baseball movies I remember watching. Who wouldn’t want to run the bases under a shower of sparks from the home run ball you hit that went into the lights?
Love this one, too. Parental note: some mature material.
2. Field of Dreams
“If you build it, they will come.” The father-son playing catch at the end brings back memories of my dad and I doing the same thing whenever he’d grill. In-between flipping burgers we’d play catch.
This is a movie that makes grown men cry. Touching and inspiring.
1. Bull Durham
Kevin Costner’s “Crash Davis” spews the best baseball philosophy around. He’s the Yoda of baseball.
One of the great, great grown-up love stories ever put on film — love of baseball as well as romantic love. And I get a kick out of knowing that this is where Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins became a real-life couple!

Related Tags:

Leatherheads

Posted on April 3, 2008 at 6:00 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for brief strong language.
Profanity:	A few bad words
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, drunkenness, speakeasies, smoking, drinking and smoking by a child
Violence/ Scariness:	Fighting, peril, suicide attempt, brief non-explicit wartime battle scene
Diversity Issues:	Integrated team, strong female character
Date Released to Theaters:	April 4, 2008

Like the 1925 ragtag professional football team it follows, this movie has more high spirits than ability to deliver.

George Clooney directs and stars in this affectionate tribute to 1920’s “professional” football and 1930’s movie comedies, but it it captures more of the letter than the (high) spirit of the rat-a-tat-tat dialogue and ebullient effervescence of those Turner Classic Movie channel-worthy gems. It is entertaining without being especially memorable.

Clooney plays Dodge Connelly, a player on a failing team in a failing league. In 1925, football was a college sport. Cheering crowds filled college stadiums while professional football was disorganized on and off the field — or cow pasture, as the case might be. Dodge decides to recruit the top college player, Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski of The Office), who is not only a football hero but a real American WWI hero as well. Carter agrees to leave school because Dodge guarantees him a ton of money and because he is very happy to have a chance to keep playing. He is guided on this by his agent, CC Frazier (suitably, if silkily, satanic Jonathan Pryce), a character who raises the intriguing Jerry Maguire-ish question of whether pro sports would have been created without pressure from pro agents.

Related Tags:

Movies -- format Sports

Remembering Jules Dassin

Posted on April 3, 2008 at 8:00 am

Writer/director Jules Dassin died this week at age 96. He is perhaps most fondly remembered as a key figure in establishing the genres of film noir (Naked City) and the heist film (Topkapi and “Rififi”) and for the marvelous Never on Sunday, starring his wife, Melina Mercouri, as an earthy prostitute who is “educated” about ancient Greece by an American scholar (Dassin himself).

The movie I most want to remember today is one that Dassin wrote and directed early in his career, one of the most profoundly spiritual films I have ever seen. It is called “He Who Must Die,” and it is the story of a group of Greek villagers who put on a passion play each year. The powerful citizens of the town decide who will play each part. Almost contemptuously, they select a stuttering shepherd to play Jesus and the town prostitute to play Mary Magdalene. But when a real-life conflict comes to the town, the members of the passion play cast begin to take on the attributes of the New Testament figures they are portraying. Unfortunately, the film is not available on video or DVD, but I strongly recommend making every effort to try to see it.

Alvin and the Chipmunks

Posted on April 1, 2008 at 8:00 am

Novelty songwriter Ross Bagdasarian noticed that speeding up the audio recordings creatd a high-pitched sound in 1958, and used that technique in his song “The Witch Doctor.” It was a hit. And so, he created the singing chipmunks, Simon, Theodore, and AAAAAlvin. Their record-breaking Christmas song sold four and a half million records in seven weeks — a record not broken until the Beatles — and won two Grammy awards. The high pitch of the voices was the novelty, but what made the record a hit was the relationship between Bagdasarian, who chose the stage name Dave Seville after the Spanish town he had been stationed in during the second World War, and the chipmunks, scholarly Simon, cheery Theodore, and especially mischievous Alvin. It became a franchise, with more records, an animated television series, product endorsements, and “appearances” with real-life rock stars. What was left? A feature-length movie, inspired by the origin story. But any charm in the original idea has been diluted and all that remains is packaging. It is 9/10 product placement, 1/10 filler.

Beaufort

Posted on March 28, 2008 at 8:01 am

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Unrated
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Graphic and intense battle violence, characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	March 28, 2008

‘Beaufort,” the first Israeli movie nominated for the best foreign film Oscar in 24 years, is a meditation on the tragic ironies that soldiers face while ending an 18-year occupation of a medieval fortress in Lebanon. Despite their valor, the soldiers’ mission increasingly seems like an exercise in futility. They might as well be waiting for Godot.
Even though the Israelis are leaving, Hezbollah forces are becoming more aggressive and trying to make the evacuation look like a retreat. Meanwhile, far away, generals and politicians issue orders that seem clueless or callous or both, when they even remember Beaufort at all.
Built during the Crusades of the 12th century, Beaufort (“Beautiful Fort”) has been fought over off and on ever since. We are told in opening text that raising the Israeli flag over Beaufort in 1982 had enormous political and cultural symbolism. But 18 years later, as the movie begins, it is not at all clear what leaving the fortress will symbolize. Are the Israelis leaving in triumph, having accomplished their goals? Or is it surrender? The soldiers are trying simultaneously to protect themselves, fight the enemy and leave with dignity, with some sense that the time they spent and the lives they lost meant something and made a difference.

(more…)