Ask 411 Movies for 3.24.08: We Need a Pitcher Not a Belly Itcher!

Posted by Leonard Hayhurst on 03.24.2008

Field of Dreams, The Natural, Major League, Tony Curtis gets beaten up by Antonio Inoki, Patrick Renna plays basketball, an animated bat starts a war, my DVD collection goes up in smoke and Leonard Nimoy loves Hobbits


Director Anthony Minghella, 54, died Tuesday, March 18, in London of a brain hemorrhage. He won the Oscar for best director in 1997 for The English Patient and was nominated for the honor again for The Talented Mr. Ripley. He also wrote and directed Cold Mountain for which Renee Zellweger won the Oscar for best supporting actress. His last completed film The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency is slated to open later this year.



Author Arthur C. Clarke, 90, died Tuesday, March 18, at his home in Sri Lanka after suffering breathing problems. He wrote the short story "The Sentinel" that led to the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey. He wrote three follow up novels to that along with several other novels, short stories and non-fiction work. 2010 was also made into a film and Rendezvous with Rama is currently in talks to star Morgan Freeman with director David Fincher.



Actor Paul Scofield, 86, died Wednesday, March 19, of leukemia in a hospital near his home in southern England. He won the Oscar for best actor in 1967 for A Man for All Seasons. He was nominated for best supporting actor in 1995 for Quiz Show. He also won an Emmy in 1969 for outstanding single time male lead performance for "Male of the Species." He is survived by his wife, Joy Parker, whom he marred May 15, 1943 and their two children.



I received a press release on Steve McQueen Days March 28 and 29 in Slater, Missouri. Guests include his wife Barbara, friend Richard Martin, biographer Marshall Terrill and stuntman Loren Janes. There will also be an auction, classic car and motorcycle show and a McQueen look alike contest. Go to www.cityofslater.com for more information.

From YouTube this week we continue with odd music videos with Leonard Nimoy's "Ballad of Bilbo Baggins." If you thought William Shatner couldn't sing, just you wait.



The song was also used as the theme for the 411 Mania Movies Zone Podcast this week. It's a good transition to a shameless plug. We talk about things we hate that other people like. My choices were Brad Pitt and The Matrix. That should get you to listen.

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Q: Hello Mr. Hayhurst,

First of all, I'm going to have to take you to task for calling Anne of Green Gables "Basically, the Disney people were trying to recreate Pollyanna." I don't know where you're getting your information from, because there are two things wrong with that sentence.

1) Anne of Green Gables the novel, which turns 100 this year (Written by Lucy Maud Montgomery), was published 5 years before Pollyanna. It's considered one of Canada's greatest contributions to children's literature.

2) Disney didn't make Anne of Green Gables in 1985, it was produced by the CBC and aired on that network as a miniseries. Did Disney get the American distribution? I would have been 4 at the time and I'm from Canada, so I wouldn't know

Upon re-reading your statement, I suppose you could have meant that Disney was trying to re-create the success of Pollyanna, but I still feel that these facts should be known.

Okay, question time.

1) The chunky kid from the Big Green, I think he was in another Disneyesque movie, playing the bully, where the one scene I remember is during a big basketball game, attached an RC strip to the basketball and controlled from the stands via radio control. It caused the ball to do all sorts of stupid things like roll around the rim, go under the rim, and then back in to give his team the lead. Any suggestions?

2) I may have asked this before, and if I did, I'm sorry. This is an animated tale involving a war between mammals and birds, and it followed the story of a bat, who couldn't decide which side he was on.

3) If your movie collection (counting DVD, VHS, Laserdisc, and any other media) was wiped out by a huge natural disaster, which ones would you:
a) rush out immediately to replace
b) could not replace due to limited availability/unavailability/rarity
c) would not really care about because you don't know for the life of you why you bought it in the first place?

Thank you very much, keep up the good work, and in response to the guy who posted that this column pales in comparison to the Wrestling one, this is the best column on this website, especially when you have questions to answer.

-Vince

A: I have another Anne of Green Gables correction to make courtesy of Val. Colleen Dewhurst played Marilla. Shirley was Anne's last name.

I am aware that the movie is based on a novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery. It was published in 1908 and was based on a news article Montgomery read of an elderly couple who was sent a girl instead of a boy for adoption and her own childhood. You were correct in that I meant that Disney was trying to recreate Pollyanna in doing a movie with the same basic principles. However, that statement appears in error as Disney didn't make the film. It did appear on the Disney channel in the US and was distributed by them for home video and DVD, as did the sequels and the series "Road to Avonlea." Disney usually doesn't mess with stuff that isn't theirs, so I assumed they made it. My error there.

The fat kid from The Big Green is Patrick Renna, who was also the fat kid in The Sandlot. I believe your movie is Boys Klub from 2001. Mario (Chauncey Leopardi) is shipped off to San Francisco to his aunt (Ashley Graham) after his dad (Beau Bridges) gets a big promotion. He befriends a group of inner city kids and they form a basketball team, entering the city tournament as huge underdogs.

According to storydove of the imdb "I Got to Know" boards, your animated film about a bat was actually a short-lived Canadian television series from 2003. "Silverwing" is about a young bat named Shade who rejects the truce long ago that was established between birds and mammals that banished bats to the night since they would not pick a side. The owls want Shade turned over to them, but his colony won't give him up. The owls destroy their village and the bats migrate. Shade gets separated and meets a female bat named Mariana on an island. They go off to find Shade's colony while dealing with the repercussions of Shade stirring up the old feud.

