Well, I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m sick and tired of seeing my beautiful webpage soiled with all this green, pretentious writing.  It’s time I turn this petry dish of insightful fungus into a beautiful, blue lagoon of awesomeness.  This is the way God intended webpages to look when he made Al Gore invent the internets.

As every red-blooded American male knows (meaning that TC was of course totally unaware), today was opening day for Major League Baseball.  Yes, I am aware that the Phillies technically opened the season last night therefore making yesterday opening day, but seeing as how I hate them and all, I refuse to acknowledge it.  So far as opening days go, this one was exceptional as far as the LCD was concerned.  Seeing Philly get their asses handed to them by Derek Lowe was awesome, as was watching C.C. Sabathia implode in spectacular fashion for the Yankees.  Normally I only care about the Yankees the six times of the year when they play the Mets.  After the Yankees signed C.C. Sabathia and A.J. Burnett, however, all I heard was how the Mets would be lucky to come in 4th place if they played in the  mighty American League East instead of the basically minor leagues of the National League East division.  It was just wonderful to see them get raped by one of the worst teams in all of baseball on opening day with their new ace pitcher stinking it up on the hill.

And the Mets? What about the Mets?  They were beautiful.  Ok, so maybe they left a ton of men on base.  Maybe they were playing the lowly Cincinatti Reds.  But Daniel Murphy, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite players on the team, came through when it counted twice and Johann Santana was absolutely filthy on the mound, quickly regaining his late season form from last year after a somewhat shaky 1st inning.  The best part?  The bullpen was perfect.  After two seasons of watching the end of Mets games from the comfort of a warm tub, razor blades in hand, it was almost orgasmic to watch J.J. Putz and K-Rod come in and slam the door shut with ease.

But what am I blabbing on about? This ain’t a sports blog, it’s a film blog.  In order to commemorate what was just about the perfect first day of baseball, I’m going to talk about some of my favorite baseball movies of all-time.  These aren’t in any particular order and I’m definitely leaving off some classics (Field of Dreams, The Natural, Bad News Bears, and Eight Men Out, to name a few).  It’s not that I don’t also love those films, it’s just that I haven’t seen some of them in a long time and I wouldn’t want to deny you of my best efforts.  If I leave something off you want to see my opinion of, drop me a comment and assuming the Mets don’t implode at seasons end, I’ll be sure to review it during the playoffs.

So without further adieu, I present to you my take on some of my favorite baseball movies.

I’m normally pretty rabidly against women playing men’s sports and anything that encourages them to.  There’s a reason women have their own separate leagues: because they can’t compete with men athletically.  I don’t care what you PCers say, it’s absolutely true.  I don’t care if major league hitters can’t hit smoking hot Jennie Finch when she’s pitching underhand from 45 feet away and distracting them with her unbelievable hotness.  Women just don’t belong on the baseball diamond.

In the case of A League of Their Own, however, I can make an exception.   It’s the story of the first women’s professional baseball league,  formed during World War II.  While the men were off doing cooler things like killing Germans and blowing up Japan, the women did their duty by taking the men’s places on the baseball diamond. This movie had just about everything I look for in a film: hot chicks running around in skirts, sports and some minor child abuse to top it all off.  A League of Their Own was made when Madonna was still hot, as opposed to the  Skeletor facsimile she has become.  Geena Davis was enchanting with her boyish frame and elvish features.  And Tom Hanks was awesome as a former major leager turned alcoholic coach.

If I can stomach and even appreciate a movie about a bunch of skirts playing a man’s game, you know it’s awesome.

Bull Durham is loosely based on the life of Steve Dalkowski, perhaps the most famous baseball player to never make it to the majors.  He was probably the hardest throwing pitcher to ever play the game according to witness accounts, but he had absolutely no control.  I won’t go into his stat lines, but rest assured they are the stuff of legends.

Nuke LaLoosh, played by Tim Robbins, is Steve Dalkowski’s fictitious film doppelganger.  Kevin Costner plays Crash Davis, an aged player chasing the all-time minor league HR record brought in to the team to mentor LaLoosh.  Susan Sarandon completes the love triangle as Annie Savoy, Nuke’s sadistic cocktease of a muse and romantic interest for the both of them.  Bull Durham is really a story about male-bonding as Crash’s coaching along with a case of Sarandon-induced blue balls help Nuke reach a place Steve Dalkowski never could: the major leagues.

