[239/365] Bull Durham

[cosmolinguist]

This is maybe the only baseball movie I really want to make diffrentcolours watch that we haven't watched yet -- just because it's not on streaming as far as I can tell -- and reading this about it just makes me want to watch it so much more!

I put Bull Durham on way too late at night, because we’d had dinner at my godmother’s house, and she’d said she loves this movie, and Thomas had said he’d never seen it. So when we got home, after midnight on a weeknight, I turned on the TV instead of going to bed, and hit play on the horniest baseball movie in the world.

I just love so much that there was this little corner of years in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s when the only movie it was legal to make was an erotic thriller. If you wanted to make a baseball movie, well, too bad, you were going to have to make it out of the parts for an erotic thriller, because those were the only parts we had for you. I love that Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins have maybe the most high-key slapstick farcical sex scenes ever committed to film, and that while filming those scenes in this movie they got together in real life and stayed together for twenty-one years. Twenty-one years! I love that Susan Sarandon is forty-two in this movie and looks forty-two in this movie and is acknowledged without question by every character and also the film itself to be the hottest woman on the planet. I love that Kevin Costner clearly met the devil at a crossroads and asked to be fuckable in movies and the devil was like “Ok, do you want to be somewhat fuckable in a bunch of movies, or do you want to be the most fuckable person in the world in exactly one movie only?” Kevin Costner is unbelievably sexy in this movie, and was never within driving distance of sexy at any other time in his life or career ever again.

I love that I know nothing about how baseball works or how it is played and never will and yet have in my life cried at the end of a probably two-digit number of baseball movies. I love how this bizarre, creaky, horny movie and A League of Their Own and The Art of Fielding and Field of Dreams all have exactly nothing in common and all are the exact same thing. I love how sports is always romance, is always feelings, is always just an excuse to get into the warmest soapiest water available. I love how at a baseball game the stadium almost always looks out at some grand view behind the field, and the sun is setting and everybody is eating hot dogs, and ice cream out of a little hat, and greasy fries, and the game takes roughly fourteen hours, and at no point do I ever know who is winning, but I somehow always end up feeling all these big feelings about precisely nothing. I love how baseball is love, and sex, and America, and a new car, and the smell of a grill in somebody’s else’s backyard in late summer, and a rising three-chord progression in a pop song, and not a sport at all.

Comments

[silveradept]

Oh, boy. That does give a new lens to view a nominally baseball movie through.

100%

[jesse_the_k]

Bull Durham is my very favorite sexy movie for exactly those reasons.

Do you have a DVD player?

Re: 100%

[cosmolinguist]

The Playstation will play DVDs, yeah I should just get the DVD. :)