Last night I went to the David Minor Theater and enjoyed both "Trouble with the Curve" and a buffalo chicken salad, once I was able to get it all put together in the dim light of the theater....but that's my problem, no one else's.
1. I really enjoyed that this was a fairy tale movie. In the traditional sense of the word, it was a classic comedy, and, as traditional comedies do, it portrayed, in the end, people at their best enjoying healing, reconciliation, successful romance, awakening, leaving home and returning again (just like what the whole game of baseball centers upon: leaving home and returning).
2. I don't go to movies, necessarily, for surprises. I think I knew about forty minutes into this movie how it was going to play out. YES! I took great pleasure in seeing how the resolution of this movie would happen, but I was never in doubt that it would come to a comic resolution in the baseball story line, the father/daughter story, and in the story's romantic tale. I realize, from hearing people talk about movies and from reading about them, that this predictability makes some viewers feels smug and they think less of this kind of movie. NOT ME!
3. Especially satisfying, even if predictable (that's another word for cliche), was the awakening, the coming to life, the unfolding of the inward beauty of Gus' (Clint Eastwood) daughter Mickey (Amy Adams). In the high-powered world of being a lawyer she is distant, cranky, competent, hollow, ambitious. But, inwardly she's barely alive. That changes in this movie and as Mickey comes alive, I loved how she slowly begins to radiate (played beautifully by Amy Adams).
4. I knew the answer right away to every trivia question Mickey and Johnny threw at each other. I had the answers out before they were answered in the movie (apologies to the guy sitting next to me....). I could never answer these kinds of questions about baseball in the last twenty years, but those questions centered on the 1970's: those facts will always be alive in me.
5. I'll admit it straight out: I love baseball as salvation stories. In this movie, baseball delivered Johnny, Gus, Mickey, and Rigo out of some kind of failure to success, separation into union, joylessness to happiness, obscurity into being recognized, and secrecy into truth. I know baseball doesn't really have this kind of magic, but I sure enjoyed it while it happened during the nearly two hours of this movie and I enjoyed the same in "The Natural", "Fields of Dreams", and other baseball movies, including the unforgettable Ray Milland 1949 classic, "It Happens Every Spring".
6. Lastly, I loved the movie "Moneyball" and,.at the same time, I loved how "Trouble with the Curve" turned "Moneyball" on its head. Gus was exactly the kind of baseball scout "Moneyball" portrayed as washed up, out of touch, ready for pasture. In "Trouble with the Curve", the old school ways of scouting triumph over computer software and I enjoyed believing, at least for the duration of this movie, that a scout who knows when a player needs to see his mother or who can gauge a hitter's talent by the sound of the bat striking the ball and who can tell when a power hitter has trouble with the curve is an asset to a baseball organization.
It's really bigger than baseball. I want to believe that those of us who rely on instincts, intuition, on having a feel for our work can still be valuable in professional worlds more and more dominated by assessment scores and other kinds of statistics.
Really, I suppose, "Trouble with the Curve" brought me back to examine and cherish my work over the years as a teacher who has relied more on intuition than test scores or course outcomes to lead my students to success.
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