New This Week: • The Good Shepherd >> • Volver • Jump In! • Entourage Season 3 Part 1 • The Natural Special Edition
Spotlight on The Good Shepherd: The Good Shepherd is an incredibly interesting movie in a theoretical sense. The movie is well made, well produced, well cast, well acted and absolutely abysmal to watch. I mean it was genuinely painful for me to watch.
The Good Shepherd is the life story of Edward B. Wilson (Matt Damon), a politically savvy spy who played a very important role in the founding and emerging power of the Central Intelligence Agency.
After 45 minutes of director Robert DeNiro’s latest effort, I began to notice how painful my seat was, how little knee room I had in the theater and began pondering whether I was found the experience of watching The Good Shepherd merely unpleasant or epically bad, complete with the same sense of pain and frustration that I had sitting through long double blocks of European history classes in college. I took a deep breath, exhaled and wondered if something interesting was ever going to happen. For the record, one interesting thing does happen, but DeNiro and his screenwriter, Eric Roth, run away from this as fast as they humanly can, lest it take the viewer out of the otherwise frightfully long-winded movie.
A Minor Thing about Barry Levinson’s The Natural For about five years in the ‘80s, before Bull Durham and Field of Dreams were released, director Barry Levinson’s The Natural was viewed as one of the most quintessential baseball movies in Hollywood history. And yet, The Natural is so peppered with baseball inaccuracies, it makes it hard for me to enjoy the film on its own merits. It’d be one thing if these mistakes were ancillary to the movie’s plot–in the original Naked Gun, four runners can be seen crossing second base after a grand slam, but since nothing remotely important hinged on that event, I can ignore the miscue–but one of the major thematic arcs of Levinson’s film is based on something that could never happen in the game of baseball.
Is it really too much to ask that if you’re making a sports movie (of any kind) that you at least kind of respect the rules of the game? Just as Hollywood shouldn’t have a movie about the NBA decided by a four point shot at the buzzer, Levinson shouldn’t have made the following mistake:
Playing a game against the Chicago Cubs in Wrigley Field, the NY Knights and their superstar Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) are down a couple of runs and batting in the bottom of the ninth. Hobbs swings weakly at a couple of pitches and steps out of the batter’s box. He looks up into the stands and sees a 30-something blonde woman in a white hat standing. The sunlight highlights the woman’s hat and something about this image inspires Hobbs. He nails the next pitch out of the park and the Knights win the game. Suddenly, everyone wants to know, who is this mystery woman who helped Hobbs win the game and come out of his slump?
One problem though. If the Knights were the visiting team, which they definitely would be if they were playing the Cubs in Wrigley, they would never be batting in the bottom of the ninth. Hobbs’ walk-off homerun could never occur. Ever. A visiting team just can’t hit a walk-off homer.
An Even More Minor Thing: Jack Marucci, president of the Marucci Bat Company, estimates that most current major leaguers go through six or seven dozen bats in a given season; that’s 72-84 bats a year, or roughly one every two games… given that there are 162 in a baseball season. Assuming that bat technology has gotten substantially better over the course of the last 68 years, that means that bats would probably break even more frequently that they did in 1939, when The Natural was set. And yet, Hobbs manages to make it through more than 20 years of on-again, off-again baseball with his one special bat, using it to not only play games but also to take batting practice. There’s no doubt in my mind that this is the true reason that the bat is called "Wonderboy".
Quotes of the Week
"They're cops. They're supposed to have night sticks. You're not supposed to be in the street swinging a chair."
-Ryan Phillippe attempts to talk logically to a very drunk Adam Beach in Flags of our Fathers
"I'm Al Gore. I used to be the next president of the United States."
-Al Gore is able to joke about the 2000 election results in An Inconvenient Truth
"I'm still burning up. Do you have any ice cubes I can rub on my nipples?"
-James Duval needs to work on his pick up lines in May
Five Things I Learned while Researching This Column: 1) The Good Shepherd has six Oscar winning actors who appear in it in various roles. 2) Universal's PR department did not champion this fact at all. 3) Angelina Jolie is my own age, 31. It only feels like she's much younger. 4) That neither the Nazis or the Japanese had anything to do with the removal of the L-A-N-D from the famed Hollywood sign. 5) Botanists consider anything with seeds that grows on a plant or a tree a fruit... including cucumbers, squash, eggplants and tomatoes.
Playing a game against the Chicago Cubs in Wrigley Field, the NY Knights and their superstar Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) are down a couple of runs and batting in the bottom of the ninth. Hobbs swings weakly at a couple of pitches and steps out of the batter’s box. He looks up into the stands and sees a 30-something blonde woman in a white hat standing. The sunlight highlights the woman’s hat and something about this image inspires Hobbs. He nails the next pitch out of the park and the Knights win the game. Suddenly, everyone wants to know, who is this mystery woman who helped Hobbs win the game and come out of his slump?