For their new film, Sugar, writer-directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden cast an actual Dominican baseball player for the lead role of Miguel ‘Sugar’ Santos, a … Dominican baseball player. This employment of a non-actor with appropriate skill of course adds credibility to scenes depicting the sport while also qualifying Sugar as part of the current “neo-neorealism” trend. But Algenis Perez Soto is not the first real athlete to play a fictional athlete onscreen. Recall that before Shaquille O’Neal did his worst playing a genie and then a superhero, the NBA star played a college basketball player in Blue Chips.
Typically, though, casting a real player as a fictional player isn’t necessarily for authenticity; many pros end up starring in films as fantastical as Space Jam and Like Mike, and often they take a back seat to a Hollywood star in the lead sportsman role, whether that actor can truly play the game or not. If he or she can’t, it’s likely they’ll be made to look like they have the moves, and in many cases such an attempt at faking it fails. To illustrate why it might always be best for filmmakers to do as Fleck and Boden have done, we’ve selected five of the most unconvincing sports moments on film.
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Making good on the promise of their Sundance winning short Gowanus, Brooklyn, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden captured the ennui and moral complexity of a young, damaged idealist caught in the pervasive malaise of the Bush years with the compelling and self assured feature debut Half Nelson, a film whose stature continues to grow with each passing year. As this decade has worn on, it has proven more and more difficult for young directors, even those fresh out of Sundance with award winning and broadly distributed indie “hits”, to make second and third feature films. Those that do in many cases end up having to compromise their most cherished projects for participation in studio financed ventures that are often subject to the increasingly asinine narrative codes, the tired sub genres, of the specialty film marketplace (Sin Nombre, anyone?). So it was with much excitement but a bit of trepidation that I first encountered Sugar, Fleck and Boden’s follow up to their Oscar nominated little indie that could. I’m happy to report that with this delicate and persuasive drama about a young immigrant whose talent may not take him all the places he’s dreamed, Fleck and Boden have only confirmed their own remarkable gifts.
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It’s been more than 100 years since the Philadelphia Quakers changed their name to the Philadelphia Philadelphians, which was thankfully shortened to “Phillies” very quickly, probably by printers who were afraid of using up all of their ‘P’s in the printing press. Since being founded in 1883, they’ve been one of the most tenacious teams in baseball, winning six pennants, and the World Series in 1980. In fact, in all of American sports (not just baseball), the Phillies are the team that’s been in one city with one name for the longest time. They’re one game away from another World Series win tonight, despite being the Major League team with the most losses in history. We celebrate their scrappiness with a list of quintessential Philadelphia movies. Check them out after the break.
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Veteran documentarian Ken Burns is on the Board of Governors for the Telluride Film Festival. The creator of classic PBS documentary mini-series like The War, Baseball, and Jazz, all of which have a total runtime of many hundreds of minutes, it’s a wonder this guy watches anything other than the archival material he uses to assemble his films. He mentions a film called Hunger by Steve McQueen that’s playing here. No, it’s not the ghost of the Steve McQueen you might be thinking of, this Steve McQueen is a Turner Prize winning British video artist turned filmmaker. A full review of Hunger with an interview is coming soon.
Ken Burns talks Mad Men and David Fincher after the jump.
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