What a weird Sundance, yesterday, Wednesday, I finally made it to my first movie.
Well, I wasn't able to get a locals pass or ticket package for the first time in years and I just started my grad school classes last weekend and would've missed Friday, Saturday and part of Sunday - about 8 films.
Anyway, my first movie for this year was "Sugar" brought to us by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the fine folks who have brought us the short "Gowanus, Brooklyn" and it's feature length follow up "Half Nelson."
"Sugar" is, in the words of Ryan Fleck at the Q&A, "just a baseball movie."
(Baseball, movie -- two words that rock my world)
It is, of course, more than "just" that. "Sugar" is the story of Miguel "Sugar" Santos (Algenis Perez Soto), a young Dominican pitcher who has been signed from a development camp in the Dominican Republic by the fictive Kansas City Knights. With minimal English skills he and some of his compatriots are sent to Phoenix for Spring Training. He does well enough that he skips Rookie League ball and is sent straight to 1A in Iowa, where he starts strong. After he is injured and has a hard time coming back Sugar runs away to New York, to find his friend who was cut from the team a few weeks earlier.
I enjoyed this movie, but after sleeping on it I saw so many threads that could've been stronger: the contrast between the bargain basement Dominican Sugar and the million dollar baby second baseman who graduated from Stanford; language and cultural barriers in Iowa while he lives with an older couple who speak almost no Spanish; what to do when the dream (whatever dream it is) falls apart...
It is also nice to be reminded that just because a movie doesn't have the best of all possible endings, it doesn't mean it doesn't have a happy ending.
It's not the best baseball movie ever (in my opinion that would have to be "Bull Durham") and it isn't the best immigrant story ever but "Sugar" is fairly good at being both.
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