With so much pop culture in the world, it’s hard to know what’s best. Fortunately, Media Magpies has you covered, as one of our writers will occasionally share what they have determined to be The All-Time Top Five.
It’s baseball season! And while other sports have been the subject of fine films, something about baseball has captured the attention of moviemakers for decades. The metaphorical richness of the game? The wealth of real-life history to draw from? The relative lack of athletic ability for participants making it easy for a variety of actors to play guys who spend half of each game sitting down? Whatever the reason, there are a lot of baseball movies out there — when you are looking for one to watch during a rain delay, just refer to this lineup of The All-Time Top Five Baseball Movies (but feel free to suggest your own in the comments):
The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings — Billy Dee Williams’ Legally-Not Satchel Paige forms a barnstorming team to get out from under an exploitative Negro League owner, and shenanigans ensue. Filmed in the 1970s, with the raunch of that decade’s comedies, but set in the 1930s, Bingo Long is fairly straightforward about the racism that the players face from white society and the exploitation that they face from the League itself; the skilled but clowning baseball they play is a way of navigating this unsafe ground. The best baseball movie with James Earl Jones, playing Legally-Not Josh Gibson, Bingo Long envisions what integration will bring, while recognizing the unfairness for those who never got that chance, and how a subculture within a sport will fade.
Night Game — Detective Roy Scheider is on the hunt for a hook-handed wacko who slices sex workers after a specific pitcher wins games, but it is unclear whether these murders are reflected in the pitcher’s stat line. What is clear is that the pitcher plays for the extremely-real Houston Astros, who along with Major League Baseball itself apparently had zero issues with their branding (not to mention the Astrodome) being used in this way in 1989. While most actual players are not present, radio broadcasts provide opportunities to Remember the Dudes of Pirates-era Barry Bonds and Bobby Bonilla, as well as Astros hero Ken Caminiti. The killer, it turns out, lost his pitching hand and his mind after being sent down to the minors because of the success of his hurling nemesis. That Night Game realizes that baseball is obsessive weirdos engaged in ritualized and stylized boredom punctuated by brief moments of activity – the same as a slasher flick – is more insightful than any sabermetrics.
Fastball — Science gets its say in this documentary about the titular pitch, where physicists clearly demonstrate that a fastball, despite all appearances, cannot rise. Then Henry Aaron provides the counterpoint of “yes, it does,” and well, who are you going to believe? Science gets a stronger showing with a fun attempt to measure and compare fastballs across generations using old footage and record-keeping to estimate the heaters of Walter Johnson and Bob Feller vs. Nolan Ryan, but it’s the clips of hitters and pitcher talking that make this such an entertaining watch (unfortunately, alleged wife-beater Aroldis Chapman is included in the clips as the current fastest pitcher on record, and Kevin Costner’s narration throughout is sappy drivel). The highlight is Bob Gibson, one of the best ever to pitch, clearly and with zero bullshit describing his techniques in throwing and intimidation. When his teammate goofs about the lack of run support Gibson got because the players knew that he could shut the other team down, the same look that terrified batters of the 1960s comes into Gibson’s eyes – this is not a game or a gag; this is a man being the best at his work, and fuck you for thinking it is a joke.
Rhubarb — A cat becomes the owner of the Legally-Not Brooklyn Dodgers, and shenanigans ensue. Because baseball can also be pretty silly, and beyond the wackiness of Rhubarb himself being the team’s owner (the subject of numerous courtroom scenes, anticipating the increasing litigious bent of the sport’s ruling class), there is a lot of fun to be had with the superstitious players first rejecting Rhubarb, and then embracing him when the wins start piling up. And wins do make their own luck, as the fans flock to support the team and the Legally-Not Dodgers make it to the World Series, leading to a surprisingly blasé depiction of mob-run gambling as a fact of life (clearly not involving players and just something people do at the grocery store, as opposed to being enticed via their phones) and, yes, catnapping schemes. It’s all part of the game, and baseball can contain multitudes.
