Eight Men Out

I have been lucky enough to grow up in the great state of Illinois, home of some of the best stories in American sports.  I came of age in a time where the Bears put up arguably the most dominant single season in the NFL, the Bulls had two three-peat championship runs, and the eternally cursed Cubs and White Sox continued to break hearts across the nation (until those bastard Sox actually won the World Series...grumble, grumble, Cubs fan).  This past Spring, I was lucky enough to get to visit the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, and it was pretty awesome.  I won't lie, I teared up on a few occasions.  This weekend, I was very happy to learn that Chicago Cubs great (and one of the worst --- but lovable --- baseball announcers ever), Ron Santo, will finally be inducted into the Hall.  That got me thinking of other Chicago greats who have yet to receive baseball's highest honor.  Of course, that lead me to Eight Men Out, the supposed "inside story" about how the 1919 White Sox intentionally lost the World Series and conspired with professional gamblers to make a profit on their loss.

Sorry, wrong Black Sox movie

The owner of the White Sox in 1919 was Charles Comiskey (Clifton James), and the man was a cheapskate.  He had a world-class team, but insisted on paying them as little as humanly possible.  For instance, the ace of his pitching staff, Eddie Cicotte (David Strathairn) had a clause in his contract that gave him a bonus if he earned 30 wins; Comiskey had him benched for the last few weeks of the regular season because he reached 29.  When the team was offered bonuses for winning the American League title, Comiskey instead gave them only cheap champagne.  Basically, Comiskey was a big enough douche to deserve having his stadium renamed "The Cell." 

When the gambling syndicate run by Arnold Rothstein (Michael Lerner) learns of the discontent on the heavily favored Sox, he makes an offer (through proxies, of course) to select players; if they lose the World Series on purpose, they will be paid far more handsomely than if they actually win.

Maybe then, they could afford some shirts that fit

Some players, like Cicotte, Chick Gandil (Michael Rooker), and Swede Risberg (Don Harvey) go along with the plan willingly.  Buck Weaver (John Cusack) doesn't agree to go along with the plot, but he doesn't report it, either.  The team's star, Shoeless Joe Jackson (D.B. Sweeney) seems too dumb to understand any innuendo or threats, and plays hard and gets paid.  How does the Series turn out?  Well, it's ancient history now, but Eight Men Out plays it for all the drama it can.  But win or lose, the suspiciously poor play from the White Sox will have repercussions for the team and all of baseball for years to come.

Example: chaw is deemed mandatory for jerkwads

If you are unfamiliar with the story of the 1919 "Black Sox," then you're basically out of luck.  While Eight Men Out does kind of touch on why they may or may not have thrown the Series, it isn't exactly the easiest movie to follow if you are not a baseball fan.  Chances are, you will not realize the significance of who the characters are; the cast is vast and recognizable, but there are darn few introductions for them.  I would have loved to hear an announcer explain who these guys were, or have one of the sportswriters (who actually play essential --- but underdeveloped --- roles in this drama) give the audience the lowdown on some of these guys.  The script explains that Shoeless Joe is one of the greatest players ever, but why?  It's not shown on-camera.  As for the others, the script doesn't provide nearly as much. 

Weaver could have held a boombox over his head, for all this script cared

That's not to say that the performances were poor.  John Cusack, despite being a lifelong Cubs fan, is very good as the earnest Buck Weaver, and his protests and effort are what makes this plot chug along.  D.B. Sweeney was convincingly dumb as Shoeless Joe, but he lacked presence on the screen, making him seem a pale shadow of Roy Hobbs, a fictional character based on the man.  David Stathairn gave the most impressive performance, one that reeked of conflict and pride.  Michael Rooker and Don Harvey were fine as the detestable bad guys, although I would have liked maybe a moment of hesitation before they jumped on the "let's lose the World Series" bandwagon. 

Above: the most emotive Rooker gets in this film

Charlie Sheen plays a surprisingly small role in this, especially when you consider his starring roles in Platoon and Wall Street only a few years prior.  John Mahoney, who was apparently never young, was pretty good as the trusting White Sox manager.  Christoper Lloyd and Richard Edson (the parking attendant in another Chicago classic, Ferris Bueller's Day Off) are okay as small-time grifters, but neither is utilized much in this movie.  Director John Sayles cast himself (and Chicago institution Studs Terkel) as one of the two baseball newspaper columnists who helped break this story, although their contributions in this film are underplayed.

I really wish this scene was a highlight

When I was seven years-old, baseball was all I could think about.  I sponged up knowledge like...well, a very absorbent material.  While old age and beer have killed off some of my brain cells, I still retain much of my historical baseball knowledge.  Rewatching Eight Men Out should have been an emotional trip down memory lane for me, but it wasn't.  John Sayles directed his actors well enough, but he failed as a writer to make me care about any of them.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Eight Men Out is its soft focus.  Is this the tale of the entire 1919 Sox team, or is it about the innocents who were unfairly banned from the sport?  The point of view character is, at times, Buck Weaver, but who the hell remembers him?  This movie was made seventy years after Weaver was expelled from the sport, and occasionally showing him as the main character isn't enough to generate sympathy for him.  The most famous player on the team, Shoeless Joe Jackson, is relegated to a very minor role in the script; that's like making Pride of the Yankees with Lou Gehrig as the fifth-billed character.  Who is this movie supposed to be about?  The entire team?  Then Sayles should have explained the characters better in the script.  Shoeless Joe?  Then he should have played a more important role.  Weaver?  Then the focus should have stayed with him as he struggled to succeed despite his teammates.

