This Review Reveals Minor Details About the Plot.
Take Me Out To the Ball Game
Plot Overview
J. Tripp
Spence (Harry Connick Jr.) a Washington Shylock
bankrupted by his dying wife's protracted illness survived
with his Jeep Cherokee and some hidden assets, but not with the big
house. Now he and his son Derek (Shawn Salinas) share a modest
apartment, and he coaches him at his last season of Little League
rather then work long hours in the office. His secretary Peggy
(Gill Baker) stalls the IRS come calling allowing them to escape
(“Me and you are going away for a while”) under new
identities (“I look different”) Glen Ryan & Michael
“Mickey” Ryan. Mickey's fake ID lists him a year
younger (12) than he actually is (13) allowing him one more
qualifying year of Little League play.
Nevada school administrator
Miss Patty Sinclair (Michelle Johnson) enrolls “Mickey”
in his new school, him surreptitiously repeating sixth
grade where he gets all A's. She and Glen go from a cafeteria lunch
munch to a nice dinner date to seeing each other regularly
throughout the movie. Glen was obviously ready to move on, but
it takes Mickey a while to get used to it.
Dad Glen has a
secret meeting with Tony (Mike Starr) coach of the best team in
town to impress him with his son's fast ball. Tony uses this inside
knowledge to lay the kid down in the draft under the noses of the
other coaches who had earlier picks. Mickey's added experience, his
maturing body, and his dad's signaling from the stands enable him
to lead his team to national prominence in the league bringing him
and his dad to the attention of IRS agent Brian Seeger (Mark Joy.)
Ideology
Cheating has occurred before in the league and had been dealt with severely; this will be no different. I daresay it's happened in a lot of places. The IRS agent was characterized by secretary Peggy as a “thug in a cheap suit” who took excessive pleasure in his work. He had a black assistant. The fall in the garden implicates the whole human race though there's no mention of Negroes there in the Bible account. That comes later. Noah's flood provided a new start. (Gen. 9:18-19) “And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan. These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread.” Germane to modern times is the lineage of Cush, Ham's oldest son (Gen. 10:6,) Cush meaning black in Hebrew, having settled in Africa, some of his to become in later years African slaves. Researcher Bodie Hodge confirms that, “As a general trend, Ham is the father of many peoples in Africa” (122). Dr. Ide adds, “Ham sired four sons: Cush (translates as ‘black’) … and Canaan the youngest” (62).
In Noah's story a deal-breaker occurred when
Noah's youngest son Ham (Gen. 9:18-19) saw a dishabille Noah
(Gen. 9:20-22) and then told his
brothers Shem and Japheth how he'd (Ezek. 22:10) “discovered their
father's nakedness.” His brothers respected Noah's privacy
(Gen. 9:23) and so received
(Gen. 9:24-27) the expected
blessing while Ham's lineage—there represented by his
youngest son Canaan—were given an inferior status.
In “Mickey” the dad upholds Mickey's glasses and baseball cap disguise—though his girlfriend sees right through it. The IRS tries to penetrate it.
Ham had put himself in jeopardy
according to, (Prov. 30:17)
“The eye that mocketh at his father, and despiseth to obey
his mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the
young eagles shall eat it.” Especially pertinent in this case
is Noah's control over the animals including the raven (Gen. 8:7.) Noah, however,
intervened to cheat death.
There's a parity of eye loss and servitude given in (Exodus 21:26) “And if a man smite the eye of his servant, or the eye of his maid, that it perish; he shall let him go free for his eye's sake.” Ham and his line—represented by Canaan in his lineage—could be given servitude rather than mutilation. (Gen. 9:24-27) “And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son [Ham] had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.”
Ham's youngest son Canaan is the particularly noted recipient of the malediction. Later when the Israelis invaded the promised land, the Canaanites were due for destruction, but the Gibeonite branch (the Hivites of Joshua 11:19 & Gen. 10:15-17) did a deal with Joshua who was the Jewish leader. They'd heard what happened to other Canaanite tribes, so they sent ambassadors dressed as if they'd come from a long journey (Joshua 9:3-6) and persuaded Joshua to make a league with this “distant” tribe. When it was discovered they'd tricked Joshua into sparing them, (Joshua 9:24-27) he made them bondmen, which was more to their liking.
