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Lisa Simpson researching Golf.

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Sugar

Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's Sugar is great viewing for the early part of the baseball season. Their titular hero works his way from a Dominican Republic baseball camp (which looks startlingly like a minimum security prison complete with armed guards at the gate) owned by the fictional Kansas City Capitals, into the American Minor League system and stalling in Bridgeport, Iowa where most of the film takes place.

The AA affiliate Bridgeport Swing provide housing for their foreign ballplayers in the homes of fans who provide a room and food while attempting to indoctrinate their wards into Midwestern American life.

The film's realistic look at the tribulations of a Dominican baseball player provides ample ammunition for social critique and the camera never strays far from our likable hero. This is a baseball film in the most pure sense as there are no easy victories and the measure of success can not be viewed in the short term but instead when looking at the end result. To paraphrase Ken Burns' documentary Baseball the greatest players are ones who are only successful thirty percent of the time.

Boden and Fleck's followup to Half Nelson, which explored the relationship between a crack addicted teacher and one of his students,continues with that films preoccupation of uncovering the more complicated facts of American life.

IMDB pages:

Sugar
Half Nelson
Baseball

The Frodo Franchise

My review of Kristin Thompson's The Frodo Franchise is now up on the Film INT website.

Read it here.

The Mid-Majority

A post of admittedly non film related news. Kyle Whelliston's the Mid-Majority is back up and running for the new college basketball season. Whelliston is a great sports writer, in fact a great writer period, and his insights are very useful for anyone who attended and followed sports at one of the schools that make up the 23 lower division conferences in college basketball. Throughout the year he'll post game reports, conference breakdowns, interviews, and the occasional travel essay.

Welcome back Kyle.

Man Push Cart (Rahmin Bahrani, 2005)

I recently watched this film based on it being fervently recommended by Jim Emerson who runs the blog Scanners and is the editor for rogerebert.com.

He has written about it numerous times on his website after seeing it at the Toronto Film Festival a few years ago. Man Push Cart serves as an interesting counterpoint to most American films and invokes a spirit of "realism" in its portrayal of a struggling Middle Eastern immigrant trying to operate his own business in America.

Read more here, and here.

The Daily Show on "Real America" According to Sarah Palin

Backstory:

David Sedaris on Undecided Voters

In the latest issue of the New Yorker David Sedaris analyzes the history and personalities of undecided voters.

The money quote:

"I look at these people and can’t quite believe that [undecided voters] exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?"

New Scanners Widget

See side panel, and enjoy.