Perfect Play
October Surprise It’s the month for baseball and movies in Marin. Here are some of our favorite sports films to enjoy between screenings. BY DAVID TEMPLETON
Why? Because October is when your team, if they have done their job, move into the post-season and push toward a spot in the World Series. October is also when the Mill Valley Film Festival takes place. For an audience member, it’s a uniquely MVFF thing to have a movie end and see cellphones light up all over the theater amid many echoes of softly whispered “Who’s winning?” and “What’s the score?” In honor of the whole baseball-meets-movie convergence that is October in Marin, here are some recommendations for films that capture the passion and excitement of competitive athletics. With any luck, there may be a sports movie or two in the film festival lineup this year, too — whether or not the S.F. Giants are still in the running to compete with it. Let’s get the obvious one out of the way. The Natural is, to its fans, the greatest baseball movie of all time. At least, the greatest that is actually about baseball: one could argue that Field of Dreams, except for the moment at the end where James Earl Jones lectures Kevin Costner about baseball and America, is actually a road-trip/fantasy movie with occasional baseball flourishes. Bull Durham, also with Costner, has a bit more actual ball-field action, but it’s basically a love story featuring two baseball players (Costner and Tim Robbins) and a groupie (Susan Sarandon) who likes them both; still, its baseball scenes, by
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any measure, are amazing and are more grounded in reality than The Natural’s. The Natural, starring former Marinite Robert Redford and directed by onetime Marin resident Barry Levinson, shows us the day-in, day-out grind of baseball in the 1930s — though with a strong Arthurian twist that plays better in Bernard Malamud’s significantly darker book. Regardless of its faults, The Natural is a visually stunning film, and the baseballgame scenes with Redford as Roy Hobbs and his Excalibur-like bat Wonderboy are as magnificent as they are preposterous. And there they are, the big three baseball movies. “Those are the pantheon films,” says KNBR morning-man and author Brian Murphy, whose sports books include
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SCREENPROD/PHOTONONSTOP/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO (RIGHT); PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO (LEFT)
It’s not easy being a movie fan and a baseball fan in Marin.
AF ARCHIVE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Bull Durham
