The Screengrab : bull durham

Thurs... er, Friday Poll for April 24, 2009

Paul Clark — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Because of the shutting down of Buzzdash, the site we normally used to host our Thursday Polls, we were unable to post the results of the poll that ran in this space two weeks ago. But if we had, we could have told you that our most recent poll commemorated the start of the Major League Baseball season, and depending on who you root for, you’re either feeling the excitement of a potentially awesome year or a certain degree of disappointment in seeing your favorite team consistently losing once the games actually count (of course, the Indians usually start slow, right? RIGHT???). But no matter how your real-life baseball team is faring right now, you can always count on a good baseball movie. And based on last week’s poll, the top-ranked baseball movie of Screengrab readers was the ever-popular Bull Durham. Bringing in a strong 55% of the vote, Ron Shelton’s celebration of the minor league circuit was also named the greatest baseball movie of all time by Baseball America. However, our runner-up, John Sayles’ Eight Men Out (36%), only placed fourth on the Baseball America list, whereas their second-place selection, Field of Dreams, was #3 among our readers with 9%. As for the rest of their top five, neither Bang the Drum Slowly nor Pride of the Yankees garnered a single vote in our poll. Perhaps if we could’ve included such favorites as The Bad News Bears (#6 on Baseball America’s list), it might’ve been more of a ballgame.

Earlier this week, the Screengrab powers that be posted their lists of summer’s most promising hits and most disastrous-looking flops. Now, it’s your turn. First, which of the following will rule the summer?

Get This - Survey Results - GlowDay.com

And on the flip side of the coin, what will be the floppiest flop?

Get This - Survey Results - GlowDay.com

As always, the comments section is open. See you next week!

Morning Deal Report: Anne Hathaway in Wonderland

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

You probably already know that Tim Burton is directing Alice in Wonderland for Disney, and you most likely wouldn’t be terribly surprised to learn that Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are attached (as the Mad Hatter and Red Queen, respectively). Now Burton has found his White Queen, and it’s Rachel Getting Married star Anne Hathaway. “The White Queen needs Alice to slay a creature known as the Bandersnatch,” The Hollywood Reporter reminds us. Ah, but who is frumious enough to play the Bandersnatch? We’re putting our money on Christopher Walken.

It turns out that October brings not only baseball’s playoffs, but really bad ideas for baseball movies. (I’m still haunted by the image of Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore dancing on the field when the Red Sox won the 2004 World Series.) Now we learn that Kevin Costner and Ron Shelton are cooking up a sequel to Bull Durham. Our first thought is that Costner and Tim Robbins are a little old to pass for baseball players (even older than some of the current Yankees), but according to this UPI report (via the New York Post), a solution has been found. “Real-life couple and Durham co-stars Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, who played a pitcher and a baseball groupie respectively in the first installment, are also expected to return for the second film. This time around, they will play the married owners of a Major League Baseball team Costner's character manages, the Post said.”

Tennis, anyone? Frank DeFord’s novel Big Bill is coming to the big screen. It’s based on the true story of tennis legend Bill Tilden, who “dominated tennis in the 1920s, winning six straight U.S. Open singles titles and becoming the first American to win Wimbledon. He was also a contract bridge champ, musicologist, novelist, playwright and actor. On the other side of the ledger, Tilden was famously self-destructive, going to jail twice for sexual misbehavior with teenage boys and dying penniless,” says Variety. Sounds like the feel-good sports story of the year.

Related:
When Good Directors Go Bad: Planet of the Apes (Tim Burton)
Hathaway Hotness, Rourke Smackdowns Head Venice Comp Lineup

The Screengrab Top Ten: The Baseball Movie All-Stars, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Spring is here! Okay, not in my apartment, but I've read that it's here, some places, apparently, and with it, the return of what's left of baseball, the American game. Sports in general, and baseball in particular, have a spotty history in the movies. I think I've been reading that sports movies are box-office poison since before I'd ever seen a sports movie and maybe before I had any clear grasp of the concept of "box-office poison." (Then I saw a trailer for Catwoman.) But anything that inspires the kind of passion, excitement, despair, and apoplexy that baseball inspires in its hardcore adherents has got to inspire some great characters. Here's a bullpen's worth of them.