I'm pretty much just actively collecting DVD's right now and if something did happen I would probably start upgrading to Blu-Ray. Of course, some of the bootleg stuff I have would be hard to replace. I also have several DVD's autographed, which would be hard to replace and probably the ones I would miss most. I have Any Which You Can signed by William Smith, The Princess Bride signed by Chris Sarandon, Phantasm signed by Angus Scrimm, Cannonball Run II signed by Richard Kiel, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark signed by Elvira, The Misfits signed by Kevin McCarthy, UHF signed by Kevin McCarthy and Emo Phillips and a few others.

Of stuff I have no idea why I bought it, the reason is that it came out of the Wal-Mart dump bin and was cheap. A few of those movies would be Three Ninjas: High Noon at Mega-Mountain, The Avengers, Cobra, Family of Cop III, Killer Tomatoes Eat France, Legend of Boggy Creek, One Night at McCool's, Possums and Money Train.

Of what I would replace first, I don't know. When I switched from VHS to DVD, I just bought things as I went and ran across them. I might try to replace some of my bigger box sets first, like the Indiana Jones and Back to the Future trilogies. Probably some of television stuff too, like "Quantum Leap" and "Chapelle's Show" that I have the whole run of.

I wanted to continue on with colors in film titles this week, but I just didn't have the time. A few things came up, including me preparing for two fantasy baseball drafts. You might think that's lame I spend so much time on it, but money was on the line. So in honor of that, let's look back at some baseball flicks we've talked about before.



Field of Dreams (1989): A very magical family film that was one of the first to explore the mythology of the game and how that has been threaded into the fabric of America and the American dream. While I never thought Kevin Costner looked totally comfortable in Bull Durham he is perfectly suited to play the perplexed everyman who turns a portion of his Iowa cornfield into a ball diamond and has the ghosts of long dead players coming to play on it. James Earl Jones, Ray Liotta and Burt Lancaster, in his last feature film, are magnificent in support and seem to really grasp the melancholy flavor and almost dream like state that director Phil Robinson was going for. It really tells you why baseball is America's pastime and why so many people identify strongly with the sport.



Major League (1989): Sort of the flipside to Dreams, this is a ribald, broad comedy that looks at the commercialism and egotism of major league baseball with a knowing wink. It's one of the best scripts I've ever seen for a comedy. It creates specific characters that would go one to become sports film stereotypes; the overly religious guy, the punk kid, the complete weirdo, the broken down has been, the cocky superstar who's not as good as he thinks he is. It's dialogue and game situations are true to life and add realism that helps to offset the broad humor. Most importantly, it follows the conventions of screenwriting 101 to a T. You quickly and precisely introduce the characters and plot while getting into the now of the narrative. For instance, in the restaurant scene where Jake looks over the balcony and sees Lynn he's asked who she is and he says "My wife…well, almost." That tells you exactly what their relationship was and is. It relates all the info you need to know in four words. The finale is also highly emotional and perfectly caps the character arcs of the characters, just a funny and good movie.



The Natural (1984): Perhaps a little soapy and a shift from the novel with Robert Redford taking too much control, but I love the film. The story is fantastic, drawing from real life elements and mixing in Arthurian legend. It demonstrates how sports figures are our new folk legends and heroes replacing the likes of frontiersmen such as Davey Crocket or war generals like Ulysses S. Grant. So many elements of the film have become iconic and universally known even to those who haven't seen the film; like the lightening striking the tree and Roy making a bat out of it and the climatic scene of him drilling one into the lights and sparks bathing the field. The last twenty minutes chokes me up and has me on the edge of my seat every time I see it.



The Babe Ruth Story (1948): One of the most unintentionally hilarious films I've seen and one where most baseball film clichés and spoofs come from. You know that scene where the guy promises to do something impossible to a dying child, this is the movie that created that. It plays fast and loose with the Babe's life in order to make him a humble humanitarian when he was really a drunken, carousing loud mouth. Other great bits has Ruth rushing a dog to the hospital in the middle of a game after he hits him with a line drive and going into a bar and ordering a milk. Ruth is played by William Bendix, who has the right size and general features, but didn't even know how to play baseball until he walked onto the set the first day. His batting stance and swing is pathetic and really distracts.



Fear Strikes Out (1957): That's one of the best bad titles ever. Anthony Perkins (Psycho) plays real life Red Sox Jimmy Piersall who suffered from mental illness and had a nervous breakdown. He sought treatment and eventually returned to the majors. While Piersall's story is fascinating and Perkins is very good in the title role, the facts are so distorted that Piersall disowned the film and verbally bashed it upon release. Not able to deal with the fact that Piersall was actually sick, they pin everything on his hard driving father, played by Karl Malden. Piersall denied that his dad was overbearing or mean and pushed him to play baseball when he didn't want to. It's standard Hollywood gloss and sugar coating that tries to be dramatic but winds up being one of many standard biopics that plays out the way the studio suits wanted it to.



The Bad News Bears Goes to Japan (1978): I wanted to throw this one in here for you guys because it features Tony Curtis getting his ass handed to him by Antonio Inoki. In this third installment, Curtis, a small time conman, takes over the team and flies them to Japan to take on their national little league champs. Many of the kids from the first two movies don't appear here and the new players aren't really setoff. Jackie Earl Haley returns as Kelly Leak and is given a useless romantic subplot with a Japanese girl. If there's one thing a Bad News Bears movie needs, it's a romantic subplot. This was during the period where Curtis was working for cocaine and it shows as he alternates between looking half dead and half annoyed throughout the movie.

Don't die.

"Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all."