Tag: sport

Take the Ice

  By

★★
“Just about skates by.”

There’s no doubt that women’s sports very much plays second fiddle to their male equivalent, though the gap varies from sport to sport. The WNBA is experiencing a surge of popularity, though the NBA is still a financial behemoth. This documentary focuses on ice-hockey, and the debut season in 2015 of the first professional women’s competition in the US, the National Women’s Hockey League. Though semi-professional is closer to the truth: the league could only afford to pay its players around $15,000 a year, meaning almost all of them had to have day jobs, from teachers to paralegals to engineers, to cover the expenses. Commissioner and founder Dani Rylan spends most of her time seeking sources of finance, though finds the men’s league less than thoroughly supportive.

To be honest, I can’t blame them. There’s a vague sense of entitlement coming off the NWHL, not realizing they are largely competing with the NHL for the same fans and money. Why should the NHL help a rival start-up, just because they have women players? That’s the harsh reality here. I respect Rylan for putting in the work and starting the league, but this is capitalist equality in action. There were points at which I wanted to reach into the TV set and remind the NWHL, nobody has a “right” to funding in the world of professional sports. You have to earn it, whether you are male or female, and doing so starts with the quality of your product.

It may have been a mistake to start with just four teams, because with all of them making the playoffs, the entire regular season felt kinda pointless. And how did Boston end up with eight members of the US national team, while none of the other franchises had more than a couple? Wasn’t there some kind of a draft to balance the teams? Unsurpisingly, the Boston Pride won the inaugural championship – without, it seems, too much trouble. The film does make some effort to make this less of a procession, by telling the story of Denna Laing, a player on the Boston team who suffered a spinal injury during a game, which left her paralyzed.

I felt these elements, concentrating on the players and their stories rather than the business, worked better, but were frustratingly brief, except for Laing. There’s not enough of a narrative in the game-play to sustain things, and I suspect I’m an outlier, in that most other people watching the documentary probably will already be well aware how the first season ended. The league is still going, albeit under different ownership, although it’s interesting the film didn’t come out for more than six years after the season covered by it. I’ve been to ice hockey games, both here and back in the UK, and at various levels. But I’d have to say, in contrast to, say, Perfect, there is not much here likely to make a fan, if you weren’t one already.

Dir: Rachel Koteen
Star: Dani Rylan, Denna Laing, Anya Battaglino, Kaleigh Fratkin

Run-Off

  By

★★
“Fast, loose and out of control”

It feels as if South Korea is going through all the Olympic sports, making films based on each of them. Indeed, this film’s alternate title makes it a sequel to Take Off, about ski-jumping. I’ve seen two of the previous entries, covering archery (3 Heroines) and table tennis (As One), with the latter the more successful. This one comes up shorter than either. Less due to the technical side, which is always solid and occasionally impressive. However, the “true story” element is riotously inaccurate, the film completely rewriting reality in favor of what is not much more than a series of the most obvious sports movie cliches, for two hours and five minutes of increasingly sappy nonsense.

The story is of the first South Korean women’s ice-hockey team, formed to take part in the 2003 Asian Winter Games. There was basically no women’s ice-hockey in the country, so the team’s core players include a disgraced speed skater, a roller hockey player, a figure skater, and a North Korean defector, Lee Ji-won (Soo Ae). The national committee need to give the impression of trying, to boost Korea’s chance of hosting the games. But they can’t find anyone to coach, so end up hiring alcoholic deadbeat coach Kang Dae-woong (Oh D-s). Fill in the rest of the plot yourself, as the team goes from losing to an elementary school team, to facing North Korea – and Lee’s sister – with a medal at stake.

Except, it never happened. 2003 wasn’t even the team’s debut, as they played at the Asian Games in 1999. The results were… rather less heroic than depicted here, where they never lose by more than one goal. In reality, they were hammered in all four games, and outscored by a total of 80-1. Not quite as cinematic. The film ends by proudly announcing the team went on to qualify for the 2018 Olympics. Conveniently omitting the fact they got in automatically as hosts – the same way Team GB qualified for handball in 2012. The more I read about the reality, the worse the taste left in my mouth by the movie’s rewriting of history. There’s artistic license, and then… I’d be embarrassed to be one of the players involved.

