Sugar

[MarkGrace]

If anyone sees this, let me know what you think. I wanted to check it out this weekend, but the Mrs. wants to see that Sunshine Cleaning movie and she'll probably win out. I'm hoping to see it soon, however.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/10009355-sugar/

[MarkGrace]

Diamond in the Rough

By A. O. SCOTT
Published: April 3, 2009

There is something undeniably noble and beautiful about the love of sports: the appreciation of grace and excellence for their own sakes, the pleasure of competition, the discipline of training. But the practice of big-time sports is often cruel and corrupt, a business built on the exploitation of young people and the peddling of impossible dreams. This basic contradiction will be in vivid evidence this weekend, during the national college basketball championships. It is also, at least implicitly, a central concern in “Sugar,” a wise and lovely new film by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck.

“Sugar,” which follows a young pitcher from a training camp in the Dominican Republic to a minor-league club in Iowa (and beyond), is infused with a deep affection for baseball, the rhythms of which are nimbly captured by a narrative pace and editing style that quicken and relax as necessary. The small details and rituals of the game — the locker room banter, the on-field surges of intensity and the tedium of the dugout — are captured with subtlety and without egg-headed, glorious-pastime sententiousness.

It is their belief in the dignity of the sport that allows Ms. Boden and Mr. Fleck to turn a quietly critical eye on its economic workings and social consequences. Though it tells a fictional story, “Sugar” belongs on a shelf with “Hoop Dreams,” another great film that challenges us to shed our illusions about sports even as we retain our capacity to delight in the games themselves.

Miguel Santos is certainly capable of such delight. Nicknamed Azúcar (Spanish for sugar), and played by a marvelously expressive and likable young nonprofessional actor named Algenis Pérez Soto, he is sweet and easygoing, but also fiercely competitive and a bit cocky.

Like many young Dominican men who demonstrate some baseball talent, he was signed by an American professional team (the fictitious Kansas City Knights) as a teenager. Sugar and his fellow recruits live in a training center that in some ways resembles a prep school, in others a prison. An armed guard stands at the gate, and practices are observed from what looks like a guard tower.

On weekends, Miguel goes home to his village to visit with his family and his girlfriend, and to hang out with slightly older men whose own dreams of major-league glory have evaporated or expired.

In their previous feature, “Half Nelson,” Ms. Boden and Mr. Fleck, a married couple who live in Brooklyn, seemed at first to be working within a familiar, somewhat dubious genre, the heroic urban teacher melodrama. But by making the teacher in question (played by Ryan Gosling) not only a drug addict but also, more important, a complicated individual whose moral confusion was hard to separate from his political idealism, they upended easy, sentimental assumptions about race, class and urban life.

Something similar happens in “Sugar.” For more than half its running time the film seems to be following the narrative structure of a standard sports story, unfolding through the triumphs and reversals of a single, fateful season. After a stint in spring training in Arizona, Miguel finds himself in Iowa, boarding with an elderly local couple and trying out his stuff in front of some pretty demanding hometown crowds as a starting pitcher for the Bridgetown Swing.

Off the field he socializes with his fellow Spanish-speaking ballplayers, befriends a former college star and conducts a tentative flirtation with the strawberry-blond, churchgoing granddaughter of his hosts, who wants him for spiritual or carnal purposes, or both. (Here in America we may accept the constitutional separation of church and state, but church and sex are much harder to keep apart.) On the field Miguel hits his stride early, is slowed down by an injury, faces various temptations and then ...

But see for yourself. The game of baseball, ungoverned by the clock, is notoriously full of surprises, and the surprise of “Sugar” — I don’t mean the major third-act plot twist, which is astonishing when it happens and utterly logical in retrospect — is that it’s not really about baseball at all. It’s about, among other things, the way America looks through the eyes of a stranger, about the beauty of the Caribbean, the Midwest and the South Bronx (skillfully evoked by the cinematographer Andrij Parekh), and about what it is to be a young man full of desire and potential in a world that seems starkly divided between haves and have-nots, success and failure.

Perhaps nowhere are these divisions more extreme than in the world of professional sports, which beguiles some of the poorest people in the hemisphere with specters of fabulous wealth. But even in that world, a lot of space is taken up by the middle ground: the modest paychecks sent to the family back home; the careers that culminate neither in glory nor in disgrace, but that flare up and peter out; the tiny increment of luck or timing that separates strike three from ball four.

And so “Sugar” walks away from clichés about the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat, preferring to contemplate the satisfactions and frustrations that lie in between. It is both sad and hopeful, but the film’s sorrow and its optimism arise from its rarest and most thrilling quality, which is its deep and humane honesty.
http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/04/03...er=rss&emc=rss

[MarkGrace]

So apparently this film is only opening in NYC and LA this weekend, and then will go to other markets after that. Guess I'm going to have to wait a bit before it hits Seattle. Another great write-up from the LA Times:

March 11, 2009
'Sugar': A movie for true baseball fans

"I'd have this rule that nobody could do anything phony when they visited me. If anybody tried to do anything phony, they couldn't stay."

-- Holden Caulfield/J.D. Salinger, "The Catcher in the Rye"

“Sugar” is a movie that should play with the baseball crowd. And that’s saying something.

The perils of baseball movies are familiar. Artificiality looms everywhere, either with the story line or the actual scenes on the field. Two of the most successful baseball films of all time, “The Natural” and “Field of Dreams,” struggle to satisfy many lifelong fans of the game. I liked those films (I don’t care that “The Natural” changed the ending of the book –- I view the two as separate entities), but I understand why others didn’t. Somehow, the over-glorification of the game, the injection of extra sentiment, comes across almost as an insult.