Ty Cobb (Tommy Lee Jones), COBB (1994)

In this poorly received and actually rather amazing movie, Jones gives a fine, fire-breathing performance as a man who, perhaps more than any other figure in the history of his sport, gives fans cause to weigh the value of his contribution to the game against the less positive effects of having had to share a planet with him. In his prime, Cobb competed as if he thought that the members of the losing team, and the less productive half of the winning team, would be rounded up after the game and beaten to death with sticks; seen in his comfortable, lonely old age, he's still a man who can only relate to the world as something to be fought, but crowds will no longer pay to see him fight on the baseball field and most people would rather not get close enough to fight him off the field, not even for ready money. Most of the movie is set in the early 1960s, when Cobb hired a sportswriter with the sportswriterly name of Al Stump (played here by Robert Wuhl) to ghostwrite his memoir, promised to let him tell the truth, and then bullied him into composing a sanitized version called My Life in Baseball. More than thirty years later, in conjunction with the movie, Stump published a more honest version of his encounter with the monster, Cobb: A Biography. Stump died a year to the month after the movie and book came out. One hopes that during that last year of his life, his dreams were a bit more peaceful.

Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon), BULL DURHAM (1988)

It's easy to love baseball if you're a hot prospect riding a greased rail to the show. It's another entirely when you're a woman living a going-nowhere life in a minor league town. Most female baseball fans in this position would be content to be groupies, frequenting the games and keeping the players company. But Annie Savoy, played by Susan Sarandon, is another case entirely- a true devotee of the game who has as much passion for baseball as any character (male or female) ever to grace the silver screen. As she states at the beginning of the film, ""I believe in the Church of Baseball." And she takes her faith seriously, singling out a promising player with a chance to make it to the big leagues, and providing him with spiritual guidance- and yes, sex- for an entire season. Her methods (reading poetry in bed, making her men wear women's underwear under their uniforms, and so on) may be unorthodox, but they seem to work. As she says, "there's never been a ballplayer slept with me who didn't have the best year of his career." In the season chronicled in Bull Durham, her man of choice is young pitcher "Nuke" Laloosh (Tim Robbins), an undisciplined kid with a killer fastball, and he gets the full Annie Savoy treatment. Yet despite her monogamous-for-a-season principles, she's thrown for a loop when she comes face to face with her male counterpart, journeyman catcher "Crash" Davis (Kevin Costner), a veteran who's been brought in to teach Nuke some lessons of his own. Crash's experiences have given him a hardened shell, but deep down he's just as much of an idealist about baseball as Annie is, and his presence in the film only underlines how pure Annie's love for the game truly is. At the end of the season, Crash is gone and Annie is still in Durham, but they will always worship at the same altar.

The Whammer (Joe Don Baker), THE NATURAL (1984)

This Robert Redford movie mostly makes a hash of the Bernard Malamud novel on which it's based, but it does have the niftiest film portrait ever of Babe Ruth, a monumental figure whose onscreen portrayers have included John Goodman, William Bendix, and, in the Lou Gehrig biopic The Pride of the Yankees, Babe Ruth. As in the book, he's called simply "the Whammer", as if it would be a blasphemous insult to refer to this celebrity demigod by the mere name his mama gave him. Joe Don Baker, who may have been the third least likely American actor to be cast as a great baseball player (after John Goodman and William Bendix), tears into the role as if it were what he'd been practicing for when he spent all that time swinging a homemade bat upside the heads of misguided lawbreakers in Walking Tall. Swaggering around the fairgrounds with a crowd of reporters at his heels and a babe in his line of sight, he captures the self-satisfied, bullying entitlement that many have attributed to the actual Babe, along with the magnetic, childlike delight in himself that made them love him anyway. Redford, in the title role, is supposed to be the new kid on the block, a country naif who's so green and self-assured that he doesn't know better than to regard himself as the old pro's equal. Getting a load of this idjit, the Whammer regards him with a sadistic, teasing dismay--as well he might, given that Baker and Redford were actually only born six months apart.

Charlie Snow (Richard Pryor), THE BINGO LONG TRAVELING ALL-STARS AND MOTOR KINGS (1976)

For the first half of the twentieth century, America's national pastime had a little problem: most of the nation wasn't allowed to play it. Not professionally, not in the big leagues, where the racial barriers overseen by the first Commissioner of Baseball, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, held so firm that they didn't budge even during World War II, when crowds turned out to watch the short-lived women's leagues play. (For more, see A League of Their Own, or rather don't, because it sucks.) Bingo Long, which stars Billy Dee Williams as a pitcher-manager of a barnstorming all-black team during the pre-segregation period, is perhaps the only Hollywood movie to take as its subject the baseball of the Negro Leagues, and the mixed feelings experienced by those stars who had the chance to delight audiences with their superb play and showmanship but sometimes felt degraded both by being excluded from white baseball and by the clowning that their fans came to expect. (It also captures the mixed feelings experienced by the Negro Leaguers when the color bar dropped and the all-black teams died off.) Pryor has one of his better movie parts in the supporting role of Charlie, a player who schemes to break into the big leagues by posing as a Cuban (named "Carlos Nevada") and then, after that doesn't pan out, as a Native American. For his later hustle, he adopts a Mohawk haircut, just like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, which was released a few months earlier. We would further explore the long-hidden connections between this engaging light period comedy and Scorsese's febrile urban masterpiece, except that there aren't any.

