Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Capone... you big softy.
Hey, Harry. Capone in Chicago here, fresh from my 4-day Disney cruise/film festival with Ebert & Roeper (my report will be filed very soon). Here's something I saw just before I left that is also a Disney product.
I'll say it now. I'm not a big fan of baseball films. I can count the ones I've liked on one hand and have fingers to spare (BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY, BULL DURHAM, THE NATURAL, and that's probably it). Argue as much as you want, but it's tough to make a good movie about such an inherently boring sport. I might be tempted to add THE ROOKIE to my list. The trailers and commercials are god-awful, I know ("From the studio that brought you REMEMBER THE TITANS"? Come on!), but the movie is inspiring on a couple different levels. And it's first G-rated film I've seen since THE STRAIGHT STORY that doesn't pander to children. Dennis Quaid plays Jimmy Morris, a real-life, borderline middle-aged Texas high school science teacher who become Major League Baseball's oldest rookie player. When he was younger, he was an above-average pitcher who injured his arm and never got a chance to play even minor league ball. Having given up on his dream, Jimmy teaches baseball at his high school just to be near the sport. He makes a deal with the kids on the team that if they make it to the state finals that he'll go to an open try out for professional players. One day after practice, a player convinces Jimmy to throw a few, something he hasn't done seriously in years. Turns out in the years that he wasn't pitching his barely passable 75-mph fastball turned into a 98-mph bullet.
Jimmy's wife, Lorrie (played by one of the few actresses that can turn a throw-away part into a great role, Rachel Griffiths), is very nervous about him chasing his baseball dream at such an advanced age, especially with a much better job in Ft. Worth waiting for him if he wants it. The bills are piling up, and Jimmy's son and newborn daughter will miss him terribly. Jimmy's father, Jim Sr. (Brian Cox), has always made him feel that baseball was not a dream worth pursuing. The film opens with a series of flashbacks showing the Morris family moving every couple of years because of Jim Sr.'s position in the military. Cox plays the quintessential son-of-a-bitch who doesn't even get excited when Jimmy gets the call to play for a AA team.
If you've heard anything about THE ROOKIE, then you pretty much already know how where the story ends up, but there's a lot of agony, disappointment, and eventual joy in getting there. Quaid is one of the best at playing the frustrated aging jock (see ANY GIVEN SUNDAY or EVERYBODY'S ALL-AMERICAN). Despite his rugged good looks, he's made a career of late of playing dour and struggling older men (see TRAFFIC or HBO's "Dinner with Friends") and this is one of the best examples of that. He's also been taking a lot more chances in his acting roles as evidenced in an upcoming film directed by Todd Haynes where Quaid plays a 1950s man who comes out of the closet to his wife. He's just been so solid as an actor over his 25-plus years acting that we forget that he's something of a national acting treasure. He's certainly tackled meatier roles than he does in THE ROOKIE, but he single handedly sells us on Jimmy Morris the athlete and dreamer.