The comedies have their supporters, with “Major League” serving as the sport’s “Caddyshack” and “Bull Durham” perhaps reigning as the most popular among both active and passive baseball fans. “Bull Durham” not only offered laughs, but went a long way toward conveying a love we have for the game that is often so unrequited that we're reminded of the need for love outside of the game.

The greatest baseball film of all time is “The Bad News Bears,” a film that celebrated baseball with great humor, great characters and, most important, a proper perspective. "Bad News Bears" doesn’t seem to have a single phony moment in it.

DancingWhich brings me back to “Sugar,” an April release written and directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, whose previous feature was the taut drama “Half Nelson” with Ryan Gosling. (I saw a preview screening of the film thanks to my work for Variety.) Boden and Fleck give baseball some much-needed independent film treatment, and by that I don’t mean anything pretentious, but rather something honest and direct.

This isn’t a movie with swelling music. This isn’t a movie whose climax depends on the ninth inning of the final game. It’s a movie that acknowledges 1) the reality that baseball is the dream of many and 2) the reality that it is a dream that doesn’t come true for many. And that’s not to say that the film’s ending is happy or sad. It just feels right.

“Sugar” also benefits by starting from a place almost unknown to Hollywood: the baseball factory that is the Dominican Republic (which just suffered a dramatic upset loss in the World Baseball Classic). It’s there in the Dominican that we meet righthanded pitcher Miguel “Sugar” Santos, one of many aspiring ballplayers from the tiny island-based nation. (In an ironic twist, one of the first characters we see on screen is an academy director played by Jose Rijo, the former Reds pitcher who served as a consultant on the film but was recently fired by the Washington Nationals for being caught up in a scandal involving a prospect who falsified his name and age.) Fleck and Boden went to the D.R. and interviewed dozens of current and former players before crafting their story.

I don’t want to spoil any of the story for you (and I’d urge you to take measures not to spoil it for yourself), but I will say that while filled with dreams of glory and riches, Sugar is very much in touch with his surroundings, and as the story progresses, the central revelation is how sensitive and human he is. (He has relationships, but there is no overarching Crash Davis-Annie Savoy love story.) There is a pretty major plot twist in the film, but I bought it. By the end, I was fixated on the notion that Sugar is the baseball movie equivalent of “The Catcher in the Rye” protagonist Holden Caufield, and I can think of no higher praise for the film than to say that I think Holden would have liked it.

Perhaps a keen baseball expert will find fault in the ballplaying skills of some of the actors, but I think they make it work. Algenis Perez Soto, who plays Sugar, was a former baseball academy competitor who played ball until he was 20, though he was an infielder rather than a pitcher. Rijo, among others, worked one-on-one with Soto, who made it through a casting search that auditioned more than 600. Of course, all the baseball skill in the world wouldn’t save a poor acting performance, but even though this is Soto's film debut, he is completely convincing.

“Sugar” comes from Sony Pictures Classics, which does not qualify it as a major studio release, so it’s only going to get targeted rather than widespread promotion. (Recent SPC releases include "Rachel Getting Married" and "Synecdoche, New York.") For obvious reasons, much of the film is subtitled -- another hurdle for it to overcome to achieve popular success. But we'll see what word of mouth can accomplish. (I'm told the Dodgers will see it on their bus ride to Tucson for an exhibition game against the Rockies on March 26.)

This might not be a film that will change your life, but I think it is a film that baseball fans have been waiting for.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/dodgerthoughts/2009/03/sugar-a-basebal.html

[TripletDaddy]

Dude, maybe I will go see this for date night this Friday. Looks like it is playing at the UCI theater, which is about 10 minutes from my house.

[MarkGrace]

By the end, I was fixated on the notion that Sugar is the baseball movie equivalent of “The Catcher in the Rye” protagonist Holden Caufield, and I can think of no higher praise for the film than to say that I think Holden would have liked it.

Neither can I.

[MarkGrace]

So this movie was in and out of indie houses earlier in the year and I was never able to catch it. I finally got it on Netflix and just got done watching it. What a tremendous movie.

Having been around many kids in Sugar's situation, this film seems to authentically capture their struggles, challenges and overall process of adapting to life in the States as they attempt to scale the Minors in hopes of hitting the Big Leagues. While it is definitely a great baseball movie, it plays less as a sport's movie (though sports is still the vehicle for the story here) and more as a character portrait of one trying to find himself and come of age in a foreign land.

A very enthusiastic recommendation from me, and I think this is one of the standout films from this year. Another homerun from Boden and Fleck!

[Commando]

sunshine cleaning was BORING! steer clear.

[MarkGrace]

Already saw Sunshine Cleaning. What is it about Emily Blunt that is simultaneously weird and cute looking?

[BoylenOver]

sunshine cleaning was BORING! steer clear.

I liked "Sunshine Cleaning". Amy Adams has me wrapped around her finger, though.

[MartyFunkhouser]

I watched Sugar last night. It is easily the best baseball movie that I have seen. The movie just captures the game of baseball and the struggle of the Latin American players. Mrs. Funk watched the movie with it and also enjoyed. She didn't relate much to the baseball, but really related to the plight of going into a foreign country without speaking much of the language.

Great movie and probably the best that I have seen this year.