Hey, how fast do they pitch in cricket?

Million Dollar Arm

(2014)

Aspirational sports movies tend to have additional cachet when they are based on true stories (The Blind Side). If you can also incorporate an always-popular fish-out-of-water element, so much the better (Cool Runnings). Thomas McCarthy’s screenplay for Million Dollar Arm chronicles how two Indian baseball pitchers were brought to the major leagues (albeit omitting that their success hasn’t been of legendary proportions), but is much more interested in the guy who found them. The result is an overlong feature that hits agreeable notes during its first half, before succumbing to listless montages and forced drama to pad out its running time.

Baseball movies tend to be the most reliable ones in the sport genre. It’s a genre where the formula of the game, or trying and winning, or losing with dignity, is built into storytelling structure. As such, it’s difficult to strike new ground here, and easy to succumb to predictability. The best one can usually hope for is that a familiar ride is reliably fashioned.

The kernel of Million Dollar Arm finds sports agent J.B. Bernstein (Jon Hamm, a down-at-heel Don Draper) struggling to go it alone (“No, I don’t want to work at the Death Star. I hate the Death Star” his partner Aasif Mandvi comments of the prospect of returning to one of the big agencies). He hits upon the idea (during a channel-hopping mix tape of Susan Boyle and a test match) of inviting Indian bowlers to try their arms at baseball, setting up the search as a talent contest (the Million Dollar Arm of the title). There’s the publicity value, of course, but mainly it’s about the not-inconsiderable sweetener for investors of the profits to be tapped from the Indian market, if there are actual players for the cricket-loving populace to get behind.

Inevitably, the movie concentrates on the white guy who found the players rather than the players themselves. Perhaps also inevitably (this being Hollywood) the moviemakers (I’m not necessarily suggesting McCarthy put this in his screenplay) indulge in some lazy cultural stereotyping (the two pitchers are all at sea with magical inventions such as escalators and elevators). Hamm deserves some credit, though, for taking a less-than-noble big screen lead role and playing grouchy and self-centred for much of the proceedings. All Bernstein is interested in is the deal, until he inevitably has his perspective corrected. This encompasses a rather contrived romance with his tenant (Lake Bell; the end titles suggest this element is factual, but their skyping across continents is no less phoney for that) and standing up to the moneyman (Tzi Ma).

While Bernstein’s unreconstituted demeanour is refreshing at first, it’s the only part that is. Million Dollar Arm is likeable, but it manages to be determinedly pedestrian. Craig Gillespie, who, judging by his filmography, is the epitome of a journeyman (his last cinematic outing was Fright Night), only manages to snap into a much-needed rhythm during the first leg. The scenes in India, playing off Bernstein’s culture shock, the excitement of the trials, and the irresistible Alan Arkin’s grumpy talent scout, are well paced and enjoyable. Pitobash’s over-excitable guide Amit provides added comic relief. However, while Suraj Sharma (as the javelin throwing Rinku) and Madhur Mittal (as the runner Dinesh; neither of them turn out to be cricketers, undermining Bernstein’s bowler/pitcher theory) are winning performers, they have the most perfunctory of character beats (homesickness, existing to react to Bernstein’s mistreatment).

The second half of the movie, as Bernstein pursues a big value client and reluctantly allows the players to live with him yet neglects their well-being, runs out of steam. Gillespie goes through the motions with such elements as the party scene (comedy vomiting!), the dashing of dreams, and the second chance/mending of ways. There’s even a toe curling (it’s supposed to be heart-warming, I know) “welcome to India” sequence, in which J.B.’s back garden is turned into an exotic restaurant. Bill Paxton also makes a showing (not one of his memorable) as the idiosyncratic trainer who knows how to treat the lads as human beings, in contrast to grumpy J B.

As I said, it’s the clichés, more than in any other genre, that underpin sports movies. It doesn’t take too much to make a passable one, as long as the basic structure is in place, but it’s contrastingly much more difficult to make a great one. Tom McCarthy has written and directed several fine films (The Station Agent, The Visitor), and his next (Spotlight) sounds promising, yet he comes a bit unstuck here. In the end it’s only A R Rahman’s lively soundtrack that keeps Million Dollar Arm swinging.

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Other monks will meet their deaths here. And they too will have blackened fingers. And blackened tongues.

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Say hello to the Scream Extractor.

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No one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.

The Matrix (1999) (SPOILERS) Twenty years on, and the articles are on the defining nature of The Matrix are piling up, most of them touching on how its world has become a reality, or maybe always was one. At the time, its premise was engaging enough, but it was the sum total of the package that cast a spell – the bullet time, the fashions, the soundtrack, the comic book-as-live-action framing and styling – not to mention it being probably the first movie to embrace and reflect the burgeoning Internet ( Hackers doesn’t really count), and subsequently to really ride the crest of the DVD boom wave. And now? Now it’s still really, really good.

All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies.

Watership Down (1978) (SPOILERS) I only read Watership Down recently, despite having loved the film from the first, and I was immediately impressed with how faithful, albeit inevitably compacted, Martin Rosen’s adaptation is. It manages to translate the lyrical, mythic and metaphysical qualities of Richard Adams’ novel without succumbing to dumbing down or the urge to cater for a broader or younger audience. It may be true that parents are the ones who get most concerned over the more disturbing elements of the picture but, given the maturity of the content, it remains a surprise that, as with 2001: A Space Odyssey (which may on the face of it seem like an odd bedfellow), this doesn’t garner a PG certificate. As the makers noted, Watership Down is at least in part an Exodus story, but the biblical implications extend beyond Hazel merely leading his fluffle to the titular promised land. There is a prevalent spiritual dimension to this rabbit universe, one very much

Piece by piece, the camel enters the couscous.

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In a few moments, you will have an experience that will seem completely real. It will be the result of your subconscious fears transformed into your conscious awareness.

Brainstorm (1983) (SPOILERS) Might Brainstorm have been the next big thing – a ground-breaking, game-changing cinematic spectacle that had as far reaching consequences as Star Wars (special effects) or Avatar (3D) – if only Douglas Trumbull had been allowed to persevere with his patented “Showscan” process (70mm film photographed and projected at 60 frames per second)? I suspect not; one only has to look at the not-so-far-removed experiment of Ang Lee with Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk , and how that went down like a bag of cold sick, to doubt that any innovation will necessarily catch on (although Trumbull at least had a narrative hinge on which to turn his “more real than real” imagery, whereas Lee’s pretty much boiled down to “because it was there”). Brainstorm ’s story is, though, like its title, possibly too cerebral, too much concerned with the consciousness and touting too little of the cloyingly affirmative that Bruce Rubin inevitably brings to his screenplays. T

Maybe the dingo ate your baby.

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He tasks me. He tasks me, and I shall have him.

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Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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