Up until this wholesale factual butchery, it had been competent enough. Nothing outside the standard inspirational sports movie, e.g. training montages, clashes of characters, unsupportive families, etc. Yet the games are actually well enough staged, with camerawork that puts you right there on the ice, and it feels like the actresses are doing enough of the skating to pass muster (they had three months training before shooting). It’s just not an honest film. A better approach would have been like Next Goal Wins, covering the climb from embarrassing defeat through to redemption. If only they had waited. For the year after this came out, Korea had a 3-2 shoot-out win over China – the same opponent who had pounded them 30-1, fourteen years earlier. With a story like that, you don’t need to make stuff up.

Dir: Jong-hyun Kim
Star: Soo Ae, Oh Dal-su, Oh Yeon-Seo, Jae-suk Ha
a.k.a. Take Off 2

The Swimmers

  By

★★
“Sink or swim.”

This is the story of Syrian sisters Yusra Mardini and her sister Sarah, played by real-life sisters Nathalie and Manal Issa. Growing up, they were trained by their father, a professional swimmer himself, and had the goal of reaching the Olympics for their country. The (still ongoing) Syrian Civil War led to the sisters leaving their homeland, and this is mostly the story of their journey, through Turkey, across the Mediterranean in a very flimsy dinghy to Greece, then across Europe to Germany. It’s a journey fraught with peril, on which predators looking to scam migrants (or worse), lurk at every turn. However…

I don’t typically like to get political here, but when a film explicitly does, I will go there. I have every sympathy for refugees, who want safety. But once you leave your home country and reach a safe destination, that’s it. If you then decide to move on – making a beeline for a country where lax immigration laws let you pull the rest of your family with you – you’re not a refugee, you’re an economic migrant. My sympathy for you drops a whole order of magnitude. It’s like if your house burns down, I feel sorry for you. It doesn’t give you the right to move into the neighbourhood’s swankiest residence. Most of the film’s attempts to pull on my heartstrings failed due to this. As soon as the sisters left the Turkish beach, they were 100% responsible for putting themselves back in danger.

Rant over. What about the film? It’s a bit of a mixed bag. Having sisters playing sisters definitely works. Especially at that age, this is the kind of relationship which is hard to simulate for teenage actors. There’s a genuineness here, for obvious reasons, which makes the family devotion at the film’s core, easy to see and appreciate. Less successful is the apparent random switching between languages. Many conversations occur in a hodge-podge of English and Arabic. While I can’t speak to the authenticity of it, as a viewer, it was jarring to switch repeatedly from listening to reading subtitles. I ended up basically tuning out the dialogue and sticking with the subs.

I appreciate the necessity of bending the facts to fit a cinematic narrative, but this probably goes too far. It’s one thing to have Yusra overhear snark from other competitors about how she doesn’t deserve to be there. But maybe avoid this when the movie then omits to mention the only swimmers she beat were, basically, other charity cases? The Olympic Selection Time was 60.80 seconds. Mardini finished in 69.21, and even her personal best is more than five seconds off the OST. The awkward truth is, she really did not deserve to be there, but few are greater at virtue-signalling than the IOC. It all feels like there are probably better refugee stories which could have been told. All the gloss this applies to its tale. can’t disguise that it is uncomfortably close to well-made propaganda.

Dir: Sally El-Hosaini
Star: Nathalie Issa, Manal Issa, Ahmed Malek, Matthias Schweighöfer

As One

  By

★★★
“Ping-pong diplomacy.”

After the bombing of a South Korean jet by North Korean agents in 1987, relations between the two nations sank to perilously low levels. In an effort to help mend fences, the countries agreed to join forces and send a unified squad to the 1991 World Table Tennis Championship in Japan, to take on the all-powerful Chinese. The process was not without its bumps, as the South’s star player, Hyun Jung-hwa (Ha), and her counterpart in the North, Ri Bun-hui (Bae), struggle to overcome their differences and become a cohesive doubles partnership. Their respective coaches (Park and Kim) also have to learn to navigate shoals both sporting and political on the way to the gold medal match in Tokyo.