There are many more problems that the focus.  Even with my near-encyclopedic baseball knowledge, I failed to recognize many of the characters in this film.  That's a pretty big problem; if I can't pick out some of these players, how can a casual viewer hope to understand what's going on?  The script is full of elliptical conversations that allude to the gambling conspiracy, but rarely acknowledge it outright.  As much as I appreciate scripts that assume the viewers are clever, the details of this story are left fairly obtuse.

...like whatever he is rubbing on the ball

Another problem I had with Eight Men Out is that it, really, isn't a baseball movie.  The script is too lazy to focus on any one game, so it instead allows every play shown on-screen to be of major importance; batters hit the first pitch every time, and pitchers give up crucial runs with every throw.  This is a movie about the scandal.  Unfortunately, there is a lot of baseball in-between the conception of the idea and the execution, and both suffer for it.  This isn't a bad movie, though.  Sayles clearly cared about this team and this story, but his passion was executed poorly.  At best, I have to say that this is a mediocre movie about a potentially fantastic film concept.

On a personal note, as a baseball fan with his head in the past (my prized baseball possession is a Ryne Sandberg 1960s-era throwback jersey), I believe that all eight men implicated in the Black Sox scandal should be eligible for the Hall of Fame in 2019.  I think a 100-year ban is more than enough; the only two that sportswriters would even consider inducting would be Shoeless Joe and Buck Weaver, both of whom had a stellar, error-free World Series performance.  And baseball writers are notoriously vindictive, so if they forgive the players, so should the sport.  At least that way, we could expect to stop hearing Pete Rose's whining in about seventy-five years.  Besides, the commissioner that banned the 1919 Sox was a total bastard; he allowed Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker to keep playing after reports of them gambling on the sport surfaced.  Come on, Major League Baseball!  Act like the museum you are an induct the players that deserve it; if you want to hold them accountable for shady actions, include a steroids or gambling section and let the fans determine their legacy!  ...and I'm off my soapbox.

Strange Days

Science fiction movies often walk a dangerously thin line.  On the one hand, they need to be different enough from the modern day to make things interesting, but if you make things too different, you risk alienating your audience (unless you have a huge budget for cool special effects).  One solution that often works well is to set your film in the near future, so you can make some improvements, but not have to change the entire world; it's economical and takes a whole lot less pre-production to imagine a not-too-future world.  When I say that this method "works well," I mean that it succeeds upon the film's immediate release.  Movies like this can seem awfully quaint after the modern day passes what was once the near future.  Case in point: Strange Days.

In the last few days of 1999, Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) has gotten himself into a lot of trouble.  For starters, he is a former Los Angeles police officer who has become a sleazy dealer of illegal technology.  You see, in 1999 Los Angeles, there are Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (SQUIDs), which are cyberpunk tools for recording a person's point of view --- through their eyes, with their emotions and physical sensations --- and Lenny sells the recordings.  Of course, this was over a decade ago, so you probably remember all this.  SQUIDs are stylish, too, often taking on the appearance of obvious wigs.

Either a SQUID or somebody scalped a robot

It's not make explicitly clear why the practice is illegal, but I suppose a demand for "high-risk" memories of criminal acts could be a bad thing.  Anyway, Lenny is a fast-talking sleazebag with a heart of gold.  He spends his non-dealing time pining for his lost love, Faith (Juliette Lewis), and reliving his own SQUID-recorded memories of her.  Not surprisingly, his highlights usually include her in tight clothing or clothing-optional moments.  When I say that Faith is "lost," I don't mean dead; she just left him for the evil and gravelly-voiced record producer, Philo (Michael Wincott).  Philo is a rich jerk with psychotic tendencies and a habit for being over-possessive.  Faith wants to be a rock star, with all the egocentric behavior that implies.

"What a catch."  Apply the statement to either or both.

Man, science fiction movies require a lot of exposition.  Anyway, Lenny winds up at the center of a storm of evil-doing.  Someone is giving him SQUID tapes showing the anonymous user raping, murdering, and --- most disturbing to Lenny --- breaking into Lenny's apartment while he slept.  For one reason or another, Lenny concludes that this killer is going to go after Faith soon.  But who could the killer be?  Could it possibly be the two LAPD officers that are trying to kill Lenny?  Or are they a symptom of a deeper conspiracy?  Dum-da-DUUUUMMMMM?!?


