There's No Crying in Baseball

A League of Their Own

Director: Penny Marshall

Cast: Geena Davis, Tom Hanks, Madonna, Rosie O'Donnell, Lori Petty, Jon Lovitz, Bill Pullman

Released: July 1, 1992

When people think of baseball movies, I'm sure this one is always at the top of the list. And when people think of movies with a predominately all-female cast, I'm sure this one is also at the top of that list. It is set during 1943 which means since there is a war going on, there is no longer anymore Major League Baseball since all the men are overseas. This movie tells the story of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (or the AAGPBL (it's still quite a mouthful even when it's abbreviated!)).

Sisters Dottie (Geena Davis) and Kit Hinson (Lori Petty) who live in Willamette, Oregon are recruited by an AAGPBL scout named Ernie (Jon Lovitz) who wants to take them to Chicago to be on a team. Correction: he only wants to recruit Dottie who is an exceptionally good player (she can easily catch a ball without a glove and without any warning a ball is being thrown to her). Dottie has no desire to leave her rural farm life and wants to wait for her husband (Bill Pullman) to return home from the war. Her younger sister, Kit, who loves baseball, but isn't as good as Dottie, really wants this opportunity and Dottie tells Ernie she'll go to Chicago, but only if Kit can also go to which he agrees. 

They make a pit stop in Fort Collins, Colorado so Ernie can check out a ball player named Marla that he hears is really great. And she is really great and she's ready to sign her and take her to Chicago until he gets closer to her and she lifts her hat up so he can see her face and it is revealed she is quite homely. At first he doesn't want to sign her, despite her being a great hitter, because image seems to be the first and foremost priority of the team. They are looking for beautiful young women to wear short skirts (although what's the point since the majority of their target audience are overseas, anyway?). However, Dottie and Kit refuse to go on unless Marla also goes with them.

They find out they will be playing for a team called the Rockford Peaches (such a...wussy name....haha, that reminds me, my dad and I went to someone's house once (I forget who or where or what for) and they owned a cat named Peaches (because it was orange) and after we left, my dad said that was a wussy name). We meet some of the other players, most notably "All the Way" Mae (played by Madonna - I think you can guess why they call her "All the Way Mae")  and her smart mouth friend, Doris (played by Rosie O'Donnell). There's also a player who can't read and needs help from another player to see if she made the team because she wouldn't know if her name was on the list or not. In another scene, we see Mae (whoops, almost typed Madonna!) teaching her how to read on the bus, using an erotic novel. Tea Leoni is also a player and last, but not least, there's a woman who has a young son who is a complete and utter brat and she has to bring him along to all the games.

The first time they are all gathered is when they learn they'll be wearing skirts which they think is ridiculous because how can they slide in skirts? This is also when we learn they'll be going to charm school because this was 1943 and everything was so sexist back then. One of the instructors gives a stylist advice on what to do with each player's hair and/or skin and when she comes to Marla, she doesn't have any advice to make her look any better.

We see a montage of the girls being photographed for newspapers and magazines and one of the headlines is (and get ready to roll your eyes!), "Trading oven mitts for baseball mitts!" Ugh. Just ugh. Oh, wait. That might not be the worst part. There's a TV ad about the new league and a voiceover says, "Girls playing baseball?" Yes, I don't know which one is worse. We also get a montage of many of their games and this is where we see Dottie catching a ball while doing the splits and a huge nasty bruise on the back thigh one of the players received after sliding onto one of the bases. I thought for sure it was just make-up because this thing is huge, but after doing some research, apparently it was real. Ewww. And ouch!

The Peaches' coach/manager is former player for the Cubs (he hit 58 home runs in 1936), Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) who is not thrilled to be coaching a bunch of women at first and spends most of his time drinking, but does come around in the end. He gives us the most famous line in the entire movie, "There's no crying in baseball!"

