Sure, it’s for kids, and maybe a lot of adults will find it cloying. But I liked it; so there.
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Sometimes, a guy´s just gotta listen. I had never seen "The Sandlot" before. I didn´t want to see "The Sandlot." The DVD sat on my desk for a month while I found other things to watch and review. Meanwhile, my film students unanimously told me how good it was. And my wife watched it one night while I was busy, and she told me how good it was. Did I listen? When I finally got around to it, guess what? It is good. It is fun. It´s touching and heartwarming and sentimental and funny. Sure, it´s for kids, and maybe a lot of adults will find it cloying. But I liked it; so there.
This 1993 film´s target audience is pretty easy: kids who don´t always feel like they fit in and grownups who recall times in their childhood when they had trouble fitting in. Of course, that includes practically everybody, so the movie has a wide potential market. If it had attempted to make more imaginative and insightful comments on the condition of the outsider, it might even have attained classic status by now. But it´s content to tell a simple story, stretch it a bit (OK, a lot), and let it stand on its own slim merits. Fortunately, those merits include a simplicity of plot, which in itself can be refreshing, and sympathetic characters, which are always welcome.
The story is about a boy named Scotty Smalls (Tom Guiry), narrated in voice-over by a grownup Scotty (Arless Howard) many years later. The voice is somewhat grating at first, but you get used to it. The flashback year is everybody´s nostalgic favorite, 1962 (remember "American Graffiti"? "Animal House"?). Scotty´s in fifth grade, and he and his parents have just moved into a new, middle-class suburb. His step dad (Dennis Leary) is always busy and doesn´t have much time for him, and his mom (Karen Allen) wants him to make new friends. Scotty wants desperately to fit in and not be a goofus, but the other kids in the area are into baseball and he can neither throw nor catch a ball. He´s a whiz with an Erector set but a fizzle with sports. He´s kind of a nerd, actually. When he´s accused by the other boys of probably always getting straight A´s, he admits he "got a B once, sorta." The boys in the neighborhood think Scotty´s a geek, a jerk, a square.
Then he´s befriended by Benjamin Franklin Rodriguez, "Benny" (Mike Vitar), the best and biggest kid on the neighborhood baseball team. Seems the gang needs a ninth member for the team, and, well, Scotty is the best they can do. The boys play baseball in a vacant sandlot, and they´re really good at it. They never choose sides and they never keep score; the game just goes on forever. There´s got to be a metaphor in there somewhere. Anyway, the film´s main antagonist is a local monster dog, "the beast," that lives in a backyard bordering the baseball field. A ball hit over the fence into the Beast´s yard is a lost ball and no questions asked. The dog "eats kids."
Yes, the story is embroidered to quite an extent. Every minor incident of childhood is underscored with threatening and portentous music, and everything that would seem trivial to most adults is made to appear monumental to the youngsters. For instance, Wendy Peppercorn (Marley Shelton), the local community pool lifeguard, drives all the boys wild with desire. So one of the guys, "Squints" (Chauncey Leopardi), risks his life drowning just to be rescued by her. Then there´s the big conflict when Scotty borrows his step dad´s prize baseball without his dad knowing it, a ball signed by Babe Ruth, no less, and hits it into the Beast´s yard. How was Scotty to know it was a priceless ball! After all, as he says when the other kids try to tell him about the Babe, "Yeah, yeah, you keep telling me that. Who is she?" The boys´ attempts to retrieve the ball make up a considerable part of the story, and these attempts are farfetched, to say the least. But Scotty´s recollections of childhood are understandably magnified. I suppose much of what we remember is different from reality, especially when we´re dealing with childhood memories.
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