sugar

It took me over a week to watch this movie, but not because it wasn't good. No, it's just that it's 90% in Spanish, so unless your conversational Spanish is up to it, you kinda have to read the subtitles. And it is a known and proven fact that reading the subtitles while I'm in bed leads to sleep in fifteen minutes or less. Nevertheless, early this morning I managed to finish watching the whole film.

Now, this movie involves two of my favorite blog topics, baseball and the DR. I guess anyone who's even a casual baseball fan has heard of the "baseball academies" in the Dominican and the obsession with the game down there, but most of us have never thought much of the thousands and thousands of kids who are good enough to get a shot but not good enough to be Pedro Martinez or Big Papi. What happens when you plunk down a nineteen year old kid from some backwater village who speaks maybe ten words of English into the middle of (backwater) Iowa to play A ball? For example, Sugar, who is introduced to ordering French toast off the breakfast menu his very first morning at extended spring training is then doomed to ordering French toast for many days (phone call home: "How's the food?" "Okay. Kind of sweet.") until a kindly waitress brings him three kinds of eggs on the house and teaches him what they are. ("These are scrambled...scrambled...")

Anyway, the movie avoids the typical heartwarming sports movie cliches where our protagonist wins the big game against all odds, etc, in favor of a more realistic take. On the more negative side, all the main characters are portrayed by non-actor (and ball-playing) Dominicans and while the kid who plays Sugar does okay with his role, he doesn't have the charisma or presence to really carry off the scenes where so much is supposed to be shown through the expression on his face, the look in his eyes, not the dialogue.

But, all in all, worth watching if you're interested in baseball, immigration, examination of the American Dream, and so forth and so on.

xoxo