There's a very odd scene where he has to deliver bad news to one of the players that her husband has been killed in the war. It's odd because we first get a mail carrier who comes to the locker room after a game, announcing he has a telegram for one of the ladies from the war department. Well, this could only be bad news and all of them (well, the ones who are married and/or have a loved one overseas) are all understandably apprehensive about this news. The mail carrier is being really callous, saying how this should have been sent personally for someone to find out that their husband is dead. He looks through the list which doesn't have the name of the receiver and tells them he has to go back to the post office to straighten it out. Seriously, you just told this group of women that one of their husbands is dead, and now you have to go back and straighten something out, only making it more agonizing for them to have to wait any longer to find out who is getting possibly the worst news of their life? Yeah, that just seems really unprofessional and something that would never happen in the real world. By this time, Jimmy has taken a liking to his players now and demands that the carrier give him the telegram. He has to snatch it out of his hand and push him out of the room with the carrier protesting about it being "official war business." Dugan opens the letter and reads it, finding out who is about to get bad news. Now I realize there's no good way to tell someone their spouse is dead, but I think in this instance the best way would be for Jimmy to announce the name from where he's standing. Instead, he slowly starts to head to the brand new widow, making the other women he passes fearful that it might be one of them who he's headed to. This includes Dottie who is very scared that her husband, Bob, is dead. Of course, the woman he is headed to, Betty Spaghetti (I think they call her that because she makes a mean spaghetti?), is towards the back, so therefore he passes many women on his way to deliver her the telegram.

In the very next scene, Bob has arrived in Rockford after being discharged from from the army. This literally happens thirty seconds right after Betty received her telegram that I was sure that this was a dream sequence and Dottie was imaging her husband was with her, after hearing the horrible news about Betty's husband, but no, after a few minutes, I realized that this was reality. This is around the time where the Peaches lose a few of their players. Obviously Betty doesn't come back after losing her husband. Dottie decides to leave when her husband returns because she wants to starts a family with him. Despite her looks, even Marla finds love and marries a man she met at a club all the players snuck out to one night and marries him shortly after.

Because of the Hinson sister's rivalry, Kit has been traded to the Racine Belles (yeah, female sports teams sure had some wimpy names). Wearing skirts comes in handy for them because their motto is "Dirt in the skirt". Dottie has decided to play until the end of the season so she is playing against her sister when the Peaches and the Belles are playing against each other in a game that will determine the champion. Dottie gives the pitcher advice since she knows her sister and Kit missed the first two, but hits a home run. Dottie had caught the ball, but dropped it, declaring Kit safe.

The movie starts and ends in "present day" 1992 where Dottie is going to visit an exhibition of the AAGPBL at the Baseball Hall of Fame. At first I thought it was Geena Davis in old age makeup, because that was certainly her voice I was hearing, but it didn't quite look like her. I found out they got older actresses to play elder Dottie and Kit, but had Geena Davis and Lori Petty do the voiceovers, which was very odd. The young boy who used to be a nuisance is now a middle aged man and comes to pay his respects to the team and tells the others that his mother has died. We also learn that Jimmy has also died in 1987.

The movie ends with Madonna's "This Used to Be My Playground" playing over the credits. I was familiar with that song, but I had no idea it was used in the movie. It's a bit of a downer song for it: "This used to be my playground, this used to be my childhood dream. This used to be the place I ran to whenever I was in need of a friend....why did it have to end?" Yeah, pretty dreary lyrics! They could have at least changed the title to "This Used to Be My Ball Field."

I believe this is the only Madonna movie I've seen and she's really only a background character. Her one big scene in the movie is when they sneak out to a club called the Suds Bucket and she swings dance, which she's quite good at (I'm assuming that was really her!) This is probably smart of me that A League of Their Own is the only Madonna movie I've seen because from what I've heard, she's a terrible actress. I never saw Evita or the one where she has a baby with her gay friend or any of the ones she made when she was married to Guy Ritchie.

Hang Ten, Dude!

Point Break

Director: Kathryn Bigelow

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze, Lori Petty, Gary Busey, John C. McGinley

Released: July 12, 1991

I would love to know who pitched this movie and how it got greenlit in the first place. Let's have a group of surfers....and make them bank robbers! That is the plot of this movie, basically. We first meet FBI agent ("I AM AN FBI AGENT!") Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) who, along with his partner, Angelo (Gary Busey, who I'm only familiar with from Celebrity Apprentice), decide that he's going to infiltrate the bank robbing surfers and try to get into their crowd so he can stop them. Since Johnny Utah is the younger, more athletic (he is a former quarterback for the Ohio Buckeyes, after all), overall better looking one, they decide that he should be the one to work his way into the surfers' group. Although it certainly would have been funnier if Gary Busey tried to. 

