Okay, okay, I know it's been forever, but since we had to watch a sports movie for my graduate Sport and Sociology class I had the perfect excuse to blog again.
The Sandlot basically confirmed that I don't really care for movies about kids, or with kids, or featuring kids in any way except basically having them pass by as extras in a crowd scene (I'm the one who spent the entirety of the Harry Potter series mainly concerned with the adults. "Okay so they're all camping for 200 pages BUT WHAT IS MCGONAGALL DOING RIGHT NOW???"). That being said, The Sandlot was cute and everyone I watched it with really enjoyed it, so it may just be my cold black heart keeping me from really appreciating it.
The movie tells the story of Scott Smalls, a 5th grader who moves to a new town and ends up joining up with a gang of kids who play baseball on a sandlot (SPOILER ALERT). As a kid who starts out unable to catch a ball without giving himself a black eye, Smalls learns about the game as the Sandlot gang faces a variety of white-bread challenges, like the team of rich snobby kids (this plot point lasted ten minutes?), getting sick from chewing tobacco, getting kicked out of the pool after kind of sexually harrassing the hot life guard, and finally having to retrieve the signed Babe Ruth baseball Smalls stole from his stepfather and hit into a yard guarded by a terrifying animatronic dog. This last point takes up most of the movie, emphasizing all the misadventures and wacky hijinks. The plot didn't really go anywhere in this movie, and some points that could have actually made it more of a story were just kind of picked up and dropped, but I guess for a movie that's supposed to appeal to kids it had just enough stereotypical story elements to keep things moving along.
Did this movie introduce the phrase "You're killing me, Smalls" into the American lexicon? Because I say that all the time and had no idea it came from a kid's movie about baseball. Also, James Earl Jones cameo! I guess '93 was a slow year for him. (Okay here's an actual baseball plot point though. His character is a former player who says he was BFF's with Babe Ruth, and there's photos of he and Ruth standing together in baseball uniforms, but Ruth retired in 1935, 11 years before integration, so they couldn't have played together. I guess maybe Ruth was just implied to be friends with a dude in the Negro Leagues? But there's another white dude in uniform on the other side of him in this picture, filmmakers come on they couldn't have played together please understand baseball history. Also, he was wearing a cap with the Pittsburgh Pirates "P" on it, but the caps of the Negro League team in Pittsburgh had a "C" on them because the team name was the Crawfords. Yes, I just did twenty minutes of research on the Negro Leagues to prove the filmmakers screwed up here). Denis Leary is also in this movie and since the only other thing I've seen him in is Ice Age I feel pretty confident in assuming he only does children's movies.
Anyway, since I had to analyze this for a sociology class, I could talk about how children should develop their own sport experiences instead of playing structured games overly controlled by adults, the class distinctions and specific challenges faced by working-class athletes, the idea of meritocracy and social mobility and how it plays into the myth of the American Dream, athletes as religious figures, the transition post-career, and woman-demeaning language, but instead I'd rather talk about how attractive the second main character (Benny Rodriguez) is. Is that creepy? He's actually ten years older than me in real life so let's go with that instead of focusing on the fact that I spent most of the movie raising my eyebrows suggestively at a 15 year old. This problem could have been solved by just making the movie about Benny's professional career as an adult and his continued friendship with Smalls, who becomes the broadcaster for the Dodgers, but I guess that just brings this whole review around again to the fact that I don't like movies about kids. Anyway, cute film I guess, but I would never have watched this if not for class, and I probably won't ever think about it again.
Final Score: Single
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