Touring the Assembly Line: Ballplayer: Pelotero

"At the end of the day, he's merchandise."

Major League Baseball's biggest importer of foreign talent is a country smaller than Cuba that turns out approximately 20 percent of the United States' professional baseball players. It is the Dominican Republic, birthplace of current stars Jose Bautista, David Ortiz and Albert Pujols, just to pick a few, plus scores of comparatively anonymous role players and hundreds of guys developing or languishing in the minor leagues. Given the modest size of its population, the Dominican Republic is arguably the most effective baseball talent factory in the world. But the documentary Ballplayer: Pelotero, currently available via On Demand, leaves no doubt that the Dominican Republic's factory operates amidst chaos — lacking responsible and compassionate leadership and thus prone to corruption.

Directed by Ross Finkel, Trevor Martin and Jonathan Paley, Pelotero chronicles the experiences of two aspiring major leaguers, Jean Carlos Batista and Miguel Angel Sano, both of whom, by turning 16, are about to be eligible to sign with an MLB club for the first time. Batista is a quiet kid who lives with his coach and father figure, Astin Jacobo, who instills in Batista a hope that he can land a signing bonus north of $1 million. Sano lives at home with seven family members — or is it eight? even they struggle to keep track — and has the swagger of a guy who knows he might sign for a record bonus north of $5 million. Both players are shortstops, considered to be can't-miss pros, to one degree or another. But just how good Batista and Sano are depends largely on their ages. If truly 16, they are special prospects. If older, not so much. Either way, they will be paid accordingly.

What Are Ideologies Without Ideas?: The Dark Knight Rises

Author's Note: As the sporadic posting at this blog indicates, in recent months I've struggled to find the headspace — and sometimes just the computer time — to write about movies. In an effort to remedy that, I plan to shamelessly ape the Film Doctor with note-based reviews from time to time when my schedule makes it difficult to organize my thoughts into a single, condensed package. What follows was my first attempt at doing that, but it turned into a ramble, plus some notes. Put another way, to paraphrase Mark Twain, I didn't have time to write a short review, so I wrote a long one instead. Sorry.

The following is full of spoilers.

Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises is a courtroom movie disguised as an action film. Between bouts of fisticuffs, the characters are constantly grandstanding — assigning blame, deciphering motives and defending seemingly criminal actions. Something is definitely on trial here (sometimes literally), but what?

War Memorial: Pride of the Yankees

"Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth."

Seven months after Lou Gehrig died, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. And so it came to be that two-and-a-half years after a retiring Gehrig delivered one of the most memorable speeches of the 20th Century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered another. These events, and these men and their words, would seem to have nothing to do with each other, and yet they were united by Damon Runyon, who in a prologue for Pride of the Yankees wrote: "[Gehrig] found death with that same valor and fortitude that has been displayed by thousands of young Americans in far-flung fields of battle." Pride of the Yankees was released in March 1943, less than two years after Gehrig's death and with two-and-a-half years to go until Japan surrendered to end World War II, and this context is critical to recognizing the film's intent. Light on baseball and heavy with virtue, Pride of the Yankees isn't meant to chronicle Lou Gehrig's life for posterity. It's designed to help a specific generation cope with the loss of a public hero, and to pay tribute to mettle in the face of heartbreaking, premature loss — something its initial audiences understood all too well.

Despite Runyon's ominous forward, Pride of the Yankees is a spirit-bolstering comedy long before it's a gut-wrenching tragedy. Gary Cooper plays Lou Gehrig as Christopher Reeve would play Clark Kent decades later — suppressing an unmistakable physical prowess behind a sheepish social awkwardness. Much like Superman, Gehrig launches baseballs through glass windows thought to be safely out of reach. He doesn't swear. He doesn't assume victory. And he doesn't turn down home run requests from kids at the hospital. Gehrig's only apparent flaw is his willingness to avoid conflict with his domineering mother by any means necessary, even if it means little white lies. (When Gehrig joins a minor league team in Hartford, he allows his mother to mistakenly believe that he's gone to Harvard.) But such vices only accentuate a man's purity. Written by Jo Swerling and Herman J. Mankiewicz, from a story by Paul Gallico, much of the film observes Gehrig's romance with Eleanor Twitchell (Teresa Wright), which begins with playful teasing and innocent chastity and leaps straight to outright devotion and commitment. (Years into their marriage, Lou and Eleanor still can't stand to be out of one another's sight.) It's a relationship as consistent as Gehrig himself, who famously played in a then-record 2,130 consecutive games.

Field of Nightmares: Fear Strikes Out

"All my life I've been splitting my gut to please you, and I never could."