Since the group of robbers are wearing rubber masks of former presidents (and even call themselves the Ex-Presidents), Johnny Utah isn't exactly sure which group of surfers are the bank robbers since this is L.A. and there are a lot of surfers in L.A. The Ex-Presidents have robbed 27 banks in the last three years, but to keep from becoming caught, they never rob the vault, only grab the cash in the drawers so they can be sure they're out in 90 seconds. Although they wield guns, they have never killed anyone. Angelo figured out they were surfers because one of them mooned the camera with "Thank you" written across his butt and he could tell by the tan line that he was a surfer. They also found traces of sand left at the crime scene.

Johnny Utah attempts his first try at surfing and nearly kills himself. He is saved by a female surfer (Lori Petty) who screams at him for being stupid. After tracking down her license plate number, Johnny Utah finds out her name is Tyler and where she works so he can ask her to give him surfing lessons. Through her, he meets Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) who is the charismatic leader of a group of surfers. He and Tyler are a bit of an item, but not since other women openly flirt with him right in front of Tyler. I didn't really get their romantic dynamic. But surprise, surprise, Tyler will end up falling for Johnny Utah anyway. I did find it peculiar that Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze didn't have the other's roles. I feel like Keanu would have been better as the surfer dude, I mean he's Keanu Reeves for god's sake. But Patrick Swayze does have the long, blond beach hair, so you gotta make him the surfer! 

Johnny Utah (don't you just love that name?) gets in good with the group and quite likes his new friends. Of course he does since his only other friend is Gary Busey! Speaking of Angelo, he leads Johnny Utah and some other agents on a raid in a house where a group of surfers are gathered. Johnny Utah had a nasty altercation with them earlier when he ran into one while he was surfing and one of the guys punched him. While he was using the beach shower, the same guy and a group of his friends came upon him with the intent to beat him up, but luckily Bodhi showed up and told them to stand down before punching the guy. Johnny Utah and Bodhi followed the car with the fist-happy surfer and thought for sure they had their bank robbers. These guys are not the bank robbers, but rather involved with some serious drugs and were all loaded with guns. There's a big shootout and Johnny Utah gets awfully close to a blade of a lawn mower when one of the bad guy pushes his head towards it. This freaked me out and I had to turn around so I wouldn't see anything too gruesome. But right before he's about to get his pretty face chopped up, Angelo shoots out the motor with his gun. Whew! An undercover cop gets really angry with them because they messed up his assignment because he was this close to finding out where the drugs were coming from. 

Well, if you haven't guessed by now (and, uh, spoilers ahead!), Bodhi and his crew of surfers are the ones pulling the bank jobs. Johnny Utah begins to have his suspicions about them and while at a stakeout at a nearby bank, he and Angelo nearly miss another heist when Angelo has Johnny Utah go into a nearby sandwich shop and get him two meatball sandwiches because he can't shut up about how great they are and how hungry he is. Seriously, this scene must go on for five minutes! When they see the four masked men, they shoot out their back car window and chase after them. Their car gets stuck as the Ex-Presidents turn into a gas station where they firebomb their car so they can get a new one and Johnny Utah runs all the way there to try to stop them. The three other guys are in the car waiting for Bodhi (in a Ronald Reagan mask) to get in, but instead, he and Johnny Utah have a wild goose chase, running through houses (like actually going inside the house from the front door to the back door). It's a pretty exciting foot chase, I must say. Johnny Utah sprains his ankle after jumping from a long drop and it's clear he can't chase after "Reagan" anymore. We see a close up of the eyes behind the Reagan mask and know it's Bodhi. Well, duh, they wouldn't spend this much time on the chase if it was just some random guy Johnny Utah was running after! 

