{"id":294,"date":"2009-04-15T22:22:21","date_gmt":"2009-04-16T03:22:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.broadstreetbelievers.com\/?p=294"},"modified":"2009-04-15T22:22:21","modified_gmt":"2009-04-16T03:22:21","slug":"bsb-movie-review-sugar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/?p=294","title":{"rendered":"BSB Movie Review: Sugar"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"sugar\"Tonight, I went out to\u00a0a theater\u00a0and saw Sugar<\/em>, a movie about\u00a0a fictional Dominican baseball player and his path from the baseball academy in his native country to the minor leagues in the Midwest.\u00a0 One of the cliches that’s repeated numerous times during the film is, “It’s just a game”.\u00a0 Of course, as we all saw just two days ago, with the passing of the great Harry Kalas, it is not “just a game”.\u00a0 For many people, it is much, much more than that, and this film does a great job of showing how that’s\u00a0true for\u00a0Latino players trying to make it to the\u00a0big leagues.<\/p>\n

Sugar<\/em>is the second film from\u00a0the writing\/directing duo of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (their first film, Half Nelson<\/em>,\u00a0has nothing to do with sports, but is also very good).\u00a0 While the movie is undoubtedly baseball-centric, it\u00a0really isn’t a “sports movie”.\u00a0 It’s a coming-of-age story about a young man that happens to play baseball.\u00a0 It gives an inside look into what Latino ballplayers go through as they leave their families\u00a0behind and are shipped\u00a0off to a strange place, and how the “system” of Major League Baseball may or may not\u00a0be treating them\u00a0fairly.<\/p>\n

The main character, Miguel “Sugar” Santos, is played by Algenis Perez Soto, who is not an actor.\u00a0 The filmmakers interviewed hundreds of Dominicans\u00a0before settling on him, and he gives an outstanding performance.\u00a0 One of the\u00a0things that stood out to me is how different the experience of minor league baseball is for poor players from poor countries.\u00a0\u00a0Most of them have no skills other than playing baseball.\u00a0 They\u00a0have the hopes of their entire family on their shoulders and there are basically\u00a0only two outcomes:\u00a0make the majors and become wildly rich and famous, or be\u00a0released and be left with\u00a0virtually no\u00a0options\u00a0after spending\u00a0most of their young lives in blind pursuit of baseball success.\u00a0 The difference is obvious\u00a0during one scene when Sugar is talking to a teammate who was a first-round pick out of Stanford.\u00a0 Sugar asks him what he would do if baseball didn’t work out, and the teammate says that maybe he’d go to graduate school.\u00a0 Granted, there are many American minor-leaguers that don’t have a degree from Stanford, but\u00a0they generally have a lot more options than your average Dominican, and it doesn’t hurt that they can speak English.\u00a0 The stakes are a lot higher for these guys, and you certainly feel for Sugar when he’s getting booed\u00a0during a rough outing for his minor-league team.<\/p>\n

All in all,\u00a0it’s an interesting look into baseball’s pipeline to Latin America, and it also delves into more general issues of immigration and integration into America.\u00a0 Check it out if you get a chance.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tonight, I went out to\u00a0a theater\u00a0and saw Sugar, a movie about\u00a0a fictional Dominican baseball player and his path from the baseball academy in his native country to the minor leagues in the Midwest.\u00a0 One of the cliches that’s repeated numerous … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[571],"tags":[571,572],"class_list":["post-294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bsb-movie-review","tag-bsb-movie-review","tag-sugar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}