Thursday Minute
No. 70 | April 8, 2010

Play Ball

Our theme this week
Baseball movies

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Documentaries:  The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (1998)
Tuesday         —   Biopics:  The Pride of the Yankees (1942)
Wednesday    —   Kids at Play:  The Bad News Bears (1976)

Today’s feature
Baseball Comedies

Best in class
Bull Durham (1988)

Honorable mention
A League of Their Own (1992)— An enjoyable tale of women’s professional baseball during the war years, the film upsets some standard gender stereotypes and features performances from Geena Davis, Rosie O’Donnell, and Madonna, as players, and Tom Hanks as their alcoholic manager, back in the days when he was having fun.  Worth watching for the ”There’s no crying in baseball!” scene alone.
Damn Yankees! (1958) — Not just a comedy but a musical comedy!  The film adaptation of the stage adaptation of the Faust legend, starring Gwen Verdon, as Lola, doing numbers like these.

For the real fan
Major League (1989)— Another film where I part company with many fans.  I found this a lot less hilarious than advertised, though Bob Uecker is entertaining, as always.

Bull Durham

How good a movie is Bull Durham?  It’s debatable.  It may be the top sports movie of all-time, or just a chick flick that doesn’t deserve to be ranked with a movie like The Natural, for example.  It depends on what page at Page 2 you’re reading.

My take:  neither of the above.

Bull Durham is a good movie…for a baseball movie.  It gets a lot of things right that other baseball movies do not.  Director Ron Shelton played in the minor leagues and he drew from his experience to lend the film the veneer of authenticity.  That’s not to say it’s anything like a documentary.  The dialog is highly stylized and the characters are bigger and broader than in real life.  But it feels like a movie made by people who know something about the game.

The film stars Kevin Costner and Tim Robbins as two minor leaguers, one on the way up, one on the way out, both of them involved with the same woman, a local played by Susan Sarandon who is looking for a season-long fling.  “Fling” may not be the right word; it’s spiritual for her:  ”I believe in the Church of Baseball.”  Unusual for a romantic comedy, Bull Durham is set in a guy’s world, but unlike many other sports films, and to its credit, its men are capable of fleshed-out relationships with the opposite sex.

The film strikes a good balance with how it treats the game of baseball—seriously (Costner’s Crash Davis has a love for the sport that’s admirable), but not too seriously (the antics of Nuke LaLoosh, played by Robbins, get the appropriate send-up).

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Bull Durham
Kevin Costner, Tim Robbins

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Bull Durham
Kevin Costner, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon

“I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.” 
An odd thing to say…but understandable since he hadn’t yet seen JFK.

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Quote of Note
Will:  You missed Pudge Fisk’s home run?
Sean:  Oh, yeah.
Will:  To have a fuckin’ drink with some lady you never met?
Sean:  Yeah, but you shoulda seen her.  She was a stunner.
—Will Hunting (Matt Damon), Sean Maguire (Robin Williams), Good Will Hunting (1997)

…58…59…60.