Since this is based on real events, it’s no spoiler (and certainly would not have been for the Korean audience) to say that the unified team triumphs in dramatic fashion. Indeed, the whole thing is more or less an exhibition of Sports Clichés 1 0.1, with moments which you feel have been needlessly juiced up for emotive purposes. For example, did the entire South Korean roster really kneel in the rain outside their hotel, after the North Korean players were withdrawn for breaches of the rules? Did Ri really collapse during the last few minutes of the final, before an inspirational speech from Hyun? I’ve been unable to confirm either incident and it feels like a case of the writers over-egging the pudding, dramatically speaking.

Fortunately, everything else is excellent, and it’s clear a lot of attention went into details, some of which may not be visible to a Western audience e.g. the North Korean players speaking with appropriate dialect and accents. What was impressive even to me, was that the actresses genuinely looked like they were professional table-tennis players. Months of training went into that, with the real Hyun being one of the coaches. Praise in particular to Bae, who had to learn how to play with her left-hand, to match the one used by Ri. Although CGI was used to “fill in” the ball during the actual tournament sequences, there were no doubles used for the actresses, and the results look close to impeccable – as good as any sports movie I’ve seen. 

Even away from the table, the performances are good, and if the melodrama is turned up little too high, the balance otherwise is nicely handled, with a mix of humour, human interest and patriotism which is effective. While the Chinese are depicted as the “villains” her – and it’s not exactly subtle! – there is very much a message of how sport can act as a unifying force for a country. That’s something I tend to agree with, which is why I have little time for those who use it in divisive ways, such as kneeling during the anthem. There’s no doubt the intent here is almost nationalistic, yet it still works well enough for non-Koreans – and for those who still call the game ping-pong.

Dir: Moon Hyun-sung
Star: Ha Ji-won, Bae Doona, Park Chul-min, Kim Eung-soo

Altitudes

  By

★★★
“Climb every mountain…”

I was really surprised to discover that this French film is actually made for television. It has a certain gravitas and thoughtfulness to it, that you rarely find in a genre which is (often rightfully) derided as being formulaic and cliched. This doesn’t escape those criticisms entirely – in particular, there’s a “Disease of the Week” subplot, which does feel as it it might have strayed in from Lifetime or Hallmark. However, even there, it feels handled in a relatively natural manner, rather than being shoehorned in there to elicit sympathy from the viewer. It definitely looks better than most TVMs out of Hollywood. Whether this is down to Félix von Muralt’s cinematography, or simply the stunning Alpine landscapes, is open to debate.

It begins at a funeral. Isabelle Dormann (Borotra) has returned following fifteen years away, after the death of her father, a former mountaineer, who then ran a lodge high in the Alps. This allows her to reconnect with her friend, Kenza (Krey), a world-class climber herself, but also more awkwardly, with Antoine (Stévenin), a man with whom she had a relationship which helped precipitate Isabelle’s sudden departure from the mountains. She decides to honour her father by climbing a new route up Les Roches Brunes, the nearby mountain after which the lodge was called. At 4,357 metres high, it’s the tallest peak in the area, and Isabelle always talked with her father about pioneering a new route up it, to be named for the family.

She and Kenza decide to honour her late father by doing just that. However, it turns out Isabelle is suffering from a neurodegenerative condition, which is slowly but inevitably killing her, making it a race against time before her physical abilities just aren’t there. It seems this is a fight she has lost, as practice sessions don’t go well. Yet after Kenza calls off the attempt, Isabelle decides to strike out on her own for a solo ascent. Kenza and Antoine follow, hoping to save her from herself.

I like films about climbing, when they concentrate on the climbing. Yet, it seems inevitable to tack on personal drama of one kind or another. It’s not enough simply to have one person taking on nature. Too often, they need to have a dead fiance or similar motivation, and the results often tend to resemble bad soap-opera. That’s definitely the case here, with the whole Isabelle-Antoine relationship dramatically overcooked, and muddying the water. The same goes for Isabelle’s condition: she could simply have been not experienced enough to take on the climb. However, when the movie sets such formulaic conceits aside and concentrates on the almost primeval struggle, it’s much more effective. I can’t even dock it significantly for Antoine effectively white-knighting things, since the ending is bittersweet enough to justify it. I think it’s one which will stick in my mind, for longer than it felt it would at the time. 