Eephus — The outlook isn’t brilliant for the two teams — one of which is not even at the full complement of nine at the start of the game — of guys gathering on a small field in Central Massachusetts sometime in the 1990s. The diamond will be plowed under and become a middle school after this final game between has-beens, might-have-beens, never-wases, and even a few could-bes, guys who have been playing against each other for years, and nine innings from now will have nowhere to go. This premise could be inspirational and instead it is miraculous, because it is baseball. Occasionally it is exquisitely boring, as co-writer/director Carson Lund hangs out in the dugout with the guys, not even paying attention to what’s happening on the field. One of the few folks in the stands is keeping score, holding it down for all of us sinners who’d rather watch the furious left-fielder call some hesher-hecklers “weasel dicks.” And yet, there is action, as Lund perfectly replicates that feeling of looking up at the game, and finding out, hey, the bases are loaded; when did that happen? There are moments of Lynchian weirdness and offhand awe – the players forgo an umpire and deny the encroaching darkness to keep the game going, bringing their cars on the field to use the headlights to illuminate the diamond and create a spotlighted space of possibility: Close Encounters Of The Third Base. But the final at-bat will always come, and it’s even sadder than mighty Casey striking out. Baseball is designed to break your heart, Bart Giamatti said. At least, unlike watching from the stands, you can see a movie again.
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I’ve only seen Night Game, but I’m sold on all of these now. (Eephus and Bingo Long were at least on the list already.) And if vomas hasn’t seen Rhubarb, that needs to happen so we can all get the cat report.
Night Game has a serial killer yet the most menacing thing on this list is an angry Bob Gibson! And I believe vomas has seen Rhubarb, if not we’ll give him Covid again.
I think this article gave me COVID! I’ve only actually seen Bingo Long out of this lot, Baseball movies have surprising strength in depth.
Bingo Long is not legally available for streaming, which doesn’t surprise me, sadly.
Amazing how there are so many good baseball movies. And very few good movies about all the other sports combined. And how every TV show directly about baseball died after one season or less.
TV-wise, I really liked Pitch, and its cancellation was such a downer.
Actual baseball is the TV show about baseball! How do you compete with the real thing, 162 episodes every year?
I haven’t looked, but Bingo Long seems like a very likely archive.org find.
In the UK, Bingo Long is cheerfully available for streaming everywhere and also has a well-appointed, remastered blu-ray. Which country loves baseball more NOW, America?
Baseball, democracy… we’re getting owned in all our best categories. I suppose you’ve got apple pie figured out, too.
I am 100 percent sure this only happened because UK distributors assumed “Bingo Long” was some kind of Wodehousian goofus and hucked cash at it accordingly.
What did we watch?
M*A*S*H, Season One, Episode Sixteen, “The Ringbanger”
Leslie Neilsen! This is an all-time comic performance roughly nine years before Police Squad and even moreso the Naked Gun movies transformed his image. I love that this is halfway between the heavies he normally played at this point and the comic performances later; he’s essentially a comic foil and patsy for our heroes to fuck with because he’s a violent dumbass getting people killed. And it’s legitimately a great performance! A stunning example of how a skilled performer can enhance jokes with their delivery; he takes little elements from the script and embodies the vaguely sociopathic colonel who views his brutality as a job to do with things like how he rarely really looks at people, taking in the vague idea not out of anxiety but because he doesn’t care (or perhaps doesn’t know what to look for), making it plausible he’d fall for the guys’s shenanigans.
Interestingly, Neilsen is also a threat to these guy’s masculinity; the episode title comes from his habit of rapping his ring on a table, which Hawkeye interprets as jock behaviour to assert his dominance. I understand that Alan Alda became a symbol for masculinity – specifically the Sensitive New Age Guy who recognised his privilege and tried to be a good person, which shows how, like a washing machine fetishist, these things come in cycles. At its heart, such things also tend to be rooted in ‘traditional’ masculinity; Hawkeye is a tough dude who gets laid a lot and is sensitive to criticism even if he is a cheerful physical coward who is genuinely curious about women.
