Take Me Out to Varsity Theatre

The wife and I have a bunch of cereal box coupons for free movie passes that we need to use up by the end of the month, so we hit up our favorite theatre last night and saw Sugar.

Sugar is the new picture by the writer/director duo of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden. There last film was Half Nelson with Ryan Gosling as a crackheaded school teacher. That movie was pretty damn good. It had a completely original story, great performances across the board, patient storytelling, fully realized characters and a screenplay that never went where you expected it to go. That is pretty much the exact same deal with Sugar. This flick is about a young baseball player from the Dominican Republic, named Miguel ‘Sugar’ Santos, who is in the Kansas City Royals farm system (although the nickname “Royals” is changed in the movie to avoid being sued or whatever). Miguel is a solid young pitcher with a good arm, but it isn’t until he masters a dominate knuckle curve that he gets called up to the U.S. for spring training. He soon makes the Royals ‘A’ affiliate in Iowa. As it turns out, it is really hard for a 19/20-year old Dominican to feel at home in Iowa.

There's Miguel aka Sugar during spring training.

This movie definitely knows its baseball and it captures all the nuances perfectly. Fleck and Boden clearly did their research. ***Semi-spoiler alert for the rest of this paragraph (although they can only really be counted as spoilers if you are as obsessed as me and Frank Costanza about going into a movie fresh*** However, this film is not really about baseball, it’s about the character of Sugar and others like him, who are raised in (relatively) poor Latin American countries and see baseball as a way to make mad money playing a game they love so they can send back tons of cash to all their loved ones, who will then be able to stop working their brutal jobs in shitty factories and crummy resorts or whatever. But the thing is, 90% of pro ball players never even get to the show. Baseball has the deepest farm system in all of pro sports by a mile. For example, the Jays have 4 minor league teams, plus rookie ball and all the other teams they have in foreign countries like the DR. You have to make it up all those leagues before getting a whiff at the big time. And what about all those Latino kids who come over when they are 18-20 and never make it? What the hell happens with all of them? Sugar explores that, and it is one of those fictional films that contains more truth than most supposed documentaries. In many ways, the film is really about the immigrant experience in general -- but whatever, I've seen a thousand movies about immigrants. What makes this one especially sick, is that it has baseball.

What also makes this film consistently interesting is that every time you think you got a handle on where the film is going, it takes a turn you didn’t expect. And I don’t mean a HUGE turn like John McClane is a ghost or the T-Rex saves the day, where you are like “OH MAN! I DID NOT SEE THAT COMING!” I mean a gentle, natural turn, where you are like “Man, I don’t know where this story is going and I like it.” It successfully avoids every sports movie cliché, and I think the writers sort of had fun with setting up moments that seemed destined for cliché and then undercut the payoff in some way or just remove it altogether.

The movie is a tad slow, which may bug some dudes. Personally, I usually like a movie with a slower pace. It gives you room to think about the motives of the characters, appreciate the compositions and contemplate the themes and ideas of the film. A movie has to be good though to pull off slow pacing. When a movie is slow AND a piece of garbage, it’s from France.

All and all, I give Sugar an 8 out of 10, so go check it out if it sounds like your bag.

Oh yeah, and before the movie they showed the trailer for Tyson, which, in case you didn’t know, is Iron Mike’s autobiographical documentary by cult filmmaker James Toback. It looks soooo sick.

I'll be seeing this for sure.