Dir: Pierre-Antoine Hiroz
Star: Claire Borotra, Déborah Krey, Sagamore Stévenin, Isabelle Caillat
a.k.a. The Climb

Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo

  By

★★★
“Cowgirls behind bars.”

Well, this is certainly the first film I’ve reviewed here which drops both into the “women in prison” and the “sports” category. It takes place in Oklahoma, where since 1940, they have been staging an annual prison rodeo event in McAlester. The competition takes place in an arena built just inside the walls of the State Penitentiary, and includes competitors from facilities across the state. In 2006, the event was opened to female inmates as well, and this documentary (while not absolutely focused on just the women, also including 13-year rodeo veteran and convicted murderer Liles) is about their preparation for the 2007 event, training on a rig pulled back and forth by fellow inmates, and climaxing with the event itself.

What stood out in particular was how normal most of the inmates seemed, though my perceptions there were likely skewed by the more, ah, dramatic depictions of life behind bars. You’d be hard pushed to pick the likes of Brooks, Witte and Herrington out of a line-up at the local PTA, though some of the stories they tell are startling – as much for the casual air with which they admit to dealing drugs or violent robbery. The rodeo gives them a bit of relief from the crushing boredom of life inside, though it’s very much a privilege. Brooks is kicked off the squad when caught in possession of contraband, reportedly unauthorized lipstick, an incident which also puts her release on parole in doubt.

While regular rodeo typically limits female involvement to the less dangerous events, such as barrel racing, there’s no such restriction here. The women inmates take part in bull and bronco riding, as well as the particularly fraught event called “Money the Hard Way”, where the first person to pluck a ribbon tied to a bull’s head wins $100. The beast is clearly no respecter of the fairer sex, sending both men and women into the air with a strictly gender-neutral approach. The comparisons of the event to gladiatorial combat seemed particularly apt here. Yet this feels more like a backdrop to the lives of the prisoners, and I found myself Googling their names in hopes of recent updates.

As with most documentaries, it’s not tidy, with loose ends a-plenty, and if I was both informed and reasonably entertained, I can’t say I reached the end with any life-changing revelations. It feels quite “safe” and conventional as a film of its genre, and Beesley clearly is not interesting in challenging narratives, least of all the self-reported ones of the women’s lives. While they do largely accept responsibility for their crimes, it’d be interesting to hear an outside perspective on those. Not mentioned in the film: the event was canceled in 2010 due to a state budget shortfall. It hasn’t returned since, mostly because the arena has now fallen into disrepair, despite support from the warden, local community and state governor for that. Whether it ever will is uncertain, leaving the documentary a record of an odd slice of Americana that may be forever gone.

Dir: Bradley Beesley
Star: Jamie Brooks, Brandy Witte, Danny Liles, Crystal Herrington

Charlotte Who? – A Gaelic Football Story in America

  By

★★★★
“When Irish eyes are smiling.”

I stumbled across this entirely by accident, Tubi’s autoplay feature putting it on after watching some World Cup highlights. But the start was intriguing enough to keep me watching, and turned out to be a really good documentary, even if the story is a bit clichéd. The original title was the rather more forthright, Who the Fxxk is Charlotte? and that sums up the approach here. Any viewers with an aversion to strong language should not apply. It’s the story of the Charlotte, North Carolina women’s Gaelic football team, and their quest to win the national title. Gaelic football? Yes: an Irish sport, which combines elements of football and rugby. In Ireland, it’s close to a religion with fierce rivalries that go back to the 19th century. 

The Charlotte club was formed in 2000, and based on what we see here, is as much a social organization as a sports club. There does appear to be quite a lot of consumption of adult beverages. But there’s no doubt, they take the sport seriously, and recruit from all round the area, both Irish and American players. On North America, teams can bring in experienced players from Ireland, known as “sanctions”, to help grow the sport. But some clubs do that to excess: Charlotte refuse to go that route, putting their team at a potential disadvantage compared to Boston, or their arch-rivals from San Francisco, the Fog City Harps. The film follows Charlotte as they develop their team, and take part in the 2016 and 2017 senior women’s tournament, for the best sides in North America. 