It’s a fun film.  Costner is great as the disgruntled, worn down mentor and Sarandon is equally impressive as a minor league baseball team groupie.  This is the film where Sarandon and Robbins met, thus beginning their, well, not marriage but whatever they call the time they spend together when they’re not making movies or getting arrested for political protesting.

Yes, I really am going to tell you that I’m a huge fan of Fever Pitch.  I don’t care if it has Jimmy Fallon in it or if it’s a pretty crappy romantic comedy from the Farrelly Brothers.  This movie belongs on any list of great baseball films because of the historical season it chronicles.  Only the most small-minded of Yankees fans (is there really any other kind? ZING!) can’t appreciate the miraculous comeback the Red Sox orchestrated in 2004.

That’s right, encapsulated within the walls of this otherwise sub-par romantic comedy is quite possibly the greatest sports story ever told.  Trailing the Yankees 3 games to none in the American League Championship Series, a deficit that had never been overcome in the history of Major League Baseball, the Boston Redsox rallied to win the series 4 games to 3 and advance to the World Series, which they also won by sweeping the St. Louis Cardinals.  This effectively ended the mythic “Curse of the Bambino”(if you don’t know what this is, just give up on life), an 86-year-old hex that had prevented the Red Sox from winning a World Series Championship.

The series against the Yankees was quite possibly the most dramatic series in the history of sports.  I’m sure one day volumes upon volumes will be written about all of the great moments, the extra-innings games, the gutsy performances on both sides.  Films aren’t going to be far behind.  But for now, we’ll have to make due with  Fever Pitch and Drew Barrymore looking insanely gorgeous with her fire-engine red hair.

Major League is just like the Bad News Bears all grown up.  A group of misfits and has beens is thrown together by a ruthless bitch of an owner in a bid to get the Majors to allow her to move the team to Miami.  The team, of course, discovers her evil plan and sets about winning their division to spite her.  You know, not for personal pride or anything.

This movie is just good, dirty fun (I’m not a big believer in the phrase  “good, clean fun”.  In my experience, the two hardly ever mix).  The star-studded cast includes Charlie Sheen, Corbin Bernsen, Tom Berenger, Rene Russo, Chelcie Ross, Wesley Snipes and Dennis Haysbert and all deliver memorable performances as quirky characters.  Major League isn’t poetry.  It isn’t great filmmaking.  But it’s a shitload of good times committed to film.

This movie makes my list from a purely nostalgic standpoint.  After his broken arm heals oddly, 12-year-old Henry Rowengartner (Thomas Ian Nicholas!) discovers that he can throw a fastball upwards of 103 miles per hour.  He is signed by the Chicago Cubs and becomes a star pitcher in the major leagues.

Pretty much, this movie is a piece of crap, but a 13-year-old LCD loved it and 29-year-old LCD carries on with the inexplicable love affair.  I spent days, weeks and months trying to convince my brothers to break my arm so I also could also skyrocket straight to stardom as a major league pitcher after I saw this movie.  Of course they wouldn’t oblige.  I could hardly believe it.  Years of unsolicited abuse and now, when I was finally literally asking for it, they wouldn’t so much as give me a charlie horse.  It was maddening.

I suppose it’s probably a good thing anyway.  Chances are I would never have thrown a pitch in the bigs and I most assuredly would never have starred in American Pie either.  But still, the world will never know what could have been.  And that is the biggest crime of all.

The Sandlot also makes this list mainly on the strength of its nostalgic value.  However, whereas Rookie of the Year is a festering pile of crap outside of my own personal memories, The Sandlot enjoys the benefit of actually being a pretty good movie.

Scott Smalls is the new kid in town.  Friendless and a total spaz(worse than TC, if you can believe that), he falls in with a group of baseball obsessed neighborhood kids who teach him everything they know about the game.  When he offers to play with his father’s Babe Ruth signed baseball and consequently loses it, they help him to retrieve it from the lair of the Beast, a legendary neighborhood dog with a supposed taste for human flesh.

