Major League spent a lot of time being mentioned as my favorite baseball movie of all time. As I’ve changed over the years, I began to worry that this was a bad thing to say. This watch was an attempt to figure my future with the movie out. I went into this thinking it would be the end. I’d watch it, confirm that it doesn’t hold up, and I could be done with it forever. That’s not quite how it went. What I realized during this viewing is that, while it has some of the very same problems that riddle 1980s comedies, it makes baseball seem like a really fun time.

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I absolutely love stories about people who fuck with fascists. Audrey Hepburn’s is a cool one.

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I’ll be participating in the Criterion Challenge in 2025.

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My most reductive thought is this is Whiplash and Isabelle Huppert’s Erika is Miles Teller grown up. Her mother’s awfulness has turned her into someone who has no idea what counts as normal in society and she seems to feel a great deal of loneliness as a result. But there’s more.

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The best ever to bat leadoff has died at 65.

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This was a beautiful movie. There is a lot of hype surrounding this and the director, Wong Kar-Wai. This was my first Wong Kar-Wai movie, and it was a tremendous start. The look is stunning; the lighting makes so much work; the 75% speed shots looked great, along with the strobed, or low frame rate shots; the way the editing was cut differently in different moods. All of it comes together to make what I think is a masterpiece.

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It seems like every friend of mine has told me this is a must-see over the years. I had never seen it, but I was on a collision course with this for a long time. I have been really coming to love John Carpenter movies and this one seems to be the most well-known, or at least at the top. So I was going to run into this no matter what. The Letterboxd Roulette suggestion from jcarp was perfect and forced my avoidance-plagued hand.

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This was great. It’s not fast, but that’s fine. It has a lot of moral speechifying, which is fine. It has some classic characters, led by Alec Guinness and William Holden. Both are magnificent—Guinness as the efficient, ethical, and hard working British Army Colonel whose unit is captured and used to build the bridge, and Holden as the American who escapes the work camp only to reluctantly return with a squad of British commandos to blow the bridge up.

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I saw this many years ago, when it was pretty new, and I didn’t pay much attention. It seemed boring and not about baseball in the way Major League was about baseball so I didn’t care. That meant I had some vague idea that the movie was about a groupie-type who slept with minor leaguers and also some career minor leaguer who set the home run record. Maybe something about a hot new pitcher.

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My shock and miserable last few days have helped me in a way. Instead of doing anything online at all during the day, I focused on everything before me. No breaks to read news or blogs. No check ins on Bluesky or Mastodon. Just a focus on work with no interruptions.

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