For being a weird sci-fi movie, there sure are a lot of quality actors in Strange Days.  Ralph Fiennes turns in an interesting lead performance; he plays Lenny as a broken man, only a shadow of what he had been.  And yet, he is still capable enough to unravel a few mysteries and avoid getting killed on several occasions.  The cool thing about Fiennes is that his performance would have made Lenny's failure just as believable as his success would --- Lenny is not your typical movie hero, because he actually needs his friends.  Those friends turn in surprising performances, too.  Angela Bassett gets to play a tough, no-nonsense cabbie that also happens to be pining away for Lenny while he bitches and moans about Faith.  I don't know if we needed the romantic angle, but it was more depth than I expected from her buddy role.  The other buddy is Tom Sizemore as a sleazy private detective; while I normally enjoy mid-90s Sizemore, his ridiculous hairpiece was too distracting for me.

...or maybe I got lost in his dreamy eyes.

Vincent D'Onofrio and William Fichtner played corrupt cops (In Los Angeles?  In the 90s?  Suspend that disbelief!), but they weren't great at it.  Fichtner was fine, but D'Onofrio overacted in this one-dimensional role, somehow equating shouting and sweating with complexity.

And from this seed, Law & Order: Criminal Intent would sprout.

Glenn Plummer's character was a blend of Chuck D and Malcom X, so it should be no surprise that he didn't aim for quiet complexity in his limited screen time.  Career character actor Richard Edson (the parking garage valet in Ferris Bueller) had a bit part, too, and was only marginally more casual.  Michael Wincott once again played an evil character with an evil voice, and he is a pretty solid villain.  Juliette Lewis spent most of the film flaunting her body with either limited or tight-fitting clothing; that's fine I guess, but I've always been kind of weirded out by her.  This is in that time period when she somehow got every "crazy chick" role Hollywood had to offer, and she's as rude and obnoxious as ever.  My biggest problem with her part in this movie is that Lenny can't get over their break-up.

Who could ever get over this?

While I wouldn't say that any of the acting is all that good, I think the cast played up to the storyline pretty well and fit the general tone of the movie.  I had some major problems with the direction, though.  This was Kathryn Bigelow's follow-up to the successful and ridiculous bromance that was Point Break, and Strange Days definitely exhibits more confidence as a director than that film.  Unfortunately, I believe that confidence was largely misplaced.  Bigelow has trouble with the point-of-view camera work necessary to convey the experience of a SQUID recording; the sex scenes, in particular, felt like the cameraman was under strict orders to not follow a natural line of sight.  The pacing of the film is erratic, and the tone suffers from a number of action scenes that have no falling action; that's fine in a tightly-wound and taught thriller, but those words do not describe this film, if only because it takes a while to progress anywhere with this story.  And it is a long while, clocking in at almost two-and-a-half hours.  I understand that James Cameron co-wrote the movie, but he is certainly no genius when it comes to the written word; some more editing would have been nice.

There are also a few stupid ideas in this fabricated future.  That's to be expected from a lot of futuristic sci-fi movies, but these weren't errors in judging how we use technology, they are just poor choices.  I liked that most of the characters in Strange Days dressed more or less like normal people (it was set only five years in the future, after all), but the exceptions to that rule looked idiotic.  For instance, I don't care how eccentric the bad guy is, he's not going to hire a dread-locked albino woman wearing a bondage-themed outfit as a bodyguard, especially as a bodyguard who is sometimes called upon to assault and/or kill someone.  Flashy bodyguards with a license to kill tend to stick out in people's memories.  And why do only people in the future dress that stupidly?

Wasn't she in the Matrix sequel?

It also bothered me that this film deals with cyberpunk ideas, including having bionic parts put in your noggin, but we never see anything too bio-technical.  We get the stupid SQUID hair nets --- which are suspiciously bulky, considering they are recording and reading brain waves that include vision, emotion, and physical sensation --- but we never get to see a bionic eye?  Lame.

I would also like to ask what the deal is with characters who presume that their enemy has drowned.  I don't know how many times I have seen a movie where a car goes into the water --- the bad guys may shoot at the underwater car, or they might not --- and the villains wait to confirm that the good guys are dead...but give up a few moments before the hero resurfaces.  What is the big hurry?  Are these bad guys late for an evil henchmen dinner party?  If there's "no way anyone could have survived that," then why not wait a few more minutes until a body floats up?  That happens pretty frequently in action scenes, but I thought Vincent D'Onofrio's impatience in this movie was especially bad.

Despite its shortcomings, Strange Days is a decently effective science fiction adventure.  The story might have a few too many twists and turns to be truly effective, and the "future" is kind of quaint now, but it is a pretty well-realized future, and that deserves some respect.  I thought the relationships between the various characters was pleasantly atypical; while the plot may have been almost stock for suspense/thrillers at times, the characters didn't ever comfortably fit into that mold.  I would give this movie a higher rating, if not for one glaring flaw: there is absolutely no mention of Prince in this film.  That's right, a movie that climaxes on New Year's Eve, 1999, and was released in 1995 (the height of Prince's "The Artist Former Known As" fame) did not have anyone partying to Prince's "1999."  Talk about science fiction.

"I've got a lion in my pocket, and baby he's ready to roar!"