Now that Bodhi's gang know that Johnny Utah is an FBI agent (He is an FBI AGENT!), the other surfers want to get the hell out of town, but Bodhi has other plans. He blackmails Johnny Utah into joining him on a bank robbery by telling him that someone has Tyler (oh, and she's pretty pissed about how Bodhi lied to her) hostage and the only way he can free her is if he available in the next twelve hours to call it off. So Johnny Utah has his hands tied and is forced to rob the bank with the others. Only since there is no extra Presidents masks (what, they couldn't get a George Bush mask for him? Surely they had those in 1991!), Johnny Utah has to go in sans a mask. This time Bodhi decides he's going to get money from the vault and while doing this, an undercover cop who was one of the customers in the bank at the time, tells the bank security guard to back him up and shoots at one of the surfers. I think Bodhi's brother gets shot, but manages to escape...I don't remember! Bodhi kills the undercover cop and somehow manages to escape to an airfield where he has a plane ready to take off for Mexico. Johnny Utah follows him and Angelo is also there and there's a big shoot out. Johnny Utah doesn't want Angelo to kill Brodhi because he needs him alive so he can tell him where Tyler is. Angelo gets shot by one of the other surfers and Gary Busey and his teeth are hamming up that death scene so much that I was laughing...probably not a good thing to laugh over a death scene! But it was hilarious.

Johnny Utah ends up on the plane with Bodhi, Bodhi's bleeding brother, and the pilot. Johnny Utah begs for Bodhi to call off the kidnapping of Tyler and to let her go before he jumps out of the plane just in case something happens, but Bodhi ignores him and jumps out after he's sent his brother. Since Johnny Utah is now a skydiving expert since he's already skydived once before in his life (in an earlier scene), he jumps out of the plane without a parachute and tackles Bodhi in the air, puts a gun to his head and tells him to open the parachute, but Bodhi refuses to open it, saying Johnny Utah needs to open it and in order to do so, he has to drop the gun. Guess who ends up opening it? Yep, Johnny Utah has to sacrifice his gun in order to save their lives. So Bodhi gets away with the money (even though his brother is now dead) and Tyler is safe. We fast forward a year later where FBI agent Johnny Utah has finally found Bodhi in Australia where he's surrounded by cops. There's a huge storm and the ocean has 50 foot waves and Bodhi begs him to let him surf one last time because he was going on about how he wanted to surf that one perfect wave, so Johnny Utah lets him go and we see Bodhi paddle out in the death wave and I guess it's up to interpretation what happened to him, but I'm guessing he probably drowned.

This movie has a lot of fun action, but for the most part, I didn't understand why this movie even exists. Did you know there was a Point Break remake that came out just last year? I mean, was the world really clamoring for a Point Break remake? It does have some interesting history as it was directed by Kathryn Bigelow who would become the first female to win the Best Directing Oscar for The Hurt Locker and later go on to direct Zero Dark Thirty. I feel for a surfing movie there wasn't enough surfing, but I guess if I always wanted to watch a surfing movie, I could watch Blue Crush. 

Need me, love me, and feed me

Free Willy

Director: Simon Wincer

Cast: Jason James Richter, Lori Petty, Michael Madsen, Jayne Atkinson, Michael Ironside, Keiko 

Released: July 16, 1993

I saw this movie in the theaters as a kid and I may have seen it on home video a year after it came out, but I haven't seen it since then. I don't remember if I saw the second movie or not, but I'm pretty positive I didn't see the third. If you had asked me who was in this movie before I recently watched it again, I would have told you "Some kid and a killer whale". I would not be able to tell you any of the adults who was in this. Lori Petty from Orange is the New Black (and Tank Girl too, I know, but I've never seen that, so to me she's Lolly from OitNB) plays a trainer at the aquarium? I didn't know that. Michael Madsen from the Kill Bill movies play the kid's foster dad? I didn't know that. Jayne Atkinson from 24 and House of Cards plays the kid's foster mom? I didn't know that. Of course, when I saw this movie back in 1993, I didn't know any of those people! 

I forgot that Jesse (Jason James Richter), the 12 year old kid who befriends Willy the whale, was a runaway. I remember he met Willy because he had to clean the aquarium shed that he and his friend vandalized with spray paint, but I thought he was just a little punk. I guess I forgot he was acting up because he didn't have any parents and would sleep in a skating park with his other homeless runaway friends and steal cakes from bakery vans and go to restaurants and eat leftover food off plates after people left and would scam people for money by telling them he didn't have enough bus fare to get home. 