A redirection of purpose is reflected by Robert H. Bork in Slouching Towards Gomorrah who writes:
[Researchers] Peter Brimelow and Leslie Spencer … quote Charles Murray: “There's hardly a single outcome—black voting rights, access to public accommodation, employment, particularly in white collar jobs—that couldn't have been predicted on the basis of pre-1964 trend lines.” “That's pretty devastating,” the authors say. “It suggests that we have spent trillions of dollars to create an outcome that would have happened even if the government had done nothing.” (238)
Liberator Lincoln never belonged to
any church, and the locals considered him a pagan with an
idolatrous regard for consent of the people. Southerners may be
more sympathetic than the North to the above Bible passages. I
heard a story on the radio: Seems the Dakota Indians were
conducting raids, and the army suggested some of them be hanged as
an example. They brought Lincoln a list of three hundred some
candidates. That was too many so he whittled it down to thirty
eight. They built the gallows and invited the Indians to come see
something they wanted to show them.
There was a big gathering for the unveiling of
“something.” They called out the thirty-eight names and because
of difficulty in pronunciation, some in the
audience mistakenly thought they heard their own names called and
raised their hands saying, “That's me.” Thirty-eight
were hanged simultaneously that day including three spectators.
Well, Lincoln was big on consent, and they did raise their hands. Yet the procedural order was violated. Three Injuns missed their opportunity just as in our movie a draft pick went to someone unqualified leaving the one who would have got it in the lurch.
Barack Obama's mother had planned to fly back from Kenya to have baby Barack in Hawaii, but they wouldn't allow a nine-month pregnant woman on the plane. The show must go on. She had him in Kenya where his paternal grandmother still remembers him born in the hospital, and they've got Kenyan documents for him. Still, he'd been planned for Hawaii, so they went ahead with the newspaper announcement and what documents they could concoct, patently forged.
Mickey in the movie lacked documentation from where he was supposed to have attended school. The most obvious tell, however, was his 13-year-old size. He stood out. The regionals were held in Eugene, Oregon, home of the University of Oregon. I hung out there where a diverse mix of students attended with a large international contingent. One fellow from Kenya had a distinctive accent on the last syllable in a sentence. Just like Barack Obama. Babies pick up speech rhythms while still in the womb. In a Cynthia Phoel short story, she writes of a woman who “draped a dishtowel over her belly … in an attempt to muffle the sounds that reached her daughter's embryonic ears” (146). Every time I heard that president speak he announced his non-native American origin, just as Mickey's height gave him away.
The morning after the election of 2008 someone had stolen the newspapers I needed for samples in my sales job along with all the newspapers for distribution from the paper company. I suppose announcing a Negro president was historic and could be worth a lot some day. I have particular feelings about doing it for a guy who is not even qualified on account of his birth place in one instance and birth year in another.
Production Values
“” (2004) was directed by Hugh Wilson. Its screenplay was written by novelist John Grisham. It stars Harry Connick Jr., Shawn Salinas and Michelle Johnson. The acting was good all around.
MPA rated it PG for thematic elements. As a Feature Films For Families production it was deliberately made to exclude profanity, vulgarity, violence and sex. If this were a Hollywood flick, the couple would have been shacking up in the heat of passion. Here it is tame dates and the boy arranged to stay with the lady should his dad go to jail.
John Grisham's trademark intrigue plays second fiddle to the baseball story but still shines through. Superb editing and camera work overcome baseball's inherent interminable waits followed by flitting action. (They have the same trouble adapting chess to the big screen.) This one is a real baseball picture squeezed into a counter medium. The settings were adapted, the outcome hard to predict, and the run time just right at 1¾ hours.
Review Conclusion w/a Christian's Recommendation
There's an added feature of four discussion questions surrounding cheating with links to the pertinent clips. Good ones. The movie is good family, sport fun.
Movie Ratings
Action factor: Well done action flick. Suitability for children: Suitable for children with guidance. Special effects: Well done special effects. Video Occasion: Good for Family Groups. Suspense: Keeps you on the edge of your seat. Overall movie rating: Four stars out of five.
Works Cited
Scripture was cited from the King James Version, Pub. 1611, rev. 1769. Software, Print.
Bork, Robert H. Slouching Towards Gomorrah. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Print.
Brimelow, Peter and Leslie Spencer. “When quotas replace merit, everybody suffers,” Forbes, February 15, 1993, p. 102. As quoted in Bork.
Hodge, Bodie. Tower of Babel: The Cultural History of Our Ancestors. Green Forest, AR: New Leaf Pub., 2013. Print.
Ide, Arthur Frederick. Noah & the Ark: The Influence of Sex, Homophobia and Heterosexism in the Flood Story and its Writing. Las Colinas: Monument Press, 1992. Print.
Inebriated Noah scene rendered in a Civil War vintage woodcut, made after a drawing by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (German painter, 1794–1872) from his archive, published in 1877. Image by licensor iStock.com/Getty Images, used under license.
Phoel, Cynthia Morrison. “Cold Snap” appearing in her compilation, Cold Snap. Copyright © 2010 by Cynthia Morrison Phoel. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 2010. Print.
bibles.n7nz.org