Ring Lardner (John Sayles), EIGHT MEN OUT (1988)

John Sayles has often allowed as how he takes acting roles in the movies he writes and directs because that makes for one less actor he has to pay, but in the right role, his cameos are sometimes the best thing in his movies. Here he found the role of his lifetime in the saturnine, long-faced sportswriter, casually wisecracking his way to a permanent place in American letters. Though it's the Chicago newspaperman Hugh Fullerton (played here by Studs Terkel) who actually breaks the story of the Black Sox scandal, it's his sidekick Lardner, glumly observing the chicanery and nodding in recognition of the crass absurdity of it all, who gives the proceedings a carefully judged moral weight that modern-day observers of the baseball scene will look for in their sports pages in vain. In his show-stopping big number, he entertains the crooked, self-hating ballplayers by performing, a capella and to tune of "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles", a little song of his own composition that begins, "I'm forever blowing ball games..." and ends with the (inaccurate) line, "And the gamblers treat me fair." All the while, the players can only sit there in self-incriminating silence, though there's no mistaking how much they wish they could kill him, or maybe kill themselves. Maybe a little from column A and a little from column B.

--Paul Clark, Phil Nugent

Click here for Part 2!

DVD Digest for March 18, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a memorable trio of new Criterions shares a release date with three of the most critically lambasted films of 2007. Who will prevail?

DVD of the Week: In the past decade, the suburban-dysfunction genre has had a lot to answer for, not least the seemingly endless string of glib American Beauty clones full of easy laughs and cheap stabs at profundity. But The Ice Storm shouldn't be held accountable for this- an uncommonly sensitive take on similar material, Ang Lee's adaptation of Rick Moody's novel ventures into uncomfortable corners of the bourgeois lifestyle without softening them with irony. Lee's film also boasted a cast that if anything is more impressive now than it was then, given the subsequent careers of then-newcomers Tobey Maguire and Katie Holmes, as well as former child stars Elijah Wood and Christina Ricci. Criterion's new two-disc set features commentary from Lee and writer/producer James Schamus, interviews with Moody and many of the film's stars, and much more, plus it promises to make Frederick Elmes' cold, wet cinematography look particularly gorgeous. It's the perfect opportunity to revisit a film that warrants a second look.

Also this week, Criterion brings us two films that are new to DVD, Alberto Lattuada's Mafioso and Hiroshi Teshigahara's documentary Antonio Gaudi. Not having seen either of these films I can't pass judgment on them, but I'm glad Criterion has seen fit to give them the best treatment possible, particularly Teshigahara's film, the latest effort on their part to celebrate his often-overlooked career.

Recent releases coming to DVD include: Joe Wright's Oscar-nominated Atonement (Universal), the kid-friendly princess comedy Enchanted (Disney, also Blu-Ray), the surprisingly good I Am Legend (Warner, also Blu-Ray), Fox's failed attempt at a Potter-like franchise The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising, and the aforementioned trio of critically-drubbed films, Love in the Time of Cholera (New Line), Revolver (Sony), and Southland Tales.

New TV on DVD includes Volume 1 of the 2007 reboot of The Bionic Woman (Universal) and Season 8 of Married... with Children (Sony). That's a strange juxtaposition of flashy action and soundstage-bound low comedy, but then when it comes to television, you can't have one without the other.

Also of note is MGM's trio of new DVD editions of baseball-themed movies to get viewers geared up for Opening Day: Bull Durham, Eight Men Out, and Pride of the Yankees. Indeed, these new editions appear to be geared more toward baseball fans than movie lovers, as they're chock full of baseball-themed extras, particularly the Curt Schilling-heavy Pride of the Yankees platter.

Finally, we bring you yet another edition of the ever popular Huddleston Corner. This week, we're offering shout-outs to two new HD-DVD releases, Atonement (Universal) and Justice League: The New Frontier (Warner). However, Mr. Huddleston would like to inform you that he doesn't know how many more condolences he has left in him, and he hopes that the bums companies who are still stuck on HD-DVD will get their acts together soon.

Morning Deal Report: This Film Is Not Approved By Barry Bonds

Peter Smith — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Frequent sports-movie screenwriter Ron Shelton (Bull Durham, White Men Can't Jump, Tin Cup) is adapting the Barry Bonds expose Game of Shadows for HBO. Possible title: Don't Get a Big Head.

New Line signs a deal with Samuel L. Jackson and what do they do with it? They put him in a movie called Man Who Rocks the Cradle, as a "kid whisperer."

The Wayans brothers are back! Aren't you happy? And they're. . . adapting The Munsters?

— Peter Smith