This is a film about growing up, developing friendships and the naivete of youth.  It’s superb in its ability to bring you back to that level of innocence and remember what it’s like to be a pre-pubescent kid whose biggest problem is not knowing who the Great Bambino is.  Well, I’d imagine The Sandlot would be if in fact you were ever possessed of that level of innocence.  I was fortunate enough to have never been burdened with such inconvenient human trappings.

That just about sums up my short list of must-see baseball films.  It is by no means complete nor are any of them are great examples of the art of film, but all of them are more awesome than anything TC would parade out in front of you.  God, I hate him.

Tulpan – Sergey Dvortsevoy – Kazakhstan

A too realistic story of a young sheep-herder searching for a wife on the Kazakhstan steppe. Overlong and slow, the film revels in its realism to ill effect. Lots of shots of sheep and grazing and herding. Not much else. The emotion is ground away by the direction, and we are left with a predictable mess of a film that is hard to watch and even harder to like.

Julia – Érick Zonca – France

This english language film has Tilda Swinton hamming it up as a raging alcoholic on the brink of ruining her life when she decides to participate in a kidnapping. It’s a good performance, but her decisions are made with unclear motivations and the film goes in strange directions for too long. You get the point about half-way through, so the last hour is really just a glorified action film. It’s still an intense film with some solid direction.

Sita Sings the Blues – Nina Paley – USA

A beautifully stylized retelling of the Indian legend of Sita and Rama. It’s a cute little story told with humor and pinash. Unfortunately, the story really only has about 30 minutes of content. The film is stretched far too thin, with lots of unneeded additions padding it out to almost 90 minutes. Its unique and well-made, but it really should have been a short.

Jury Duty – Edouard Niermans – France

Written by Didier Le Pêcheur (News From the Good Lord), this made-for-TV film was a great premise. A man murders a young girl, and gets away with it. Due to circumstances of the times in 60′s France, a young Algerian is convicted of the crime. The real murderer has to be on the jury during the trial. It’s almost Lifetime movie stuff, but the script is smart and the plot points and conclusion are genuinely convincing. It’s a solid film that has much more to it then just the summary.

A Beautiful Person – Christophe Honoré – France

A very French romance. Love and affairs between partners at a college. Students and students, teachers and teachers, teachers and students. It’s an uninteresting romp filled with vain uninteresting characters. When the drama gets heavy, I was too disenchanted with the characters to care. The Nick Drake soundtrack was interesting, but thats about it.

Before the Fall – F. Javier Gutierrez – Spain

It starts off with a promising premise.  A meteor is going to destroy Earth in three days. Riots and craziness happen as the public panics. In a remote Spanish town, a family is awaiting the arrival of a child-killer who escaped from jail and is coming for revenge against the one who got him captured. Unfortunately, the film devolves into a slasher flick and makes many odd choices on its way to an unfulfilling climax. It also had too many power zooms.

Burning Plain – Guillermo Arriaga – USA

Arriaga’s trademark screenplay structure is at work here in his directorial debut. This time, his low-key style works even better than Innurita’s in your face melodrama. The screenplay is solid and reveals information slowly and at the right time. The story follows a few different people from all walks of life, and goes back and forth in time until a complete picture is made. Very well done.

The Equation of Love and Death – Cao Baoping- China

A woman is obsessed with the boyfriend who left her 4 years ago. She is a cabdriver who keeps pictures of him and thinks there may be some code in the letters he has been sending. Things take a turn when she is kidnapped by some passengers. This film was all over the place. The kidnapping has nothing to do the with the plot. The missing boyfriend story is strange and senseless and the ending has no real value. A good performance by the main character is wasted.

My Dear Enemy – Lee Yoon-ki – South Korea

A woman finds her exboyfriend and tries to get the money he owes her back. He takes her on a journey to borrow money from other people to do it. This film angered me. It wasn’t bad. The two leads were good, but it was achingly slow. It had a destination, but it took its damn time getting there. Even if it wasn’t my 44th film in a row, I still would just have wanted the movie to end. It didn’t need to take it’s time since it was so predictable.