There are absolutely no pretensions here. It’s a very straightforward approach, and that no-nonsense style fits the participants to a T. Unlike some docs, there’s no off-field drama here, be it artificial or genuine. It’s all about the sport, and it’s depicted as a classic underdog story with plucky Charlotte trying to beat their larger, more established and more “sanctiony” opponents. Though in regard to the last, I would have been curious to see actual numbers: how many of their team were Americans, and how does that compare, say, to the Harps? It’s an easy enough sport to pick up for a viewer, though in some of the games, it was occasionally hard to know the exact score. A score bug in the corner would have been useful. 

In some ways, the structure feels like it mirrors that of a classic kung-fu film. The heroine loses the first battle against her nemesis, but this only increases her resolve. She withdraws, trains harder and learns new techniques, in order to prepare for the rematch. That’s what we have here, with the 2016 tournament ending in defeat. The Charlotte coach also retires, his previously pledged three-year term having come to a close. Yet this opens the door for a dual-headed approach, with two managers of different styles. Considering this is a sport about which I knew almost nothing going in, it was all remarkably engrossing. If you’re not cheering by the end, you’ve clearly got no Irish in you.

Dir: David N. Stiles
Star: Aoife Kavanagh, Catríona O’Shaughnessy, Jan Henry, Kevin Tobin

Strong Enough

  By

★★★½
“Fit for most purposes.”

This is a very small-scale and restrained production, which unfolds, largely in real time, over one afternoon in the single location of a cross-fit gym. Athlete Sam (Jerue) is set for an attempt to see five world records in a 30-minute span, supported by her trainer Shane (Grosse) and under the eagle eye of adjudicator Alec (Sawyer) – it’s clearly intended to be the Guinness Book of World Records, but their name is never mentioned! However, a fly in the ointment shows up, just minutes before Sam is scheduled to start. Her husband, Charlie (Kershisnik), from whom she is currently separated, arrives at the gym, followed rapidly by Sam getting served with divorce papers, in what can only be called a dick move. 

This does feel very artificial, an obvious and contrived attempt to add external drama to what should be a purely internal situation: Sam versus herself, in an effort to push further than anyone has gone before. However, it’s a little more complex than it initially seems. Charlie may appear not much more than a bad guy, yet by the end, your feelings towards him may well be modified: he’s not entirely the villain he seems. It still does feel superfluous, as if the makers weren’t confident in the ability of the central struggle to hold the audience’s attention. In some ways, they’re right. You’re watching someone do squats, or chin-ups. How exciting can that be?

The answer might be, more than you’d think. In Jerue, the makers have some who actually is a well-regarded cross-fitter, and that means there’s no stunt doubling or cut-aways. Foss simply drops the camera back to mid-range, and you get an unbroken sixty seconds of his lead actress doing what she is supposed to be doing. As someone whose fitness stops at 30 minutes of moderate intensity on the elliptical, I have nothing but respect for those who push their bodies as far as possible (unlike one reviewer of the film who wrote sneeringly, and I quote, “Cross Fit feels like a gateway drug to fascism”. I wonder what his BMI might be. Just curious). I like American Ninja Warrior, The 100 and its ilk. This is not dissimilar.

It does skirt perilously close to some of the usual sports cliches, though by this point, it’s difficult to come up with a credible scenario which doesn’t. Either your protagonist prevails over their opponent (which may be internal, as here), or they go down bravely: as Shane puts it, “Like the gladiators of old would say: let me win, and if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt.” That is, basically, your two categories of sports movies, and there’s not much attempt to escape the mould here. However, all the characters seem genuine; I’m not sure how much “acting” is require from Jerue the cross-fitter, playing Sam the cross-fitter, but she acquits herself reasonably well. I ended up watching the final half-hour from the elliptical, and might just have pedalled a little harder than normal.

Dir: John Foss
Star: Ashley Jerue, Demetrius Grosse, Cameron Sawyer, Noah Kershisnik

A League of Their Own

  By

It has been a very quiet year for action heroine films. Here we sit, entering the sixth month of the year, and the only one of the top 100 movies in 2023 at the North American box-office I’ve reviewed here is Everything Everywhere All at Once – and that actually came out in April last year. [I’ll probably add Polite Society to the list shortly] There have been a couple of high-profile streaming titles, such as The Mother, and last week, I discovered the third series of La Reina Del Sur had hit Netflix. It made the top ten shows in the US, which is quite impressive. But it’ll take a few months for me to get through its 60 episodes.