Booming and severe, the opening strains of Elmer Bernstein's score for Fear Strikes Out seem more appropriate for a biopic about Attila the Hun than a baseball movie. But then Fear Strikes Out isn't your typical baseball movie. Loosely based on actual events, it tells the story of Jimmy Piersall, whose battle with bipolar disorder — back in an era when mental disorders tended to get filed under less sympathetic catch-alls like "insanity" — was the distinguishing characteristic of his 17-year major league career. For all the movies that find romance in baseball, from The Natural to Bull Durham to Field of Dreams to The Rookie to, well, almost all of them, Fear Strikes Out is the counterbalanace. It replaces joy with stress, turns cheers into jeers and makes a game feel like a gauntlet. A story of shadows and demons, Fear Strikes Out could only have been made in black and white. The lush green grass of a baseball field would have added an air of optimism that doesn't belong.

Directed by Robert Mulligan in his feature film debut, Fear Strikes Out establishes its nightmarish tone from its opening scenes, which find a young Jimmy Piersall practicing his game on a small, dusty front yard ringed by a chain-link fence that has the feel of a prison camp. Under the watchful eye of his warden-like father, John, Jimmy grows up with all of the flexibility of an inmate. Bed times are strict. Fun with friends is essentially forbidden. And Jimmy's successes merely serve as indicators of his failures. John micromanages his son under the guise of mentorship, firm in the belief that he's improving Jimmy's chances of becoming a successful professional ballplayer. And to some degree he is. But at the same time John is stripping away Jimmy's humanity, holding his son captive to the belief that the only acceptable outcome of his life is to be a starring outfielder for the Boston Red Sox — a destination that John presses Jimmy to reach sooner rather than later.

Brother Wes Built the Ark: Moonrise Kingdom

Given that Moonrise Kingdom unfolds under the metaphorical shadow of a literal oncoming storm, it's only fitting that the two main characters in this childhood romance should meet at a children's opera about Noah and the great flood. After walking out of the church where Noye's Fludde is being performed, past the pint-sized brightly costumed actors standing outside waiting to take the stage two-by-two, Sam discovers Suzy seated at a makeup mirror, dressed as a raven, and it's essentially love at first sight. But Noye's Fludde does more than just provide the setting for some symbolic meet-cute, or keep alive writer/director Wes Anderson's habit of staging (elaborately homespun) plays within plays. It also evokes Anderson's modus operandi. From his trademark cross-section sets, to his predilection for nostalgia-inducing trinkets, to his habit of suggesting character through distinctive costumes, what are Anderson's films if not giant arks for collecting, organizing and preserving various species (and artifacts) while providing them with sanctuary from the storm?

Whether that reading sheds new light on Anderson's body of work or merely confirms your previous view of one of the few modern filmmakers who lives up to the "auteur" label is of course up to you. But it seems to me that thinking of Anderson as a collector and preservationist — and I don't mean to imply I'm the first person to come up with that analysis — deflates the common criticism that suggests Anderson is stuck in a fantasy world of bygone nostalgia. There's nothing "stuck" about it. Anderson goes there eagerly, consciously, purposefully, like a historian goes into the past, because he continues to find significance there. No doubt, it would be interesting to see what an Anderson film would look like if he left the ark. No doubt, his idiosyncratic interests and cinematic approach keep him a niche artist in the meantime. (No doubt, the consistency of Anderson's films makes him a bit of a challenge to write about without retracing well-worn critical analyses or foolishly ignoring Anderson's signature flourishes.) But in the end all that matters is this: Anderson continues to find universal truths in his hermetically sealed world.

The Perfect Mismatch: Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Keira Knightley's biggest flaw as an actress is her perfectly beautiful face. Other actresses are cuter, more voluptuous or sexier on the whole, but no one else has features that look like instructional models for cosmetic surgeons: those high cheekbones, that tiny nose, that sharp jaw line, that toothy smile. Looking into Knightley's face is like staring into a spotlight; it blinds us to everything around it. No doubt, Knightley's incredible beauty has been a key component of her fast-rising Hollywood stardom, which began a decade ago with the sleeper hit Bend It Like Beckham, exploded a year later with The Pirates of the Caribbean and reached Oscar status with her Best Actress nomination for 2005's Pride & Prejudice, just to name a few highlights, but Knightley's gorgeousness makes it difficult for her to disappear inside her roles. She's a natural for playing objects of desire, as in Love Actually or Atonement, but when she plays someone damaged, such as in last year's A Dangerous Method, or merely plain, as in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, it's rarely love at first sight.

This is the long way around to pointing out that, on the surface of things, Knightley appears to be grossly miscast as Penny, the little bit damaged, little bit plain and little bit quirky young woman with a deadbeat boyfriend and a solid record collection who, thanks to Knightley, is still a lot gorgeous. Knightley doesn't just clash with her character, she's also at visual odds with her costar, Steve Carell, whose familiar everyman persona is so extraordinarily ordinary that he makes Jimmy Stewart look like, well, Cary Grant. Carell characters aren't supposed to be in love entanglements with Knightly characters. They're supposed to manage paper companies in Scranton and hold onto their virginity for several decades. They're supposed to be in love with women played by Amy Ryan, Catherine Keener or Tina Fey - attractive women, all of them, but not candidates to be the face of Chanel or a Russian romance saga. Carell is meant to play guys named Dodge, which is precisely what he does here. Knightley is meant to star opposite men who look like Ferraris.