After he is caught spray painting the aquarium (his friend manages to get away), he is placed in a foster home with a seemingly nice couple (Madsen and Atkinson), but acts like a total douche to them. He acts like a little prick to everyone he meets and I just want to smack him so much. But I guess since his mom is in jail and his dad is...wherever....we're suppose to feel bad for him. The only one who can make him smile is Willy, the killer whale whose tank he vandalized. Rae (Petty) the trainer, tells Jesse that they've been having a hard time training Willy, but lo and behold, Jesse and Willy form a special bond (Willy even saves Jesse after he knocks his head and falls into the tank...he's lucky Willy didn't pull a Black Fish on him!) Jesse feeds Willy and trains him by moving around in circles so the whale copies him. The whale attraction is losing money as they can't put on a show but now that Jesse has trained Willy they have a big grand opening and lots of people are in the stands to see Willy perform. However a bunch of snot-nosed obnoxious kids are banging on the glass in the downstairs viewing area and this makes Willy agitated and therefore he does not perform no matter how much his 12 year old BFF pleads him to. You would think they would have a sign that says "PLEASE DO NOT BANG ON THE GLASS!" Although I have been to zoos and people still feed the animals even though there are signs that say "PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS", so that probably wouldn't have helped. When Willy refused to put on a show, I was like, "You show them Willy...don't perform for those awful people!" 

Every movie like this needs a bad guy and in this movie it's Dial (Michael Ironside) who is the owner of the aquatic park and might as well have dollar signs etched in his eyes because that's all he cares about. He is very angry after the fiasco with Willy not performing and after he sees a leak caused by Willy ramming into the glass to stop the incessant tapping, he gets an idea to cause more damage to the tank. He and his other henchmen sneak into the aquarium one night and puncture some holes so water starts spilling out, but since Jesse was there at the time, he hides and overhears everything, such as Dial telling them that they will collect one million dollars insurance from the death of Willy. First of all, that doesn't sound like that much at all, but this was 1993. Second of all, wouldn't there be an investigation in all of this? Wouldn't they be fined for not having a stable living condition for their orca? Wouldn't they find out that the tank was purposely sabotaged? I feel like that he did not think this the entire way through.

I didn't remember this subplot at all and thought they had freed Willy because, you know, it's the right thing to do! There's a scene at night where Jesse is sitting in the bleachers and Willy is making this awful, haunting noise and he says, "What's wrong boy?" Keep in mind you can see Puget Sound beyond the little pool Willy is swimming in. Christ on a cracker, kid, look up. What the hell do you think is wrong? He does look up and on closer inspection he notices that there are....ORCAS in the wide open body of water and realizes they must be Willy's family as they are answering his sad cries. 

But it isn't until Willy's life is in danger that they then decide to release him into the wild. So if Willy had performed a great show that day and they had made a crapton of money and the evil guy never had to kill the whale for the insurance money, then they never would have released him? Is that what I'm suppose to believe? That seems effed up! In fact, I think that would have been more interesting...to FREE the damn whale (technically part of the dolphin family, I know) because it's the RIGHT THING TO DO! Not free him just because his tank was gushing out water. AURGH, movie! 

They do end up doing just that and instead of asking for help (besides from Jesse's foster parents), it's just Jesse, Rae, and a Native American guy who works at the park. Dial and his henchmen find out about the plan and go to stop them (how are they going to get back a 3 ton orca?) They back Willy out into the water, but two boats have blocked his path with a big net in the way, so Jesse beckons the whale to follow him over to a rock wall and we see the famous scene where Willy jumps over and into his freedom. The kid is right under the whale and all I can think of is, If that whale falls halfway, it's going to be very unpleasant for that kid! They show stock footage of a pod of orcas in the wild and it's so obvious that none of the whales are Keiko, the whale who played Willy because his dorsal fin has flapped over, which is a common thing that happens to orcas in captivity. None of the whales shown have the drooping dorsal fin.

As you know, Keiko was released into the wild because it didn't seem right to have a whale that was the star of the FREE Willy franchise to not be free. He was released near the coast of Iceland in 1998 (the final Free Willy movie came out in 1997 so that must have been when his contract was up, sorry, bad joke!) Sadly he died in late 2003, most likely from pneumonia.  

"Will You Be There", the song Michael Jackson sang for the movie, won Best Song at the MTV Movie Awards. (And if you want to see the famous jumping over the rock wall scene, it starts around 2:30):