One of my favourite running gags on this show is Frank responding to an innocuous question as if it were an insult (“Morning, Frank.” / “Wouldn’t you like to know?”). There’s a great moment where Hawkeye struggles to improv and taps out to Trap. McClean Stevenson watch: he has a lot of fun with drunk Henry (“Don’t you think you should be out on the range?” / “Me too!”), and he gets my biggest laugh over his fear of blood (“I could paint a barn with someone else’s blood! I just can’t stand to see my own.”).
I wish I had another upvote to give just for that washing machine fetishist joke.
I think my favorite example of that particular Frank running gag is “Hi, Frank.”/”That’s easy for you to say!”
Severance, “The Grim Barbarity of Optics and Design” and “Hide and Seek”
Strongest moment in this set of episodes is hands down Dylan realizing he has a son in the outside world: Dylan’s always wanted to theorize about (and romanticize) his outie’s life, painting it as a fantasy of cool, and he’s utterly unprepared for and bowled over by something this ordinary but real and huge.
Otherwise, it’s a collection of nice touches and bits I like: Burt and Irving’s ongoing romance (love Burt drawing on the Kier painting for inspiration and theological permission), outie Mark unknowingly drawing off innie Mark’s boosted confidence, the weird corporate lore about MDR employees having pouches with their larval replacements inside, Mark and the protest song. The big pieces of the mystery–Devon trying to work out why the woman she met at the birthing center doesn’t remember her, Cobel’s past–don’t mean as much to me. The science fictional elements of the show are stronger for me than the paranoid mystery elements, so I’m usually more interested in the innie sections and their very specific worldbuilding than I am in the Pepe Silvia board outie sections.
Babylon 5 — intolerance on the station! One sneering bigot in particular hilariously predicts David Cross’ “Racist In The Year 3000,” you know this guy’s daddy told him to never trust a man what’s made of gas. The difficulties and necessities of tolerance is clearly a huge theme (if not The theme) of the show, and the trouble with sci-fi doing this is species do not map onto “races” — not just in an obviously bad one-to-one “Negrons” bit but because one is real and one is not, and the possibilities of difference in the real one are a lot more interesting to consider in this arena that is built to have difference by default, thinking of James Tiptee Jr.’s fiction here. The same episode has one of the alien groups that is heavily hierarchical in structure come around to the idea of marriage for love instead of position, it is sweet and all but that is defaulting to a human idea as the best idea and a human-forward show will almost always do this. On the other hand, human-forward reality is full of intolerant hate of what it is literally labeling “alien” right now, so Stracynzki’s earnest vision has its pleasures, and complications appear to be developing in any case — larger conspiracies on Earth and in the most recent episode a revelation of alien manipulation that finally gives them initiative and power to match the humans.
There’s an episode later in the first season where I think the show finds a sweet spot for metaphor vs the reality of its world, where aliens clearly stand in for Jehovah’s Witnesses, but the alienness both makes it generic enough to map onto any seemingly-self-harming belief system and specific enough to create real tension within the story with painful but understandable consequences.
Hmmm interesting, I will be on the lookout for that one. A recent episode had all the aliens celebrating their religions as part of a station-wide tolerance initiative and it ended with the captain introducing the ambassadors to representatives of every one of Earth’s religions — again, a sweet moment (although funny to see everyone lined up in a row, it’d be funny to look at the intern figuring out who couldn’t be next to who) that immediately undercuts everything beforehand. All these alien cultures are monoreligious? And if that is the case, why not dig into that vs Earth schisms? “Because TV show,” yes I know, but there are opportunities here. And “based on Jehovah’s Witnesses” is suspect to me, as opposed to “based on principles that can be mapped to JWs if you want to.”
The Alien Nation TV show is the only time I have encountered TV sci-fi writers acknowledging non-humans should be as polyglot in their faiths as humans. Though JMS still gets credit even having human religion in the future. I like that a lot more than the unlikely atheism of Trek.
