Field of Dreams... cringey?

[ls7plus]

Originally Posted by quinnsryche

How can you not tear up when Ray and his dad "have a catch". OMG what a heart wrenching scene. Anybody who ever threw a ball with their dad would have to have a heart of stone not to get emotional over that. Oh, and The Natural SUCKS! What a stupid movie. When he hits the HR and the lights explode, probably the dumbest scene in any movie ever. Robert Redford is one of the most overrated actors of all time (especially in that movie).
I'm sure I'll get pasted for that one but I don't care.

I love 'em both, and have seen each about 5-6 times. By the way, in Bernard Malamud's novel, "The Natural," from which the movie was derived, Hobbs strikes out, instead of homering at the end. Malamud's theme was that we really just keep making the same mistakes over and over again, and never really learn!

Good thread,

Larry

[JollyElm]

I went to school up near Buffalo and there was a beach bar (yes, beach bar!!) in Silver Creek, I believe, that had a bunch of the heavy wooden paintings of 'fans' that were peppered into the background of the stadium scenes to make it look more packed. They had nothing there pointing them out, but there they were. Pretty cool. And War Memorial Stadium (The Rock or Rockpile) was an awesome site to see from the inside. Very old school baseball.

[seanofjapan]

I loved FoD when it came out and re-watched it a few times over the course of the 90s, but haven't seen it in about 20 years.

I've become reluctant to re-watch classics like that for fear that I'll discover they've lost their hold on me in the interim. Some movies age well, others don't. I'm not sure where on that spectrum FoD falls and don't want to test it, I have such fond memories of it but have become a bit less swayed by the romanticism at play in films like that as I've grown older and more cynical (sigh).

I do remember getting all choked up at that "you want to have a catch dad?" moment towards the end (I also used to get choked up at the end of a League of their Own where they are all old and go to visit the Hall of Fame exhibit and you see that picture of Tom Hanks' character with the notation indicating he had died a few years earlier. Loved that movie too).

As was mentioned above, the 80s-early 90s was a particularly good era for baseball films. I also have a soft spot for Mr. Baseball, today I live in Nagoya, the city in Japan where it was filmed.