Rudo y Cursi – Carlos Cuarón – Mexico

Rudo and Cursi are the nicknames or two poor Spanish brothers who get recruited into the wild world of professional Mexican soccer. There meteoric rise to fame, one as a goalkeeper and one as a striker is slightly unpredictable but very entertaining. Everything that happens in this film makes sense, and the characters feel real. A very fun film that doesn’t really bring anything new to the table, but it still feels fresh and interesting anyway.

The Girl From Monaco – Anne Fontaine – France

A criminal lawyer takes on a high-profile murder case, but the drama happens more outside the courtroom than in. He befriends his newly assigned body guard, and falls for a beautiful weather girl who turns his world upside down. It’s an enjoyable comedic romp until it unforunately takes an ill-advised dark turn and ends up in odd territory that doesn’t feel right.

God’s Forgotten Town – Juan Carlos Claver – Spain

A horror film about a town where all the residents dissappeared 50 years ago. A small TV crew is sent in to do story and gets wrapped up in a story involving ghosts, nazis and a holy relic. It’s not as good as it sounds. The story is uninspired and the direction and style are flawed. It had a promising opening, but quickly turned into a third-rate horror film.

Bitter & Twisted – Christopher Weekes – Australia

The death of a young man causes problems for his family, and for his girlfriend. This amatuer effort has some good performances, but not much else. The characters are not fleshed out, and those that are have the same stories of characters in hundreds of other films. It has its moments but is ultimately forgettable.

King of Ping Pong – Jens Jonsson – Sweden

Two brothers contend with the snow, their drunk father, their mother, her boyfriend and each other in this slow drama. The overweight older brother is the best ping pong player at the rec center, but he still gets picked on. The younger brother is a ladies man who is clearly the apple of his father’s eye. He seems to have it made. Unfortunately, the older brother finds out a secret that can change all that. This meandering film loses its focus after the first few minutes and never really regains it. The two leads are good, but the film has no footing and goes on way too long.

Emodiment of Evil – José Mojica Marins – Brazil

Coffin Joe! Those familiar with the first three Coffin Joe films from the 60′s and 70′s will be happy to see the titular horror icon is back. This film starts when Coffin Joe is let out of jail after 40 years. He quickly gets a gang together and sets out to make himself a son. The film is full of the expectied surreal and graphic elements. It’s a good mix of modern sets, slick gore, and Coffin Joe’s old-school horror charm. A worthy conclusion(?) to a seminal horror franchise.

A Game for Girls – Matteo Rovere – Italy

A group of rich highschool girls go through life controlling and manipulating all the people around them.  Things come to a head when the new young teacher tries to help them when one of them tries to commit suicide. The leader sees her lifestyle falling apart and sees this teacher as the cause. She fights back in the only way she knows how. It’s a fair film with some major problems. The tone is off for most of it, and none of the characters have any redeeming qualities.  It’s nothing unique.

The Hurt Locker – Kathryn Bigelow – USA

It’s an action movie at heart, but a very good one. The film follows a bomb diffusion squads last days of deployment during the Iraq war.  The characters are beleivable, and the tension is palpable. It’s everything you could want, minus any real sentiment. I don’t know how accurate it is, but it sure felt authentic and it had me on the edge of my seat the whole time.

The Tour - Goran Markovic – Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina

A small theater company gets caught in the middle of a war, and end up performing for both sides while they are trying to find their way home. It’s well acted and directed, but the characters make some illogical choices just to move the plot along. There is a message about equality that runs through the  whole thing, but its just too in your face.

White Night Wedding – Baltasar Kormákur – Iceland

This is a cleverly told tale of a professer and his failing marraige, told parallel to the story of his second wedding. Information is revealed nicely using this parallel structure, and both tales climax at the end of the film. Besides the nice structure, the film has some great characters and some good dark-comedy running through the whole thing. It was a nice little enjoyable film that stumbles a bit at the end but has much going for it.

Able – Marc Robert – USA

Amatuer horror tripe. Worthless. Still, I have to give all the people involved credit. They at least they had the guts and drive to make a feature film! And they got it into a film festival! I just wish I didn’t have to see it.