Kojak, “The Forgotten Room – A Greek immigrant, an acquaintance of Kojak, is a suspect in a murder. Kojak is at first pretty sure it couldn’t be him, but slowly the truth emerges. This is of course about the challenges immigrants face in America, but also about an unlikely romance between the suspect his boss, the slightly older widow who runs a bakery. As ever, the noir elements are never far away. Guests include Oscar Homolka (Ball of Fire, Funeral in Berlin), Phillip R. Allen (the ill fated captain of the USS Grissom in Star Trek III), and an almost unrecognizeable Alan Napier, years after he was Alfred on Batman ’66.
Frasier, “The Last Time I Saw Maris” – The beginning of the end of the most dysfunctional of marriages. Maris goes to NYC for a shopping spree but doesn’t tell Niles, and when he calls her out, she throws him out. The center of this is of course Niles confronting years of pent up anger, but along the edges are Frasier, giving advice that might be sound or might be his own frustrations with Lilith, and Martin, urging Frasier to stay out of it but ultimately agreeing that Niles needs to stand up for himself. Some very funny bits but also a very bittersweet episode.
Tried to watch Farewell, Friend, a French heist film with Alain Delon and Charles Bronson, but the third time I fell asleep, I quit. Not just dull, but also incoherent, tawdry, and poorly dubbed. I doubt I am going to try it again.
Lost Highway – I rewatched a load of Lynch when Blank Check were going through his filmography but didn’t get around to revisiting this one, so I headed out to see a screening of it yesterday. I first saw it in 2016 and thought it was Pretty Great, on the big screen I’m happy to push it up a level because I had such a great time. The Bill Pullman half is so strange, dark and slow with some iconic moments that I remembered but also a ton of stuff that I didn’t – including the hilarious scene of him absolutely SHREDDING on sax, then later having a flashback to the sax solo.
I love the way lines of dialogue keep circling back in after the big shift in the middle, and Robert Loggia is an absolute blast in the second half – that tailgating scene is hilarious (and disturbing). Patricia Arquette does fantastic work throughout, and I’m fine with Balthazar Getty who I think gets some stick for this movie but I feel like his blank naivety serves the role well. Also, killer soundtrack, and obviously Robert Blake is the creepiest fucker on the planet. Bumping it up into my Lynch top tier!
Only watched Lost Highway for the first time a month or so ago and liked it quite a bit, I think going back to it with a stronger handle on its mixed vibes and portrayals will make it even better. Getty does do a good job as a simp but Pullman is great, what a tweak on his wholesome aura that got him elected president just a year prior.
Matlock S1 E2 – Matty gets her first crack at exonerating a killer by getting the real killer to confess on the stand, an original Matlock specialty. We’ve basically got two shows in one going on here, the Crime of the Week and the overall secret plot. This is great because if one’s stumbling the other can pick up the slack. Unfortunately we’ve got some big problems with both sides this week. The details given in the weekly case are woefully selective. The biggest thing is there’s not really a murder per se, maybe a wrongful death, and the person who really needs to be on the stand is the forensic investigator who should have known (or at least suspected) that was the case from the outset. Meanwhile, the audience isn’t told so much as a cause of death. Even without that knowledge, the details we’re given are extremely circumstantial, an incredibly flimsy case for the prosecution even by the standards of TV court, with one of the few details involving a box of condoms at the scene. It’s not an icky SVU situation, fortunately, though it would have been nice for someone to point that out at the jump since it seems pretty germane to the case (that forensic analysis again), but the procurement of the box is important to the Encyclopedia Brown-ish twist that solves the case so it’s pointed out and highlighted.
In the longer game, Matty’s plan to get some passwords from her employers involves two giant leaps in logic – that her boss will A) feel sympathy and reach out in a very specific way and B) take out her phone in an exact place and time – which is too many when you could just as easily get the same info in twelve hours with a pair of binoculars. I know what I signed up for here, but watch yourself counselor.
So you’re going to allow it, but Matlock better be going somewhere with this?
Has anyone in human history ever gotten a witness to break down on the stand and confess? (Not that It makes for bad entertainment any more than the fantasy of a private eye solving a murder, which has also never happened.) I wonder if The standard “plan B” on The Practice of finding someone else to blame among the witnesses was intentionally turning the witness confession on its ear.