Since there’s nothing new to “feature”, I decided to dip back into the archives and revisit some old reviews, which are in need of updating for one reason or another. I’m starting with League of Their Own. This is partly because it deserves more than the three hundred words it got when originally reviewed 20+ years ago, and partly because of the Amazon reboot into a TV series which came out (as we’ll see, a very apt phrase!) last year. I think my original review (below) was a little harsh, though it may be that I’ve changed since. Baseball is now an intrinsic part of my everyday life, especially during the summer, and I can perhaps appreciate the film that much more.

Indeed, of all the films about baseball – and there have been some classic – I’d rate League behind only The Natural overall. The latter captures the mythic, almost epic quality of the sport, but League simply sparkles in terms of story, characters and dialogue. Virtually everyone involved gives at or near career-best performances, and considering that includes Tom Hanks and Geena Davis, this is a high bar indeed. Hell, even Madonna is good, though it feels more as if the character was written for her, rather than she’s playing a role.

At its heart is the relationship between sisters Dottie (Davis) and Kit (Lori Petty). Kit has been overshadowed by her sister for her whole life, but can at least hold her own in the baseball arena. When the chance comes to play professionally, it’s Dottie the scout wants, but Kit who needs the opportunity, and convinces the scout to take them both. Thereafter, it’s partly about Kit trying to come out from under the shadow of her sister, but also coach Jimmy Dugan (Hanks) rediscovering his love for the game, and all the women proving the game they provide can be every bit as entertaining for spectators as the male version, even if the quality of play is lower]

[Diversion. The distinction between quality and entertainment was made clear to me over the past few months as I’ve followed the battle for Wrexham to get promotion from the fifth to the fourth tier of English football. The talent on view is not of Premier League quality, clearly. But the decisive contest against rivals Notts County – won 3-2 by Wrexham after their keeper saved a penalty in injury time – was the most dramatic and enthralling game of football I’ve ever watched. So, the appeal of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League doesn’t need explaining, even if they’re not the major-leagues]

Writers Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel do a remarkably good job of keeping all the threads of the story moving forward over the course of the season. Events culminate in the final game, where the two sisters face off, on different teams, for the championship. Dottie knows its her last game, since she’s going to quit and start a family. Kit, however, needs the win, for her self-esteem. It is, of course, Sports Cliche 1.0.1, with the title decided on the final play, Kit barreling into Dottie at home-plate. Yet it still works. Even the wraparound segments, which I disliked at the time, now seem to provide a suitable send-off for the characters we have grown to love over the preceding two hours. Hence, its rating is upgraded to a very solid ★★★★.

Then there’s Amazon’s League of Their Own. It’s basically unwatchable. I tried, trust me. But it takes a story that operated at the intersection of sports and humanity, and turns it into one firmly located on the cross-streets of sexuality and race. And that’s fine. It’s certainly a version which could be told about the AAGPBL. But it isn’t what I wanted to see, and it certainly shouldn’t have been called A League of Their Own, because that creates a set of expectations which the film is unable to fulfill, despite forcing in famous lines like “There’s no crying in baseball!” Call it Lesbians in the War Who Occasionally Play Baseball: that’d be a more accurate reflection of the show’s interests.

Even as that, it’s not very good. The CGI used during the baseball games is flat-out terrible: nobody involved here looks even slightly competent (an area where it differs radically from, say, GLOW). It’s also a thoroughly unconvincing rendition of the period. The dialogue, attitudes and even the incidental music, all appear to come from significantly later times, to the point why you wonder why they bothered setting it in in the forties at all. Turning a frothy and subtly empowering comedy-drama into a social commentary sledgehammer, where baseball is an escape from straight society, was never a good decision. At least the largely (and justifiably) forgotten 1993 series, for all its flaws, operated in the same thematic ballpark. Pun not intended.

None of which takes away in the slightest from the joys to be had in the original movie. We watched it last night, and never mind baseball, it has to be one of the best sports movies, regardless of gender, of all time. That’s probably because it’s a rare entity which works both in terms of its sport and without it. You could remove every scene of them playing baseball and you’d still have a thoroughly entertaining, if somewhat confusing, film. About an all-women bus tour of the Midwest, I guess. But the AAGPBL was an entity that certainly needed to be better known too, and A League of Their Own is the telling of their story which it deserves.

