One of my favorite movies of all time is… Well, let me preface. See, there’s two types of favorite movies. There’s the movie you say is your favorite and you’re proud of saying it’s your favorite, the movie you pull out when you’re with people who you don’t know well enough and don’t want them to get the incorrect expression. This movie is your favorite movie, to a degree. (To wit, I’m not sure what I would answer for this at this point, except to say it would probably be Shawshank Redemption.)

But then there’s another type of favorite movie, the type where you watch it and you geek out and have to watch. The kind that is always entertaining, that you have watched so many times that the lines are practically embedded into your cerebrum, that ten years later you can still mouth the words to even if you haven’t seen it in forever.

Likewise, it’s impossible for me to acutally say what I would call my favorite of these movies. Star Wars is up there, but now that I’m older and more experienced it’s gone from being a simple fantasy stroll to a complicated study in story telling. (In other words, I’ve managed to deconstruct it to the point it no longer holds its original meaning, and I haven’t really felt like putting the pieces back together.) But what brings me here tonight is not Star Wars, but another movie from my youth. A movie of youth and innocence, beasts and baseball – The Sandlot.

You’ve probably seen it. If you haven’t – for shame! And you call yourself American! (I’m well aware a many of you don’t. Bare with me here.)

For the uninitiated, the Sandlot is about the new boy in suburbia, a geek who happens to be moving in at the beginning of summer. He has no friends, and through a series of coincidences hooks up with a gang of kids who occupy the neighborhood’s sandlot – a rough-shod baseball diamond whose outfield faces the backyard of the local grumpy neighbor and his pet dog – the Beast. Amidst learning to play baseball, the boy makes friends with everyone on the team and gets involved with all of the happenings of small town life in the summer.

All until the leader of the gang – Bennie “the Jet” Rodriguez – manages to do the impossible by knocking the ball out of its skin. So the kid (the main character, whose full name escapes me but his last name was Smalls) goes to find his step-father’s baseball – only it happens to be signed by Babe Ruth. As fortune has it, the boys get their first home run, knocking the Babe Ruth ball over the wall and into the Beast’s territory.

You can pretty much guess the rest of the movie from there.

And so, as with so many great movies, the Sandlot apparently produced a completely unwarranted and unnecessary sequel. It is this unfortunate piece of dredge that I now sit watching, for lack of anything better to watch (which is saying a lot.)

Like all crappy sequels, this sequel isn’t really a sequel. None of the characters have returned, though apparently the main character in the first movie had a younger brother at some point. It takes place some 10 years later, in the same sandlot. The characters are basically the same – one baseball super athlete who’s the leader of the bunch, a fat kid with a big mouth (both for food consumption and for exuding verbal vitriol,) a pair of brothers who don’t appear to belong in a basebal field (one’s lanky and wiry, the other one’s small), and a skinny nervous kid (now a black kid with an afro who says things like “solid.”) And of course, a large dog with whom to do battle – the Great Fear, spawn of the Beast. (That is almost a direct quote from the movie.)

But there’s an addition to the cast (of course): Girls. Three of them, in point of fact, softball players. Presumably, pretty darn good ones (as only one of them is actually shown playing baseball, it’s hard to conjecture about them as a group.) So of course, you think: Boys v. Girls in an all-out-baseball-battle-of-the-sexes. Well, not really. It’s about five minutes of the film. The leader of the girls is initially presented as an empowered young woman (well, empowered 12-year-old-girl) who’s not afraid to step up to the boys. But, the second the girls and boys call a truce after two days of arguing (again, 5 minutes of the movie,) she becomes a typical gushing “OhmyGodhe’ssocutewhydoesn’thelikeme!” gushing girl (the crush being, of course, the super-athlete leader of the boys.) (In a rather disturbing scene, the kids, except for the aforementioned boy-lead, go swimming in the lead-girl’s pool; her mother approaches and reminds her “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bycicle.” Go butch!)

The rest of the movie is like watching an extremely bad remake of the original, except someone decided that the words were far too complicated and got rid of half of them, then dumbed up the rest in case Retardo the Wondermoron still didn’t understand. The priceless object is no longer a baseball heirloom, it is instead a NASA rocket model (yes, as in the actual NASA space shuttle, the prototype for the Challenger was the stolen artifact.) And countless other stupid substitutions have been made.

Did I have a point in starting this? Well, not really. I expected the movie to suck (okay, maybe not this badly.) But watching the movie is like watching a perversion of something holy. That’s it – it’s like watching blasphemy in pure form. Everything about it has been taken to an entirely new level of wrongness. What little interaction there is between the children and any adults that exist outside the world of the sandlot reeks more of child molestation than parent-child interaction.

(”You’re Scotty, right?” the aforementioned NASA engineer/lady-lead’s dad asks the narrator. “You should come over tomorrow and help me with my rocket.” He continues, the boy barely having answered. “See the girls don’t appreciate my… science. I’d like to share that with someone.” Ewwww…)

The children’s acting is far worse. The narrator (in his youth, anyhow) has a dialect that I’m sure the writers thought adoringly cute on page, but translates to annoyingly ignorant on screen. The boy-lead doesn’t speak more than two words every 20 minutes. The fat kid isn’t witty so much as he’s just loud. And the story that introduces the creature (in the original, a mythic retelling of a monstrous creature akin to something you’d see in MST3000; now a black-and-white video that looks like a [bad] home movie of a puppy growing up) is ridiculously thin – the creature never looks like anything other than what he is, a big drooling puppy.

And the narrator (in his grown up, “I’m narrating the movie as a remembrance” voice) actually does manage to capture the same mythic “these were the days” type of voice from the original, but the events that surround the narration makes the narration ludicrous.

It makes me feel cheap and dirty. Tainted.

I am very, very sad. Is this the type of drivel that the future generation is growing up with? Lord, I hope not.

Also, thank God for DVD. I think I’ll pick up the original in the near future. Likely pick it up on the cheap, too. I doubt it’s seen as some baseball oeuvre.

Cold has turned to warm;
Spring’s return echoes one thought:
Long legs on short skirts.

“You know… I started it… the whole having a soul… before it was all the cool new thing…”
“Oh my God, are you twelve?”
“I’m getting the brush off for Captain Peroxide, doesn’t exactly bring out the Champion in me!”
-Angel and Buffy, Chosen

I just came to one of those realizations, and I heard a “click” inside of my head. The realization, of course, was entirely dependant on information I had in my head. It’s a case of 2 and 2. And now that I see 4, I just feel sick.

Stupid, stupid man.

I submit this with little comment.

Wikipedia entry on jocks.

Note the length, specifically, and the depth of understanding reached.

Wikipedia entry on nerd.

No further comment.