A Fish Called Wanda – Everything we always talk about is great, but there’s also a real sweetness to this movie that other comedies can’t replicate, like Curtis’ genuine hurt and surprise when Wanda falls for Archie. (Also have to acknowledge that Cleese, otherwise a dick, is great here, giving the standard trope of an older guy carrying on an affair with a younger woman a sense that Archie’s coming to life again or maybe for the first time ever. He even carries himself differently in the last scenes.) Oft quoted by me: “You don’t have the guts! …Okay, you have the guts!” and “DISAPPOINTED!”
The Coversation — Gene Hackman does audio surveillance for private clients and most of the time does a good job ignoring the moral dimension of his work.
One very interesting facet of watching this 50 years later is the technical process Hackman and John Cazale engage in to collect and clean up the audio. At the time the big bulky reel to reel tape recorders, the funky transitorized components, and the clunk of tape deck buttons was all state of the art, and now it’s even cooler as as the film shows us the high level of sophistication and skill needed to do sound editing on these machines compared to just dumping it all into Audacity.
I liked, didn’t love, the move as a whole, but it has some great performances, including Hackman as the guy who is in command of his profession but so halting and indecisive in interpersonal interaction. But the best performance is Elizabeth Macrae as a fading beauty who just wants to have a good time at the sound engineering convention afterparty.
American Dad!, “What Great Advancements!”
Hahaha, apparently the season finale is a throwback silent film. Simple farm boy Stan spends his days doing chores but dreams of being an inventor, so one day he takes his donkey to the big city to try to sell his inventions and make a fortune. I won’t tell you what happens there, but this ended up being a fun little gimmick with some surprises and some good comedy. And I’m only 95% certain this is the season finale, since I’m basing that entirely on it being episode 22.
Good Cop / Bad Cop, “Explosions”
The power station and cell tower in town go out in fairly quick succession, and the cops figure something is up… but then they have to figure out what exactly that is and why someone would do this. (Meanwhile, we get to watch a pretty fun criminal couple get to the actual work.) This also comes in the middle of some Hickman family drama, what with what we learned from Lou about their mother leading to further revelations and some infighting all around. Good episode; the show’s been showing some more depth as it goes on, as much because of the sharp writing and performances of the main trio and their relationships. But it’s still fun in their banter (especially Henry and Lou), the comic relief of the other cops, and the touch of small-town quirk to the cases.
What We Do in the Shadows (TV show), alternate endings
Never did get around to the other two endings after finishing the show. Well, now I have.
Year of the Month update!
This April, we’ll be looking at 1999, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
TBD: James Williams: 10 Things I Hate About You
Apr. 7th: J. “Rodders” Rodriguez: The Scooby Doo Project
Apr. 8th: Bridgett Taylor: …One More Time
Apr. 18th: Cameron Ward: The Mummy
Apr. 28th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Sixth Sense
And here’s how we’re wrapping up Silent Era Month!
Mar. 30th: Lauren James: The Well of Loneliness
Mar. 31st: John Anderson: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
Fantastic off-kilter list, a great kick-off to the Magpies chronicling the best in everything. Weirdly, Rhubarb is the only one of these I’ve seen so far (only one lonely art theater is showing Eephus, hoping to make it out to it sometime before it disappears, very disappointed in my AMCs which usually throw a bone to a movie like this with at least one screen in the city). I have one proposed addition, the Netflix doc Battered Bastards of Baseball which chronicles the ragtag independent baseball team owned by Bing Russell, father of Kurt, who played for the team and appears in the documentary. Although its most mind-blowing revelation comes near the end when we learn
spoiler below
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Big League Chew was invented in the kitchen of former player and TAR director Todd Field
Thanks! And surprising Field had time to invent Big League Chew in between all the orgy piano gigs.
Must immediately find a way to watch Rhubarb. It’s even a perfect cat name!
Rhubarb is named because he’s got fighting spirit! It is a perfect name and they cast the perfect cat. It’s on paid youtube, in the U.S. at least.