A collection of recommendations this week inspired by the main reason I’m still busy outside of work. I’m actually a little surprised how many sports movies I’ve covered, as it’s generally outside my interests. But I’ve had a long time to collect them now.
Field of Dreams – if someone doesn’t name this as the quintessential baseball movie, it’s probably because they said A League of Their Own
Mr. 3000 – Bernie Mac is playing baseball, how silly!
Major League – Awful players are playing baseball, how silly!
Ed – Matt Leblanc is playing baseball, how silly! Also there’s a chimp.
BASEketball – You got your baseball in my basketball! You got your basketball in my baseball!
Despite election cycles, the world is all politics, all the time, and it is only the privileged few who can avoid that, perhaps especially during an administration mainly built on not constantly drumming up controversy. So there’s always time to consider American government through the movies.
1776: Begin at the beginning, and sit down, John. Gridlock is eternal.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: The little guy with a heart who’s chronically too rare in the machinery of government.
The Manchurian Candidate: Back when it was easier to imagine a foreign government brainwashing and grooming future American leaders than just tuning the minds of the electorate through online advertisements and fake accounts.
All the President’s Men: Somehow Watergate is when cynicism about government corruption became standard, though it’s always been with us.
Wag the Dog: When there seems little else to do about the state of affairs, why not laugh about it?
This year more than any other year, I’ve been finding myself with less time or energy than I need to do a full review. I’m getting busier and older, but even so, I’ve still made at least some kind of post once a week, more Yesterdays and back catalog collections than ever before. Some of them were work I felt I did some good or at least fun writing with, but mostly, I consider them filler.
In that spirit, I’m dropping the ball one more time this year by counting down my ten favorite actual reviews of the past year.
1: Julie and Julia: hmm, I wonder what I connected with here
I hope in the new year to have less filler but also more branching out with opportunities to make social commentary though movies. Maybe only ten people read this blog regularly, but I made a commitment to myself if nobody else, and I have no intention of just fizzling on this project.
It keeps happening. Does anything change, in the long run?
While going through old posts for the suggested viewing, I found even more movies about police officers acting outside the law to get the bad guys than I expected. Dirty Harry is the archetypal fairy tale of why law enforcement needs to be lawless, but we’re so accustomed to the narrative that “hero” cops bending or breaking the laws that are meant to keep us safe from the misuse of their authority are rarely visible. I recall how badly I hoped that Bad Boys might at least end with the bad guy actually imprisoned instead of executed. Because the unspoken superpower that fictional police have but real police rarely do, is that they are magically always right by being the heroes of the story being told. That doesn’t even begin to discuss the problem that modern law enforcement has with the kind of people who are attracted to the authoritarian, “I Am The Law”, consequence-free state of modern policing.
I don’t really have enough time for a review this week, so here’s a collection of my favorite Movies of My Yesterdays posts. One might say they’re Movies of My Yesterdays Of Yesterday, but one would be reaching dangerous amounts of meta.
In looking back on these posts, I realized that when I began, I used an introduction that I forgot about by the third entry:
Movies of my Yesterdays is an irregular series where instead of writing about a movie I’ve never seen, I choose a movie important to my past and discuss why that is.
Galaxy Quest: a love letter to fandom, or a love letter to a love letter to fandom?
Yesterday's Movies 
