The Sandlot

The Sandlot

Back in college my roommates and I performed the most exacting sort of scientific experiment to determine the greatest guys' movie of all time.  We sat down in a closed room with several young men and women and watched a selection of several films.  Among them, Top Gun, Unforgiven, Tombstone, and the Sandlot.

Reactions were varied, of course, but when we compiled our data we learned one thing:  Men love this movie, women think it's cute.  Men think this movie represents everything that was best about childhood, friendship, overcoming adversity, the triumph of imagination, and baseball.  Women think it's about a bunch of boys playing baseball.

Conclusion?  The Sandlot is the greatest guys' movie of all time.

And it's finally on DVD.

My sister, who understands me, even if she doesn't always get me, sent me a copy for my birthday.  My wife, who gets me, even if she doesn't always understand me, sat down with me last night to watch the movie.

She thought it was cute; it was a nice movie about little boys and baseball.  I laughed until I couldn't breathe, and then I laughed some more, thinking about the movie, and about where I grew up and about my friends, back then and now, and the things we bond over and the idiot things we do in the name of adventure.

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TV: Freaks and Geeks

Freaks and Geeks – The Complete Series

Humor is an odd thing.  It varies from culture to subculture and from person to peer.  And it comes in many, many flavors.  There are the broad strokes of slapstick and parody as well as the more delicate and intricate details of irony and satire.  Freaks and Geeks lies somewhere in between those broad and subtle strokes, firmly in the land of "so painful it's funny."

You know this territory; anybody who has ever been a high school student knows this territory.  It's what Chris Rock and Bill Hicks and George Carlin are famous for dealing, or having dealt with, in public and on tape.  Those situations that are excruciatingly painful, so humiliating, so debilitating, that the only way to remember them is with laughter, lest the tears send you running back to the therapist's couch.

I'm not sure how this show slipped by me.  It originally aired in 1999 and 2000 and would have been a little too much salt in wounds still to fresh to be truly funny to me.  Even now, a full 15 years after high school, there are times I find myself pausing the disc to just walk away and gain some perspective before I can finish the show.  It's that good.  From the musical selections to the acting to the directing, this is quality work.  Where it stands out, of course, is the writing.  The dialogue was left largely to the actors to improvise, leaving it feeling fresh and natural; nobody speaks too cleverly in this show.  There are no pithy one liners and no guaranteed happy endings written here.

But for all that pain, for all that embarrassment, it is a funny show.  The characters survive and learn and grow and that makes these stories funny, in that hard to define, "thank God it's not me…anymore" kind of way. 

So, if you find yourself in need of a good show this summer, check out the DVD set, just make sure you've put both the knives and the yearbooks away first.

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Cinema, Films, Movies, and the Like

A few weekends back, I sat down with my wife and mother-in-law and watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

My mother-in-law had invited us over for dinner and my wife thought it would be a good idea if we brought a DVD to watch after dinner.  The trouble was, in the three months she had had a DVD player, my mother-in-law had watched all our best DVDs.  So, my wife and I headed off to the video store, where I wandered up and down the aisles looking for something that I had not seen, but looked romantic enough for my wife and funny enough for my mother-in-law.  My wife’s patience gave out at the thirty minute mark.

I walked back to the classics aisle and grabbed the first thing that caught my eye:  Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.  We rented the DVD and the evening proceeded as planned.   The next day, I returned the DVD and called my mother-in-law to see if she had any request for the next weekend.  She did not, but she mentioned how much she had enjoyed seeing Charley Chaplin and John Wayne movies when she was a girl.

I had known about John Wayne; in fact, some of the DVDs she had borrowed from me were Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.  Hearing that she also liked Charlie Chaplin, however, sent me searching through the stacks again, looking for a copy of the Little Tramp.  When I could not locate a copy at any of the video stores in town, I decided to just buy the DVD and give it to her as a gift.

My wife, upon learning about this, was quite pleased, but also a little jealous.  She wanted me to find movies for her; she wanted me to seek out the classics that I know she has not seen and for us to watch them together.  This request sent me looking for more modern classics of movie making.  (She has not, for example, seen E.T or the Goonies.)

I was having a lot of fun finding movies to show to my wife and / or my mother-in-law.  Their very different ages and tastes made it a bit of a challenge to find something that I thought they both might like, and sometimes I went for something that I knew one would love and the other would, well, sit through.  At the same time, I was getting a little bored.  We, as a family, had sat through several movies, all of which I had already seen, sometimes three or four times.  (The Wizard of Oz comes to mind; which, just for the headtrip, I highly recommend watching in Japanese.)

So, I turned my search to Amazon and found this book:  The 100 Best Movies to Rent You've Never Heard Of: Hidden Treasures, Neglected Classics, and Hits From By-Gone Eras.  The book details just what the title suggests, an eclectic and informed selection of movies that you have probably skipped over in the video store, if your video store even has them.  These are not cult films, nor are they all that hard to find, the are more just, lost in the shuffle films – good movies that got passed over for one reason or another.  The book arrived and I immediately sat down to watch (and enjoy) the first movie listed – The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn.

Soon after, I started looking for the second film in the book, Aguierre, the Wrath of God.  I was now searching out movies for three different people:  myself, with this new book of films that I had largely never heard of, my mother-in-law, who likes classic westerns and romantic comedies starring the elite of old Hollywood, and my wife, who likes action and romance in equal parts and who has not seen most of the movies of my childhood and teen years.

It was time to get organized.

I went to Lists of Bests (I'm SunToad) and searched out a couple of classic film lists.  I chose to start with Roger Ebert’s The Great Movies as well as building a list based on the book I had bought.  I then added the list for Steven Jay Schneider’s 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, just because.

There is a lot of overlap on these lists and I do not intend to complete any of them anytime soon, like within the next decade or two, but I do intend to use them to help me find movies for my family to watch; movies that we can all enjoy with our varied tastes and interests.

And, of course, because they are on the web and they are social, anyone who chooses to can play along at home.  So, feel free to copy the lists and delve into the back shelves of your local video store or second hand emporium.

Good luck and thanks for reading.

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