★★★½
“A chick flick with balls…and strikes.”

Deserving credit for being about the only female sports film of note, this is actually pretty good, despite a pointless and schmaltzy wraparound, which gives us nothing but some wrinkly baseball, one of Madonna’s least memorable songs and Geena Davis as a thoroughly unconvincing pensioner. Which is a shame; if the bread in the sandwich is stale, the meat is tasty and filling.

From 1943 to 1954, women played professional baseball, a fact largely forgotten until this film. Davis plays the star catcher, taken from the countryside to play ball – giving a new meaning to “farm team”, hohoho – along with her sister (Petty). The movie covers the first season, under a recovering alcoholic coach (Hanks), leading to a face-off between siblings in Game 7 of the championship.

Davis is excellent and entirely convincing (she’d go on to make final trials for the US 2000 Olympic archery team): the interplay between her and Hanks is great, and most of her team-mates are also true personalities. However, Madonna is superfluous, given the similar presence of Rosie O’Donnell [I’m struggling to avoid obvious jokes here]. Jon Lovitz steals the first quarter as an acidic scout, and it’s a shame when he leaves.

If the characters are great, there’s a lack of narrative drive; how can you get excited over playoffs, when it looks like every team qualifies? The friction between Davis and Petty vanishes for much of the movie, in favour of a series of entertaining but – being honest – unimportant diversions. When we reach the finale though, it’s great; ever bit as exciting as any World Series Game 7. And coming from an Arizona Diamondbacks fan, that’s praise indeed.

Dir: Penny Marshall
Star: Geena Davis, Lori Petty, Tom Hanks, Rosie O’Donnell

Offside (2019)

  By

★½
“As dull as a 0-0 draw.”

Football is known as “The beautiful game,” but you wouldn’t know it based on this documentary, which seems perversely intended to remove anything like that from its topic. It focuses on Olimpia Szczecin, a women’s soccer team in Poland, as they prepare for the coming season. There’s your first problem. Team sports like this are inherently about conflict: there are winners and losers, but these are not determined on the practice field, and that’s where the film spends the bulk of its time. It’s simply not very interesting, unless you have a thing for watching women amble around a park, kicking balls at each other, jumping over low hurdles or being yelled at by their coach (Baginska).

There’s simply no narrative here which can attract interest. There are any number of threads which could have been used, if the film had bothered to explore or even explain them. For example, you’re never told – I had to Google this – that these players are actually amateurs rather than pros, so there’s the potential issue of striking a balance between their day jobs and their passion. Though we never see much “passion”. The only time the film reaches any genuine enthusiasm is when we see a coaching session for young girls, about the only ones in the entire documentary, who appear to be enjoying themselves. The coach also speaks about the importance of dealing with her players’ personal problems and keeping them off the pitch. Yet we never see this happening in any meaningful way.

A football season is inherently dramatic, fortunes ebbing and flowing over the course of meaningful competitive games. Yet this peters out before the campaign begins, robbing us of that tension. The entire season is instead described in a short series of terse captions. What little footage of actual play we see, is disjointed and impossible to get excited about. For example, they reach the final of an indoor tournament, where we’re told they are wearing white shirts, while their opponents are in blue. Except, the entire film is, for no good reason, shot in black-and-white and consequently, you can’t tell which side is which.

Outside of Baginska yelling at people, there’s no sense of any of the players having personalities or lives off the pitch. Why do they play? What are their goals? [Pun not intended] The film seems supremely disinterested in… Well, anything, to be quite honest. Rather than turning up with a story to tell, or even looking to find one, it feels as if they simply showed up for eight weeks in the off-season, due to an error in scheduling, but shrugged and made their film anyway. The irony is that, certainly in the UK, the women’s game has never been bigger, thanks largely to the English team winning the 2022 European Championships. If you told me this film was made by some American dude, to prove the validity of his belief that soccer is the dullest sport on Earth, I would believe you.

Dir: Miguel Gaudêncio
Star: Natalia Baginska, Roksana Ratajczyk, Kinga Szymanska, Weronika Szymaszek