Of the four holy sports of America –
baseball, basketball, football and hockey – I have always had a secret affinity
for baseball. Clearly football and the
NFL is the most divine, and basketball and the NBA is the sexiest; yet it has
always been baseball that as a non-American I have wanted to waste an afternoon
in front of. This doesn’t mean that I
really understand it; I just have a soft spot for it.
The Battered
Bastards referred to in the title are a legendary independent Baseball team
called The Mavericks set up in Portland in 1973 as a response to the previous
team The Beavers moving to Washington.
At that time, all of the minor league teams were linked to a major
league team who used the smaller teams as a ‘farm system’ in order to source
and train up and coming players. This
meant that there was little cohesion in the lower teams and they were simply
less exciting to watch. This led to the
Beavers getting tiny audiences and eventually moving towns.
The unlikely hero of the story is a
largely forgotten ‘50s movie star called Bing
Russell (who is none other than Kirk
Russell’s dad) who was so obsessed
with the game that he set up his own team in Portland. He held open tryouts, which people travelled
the country to attend, and set up a team that was allowed to drink and smoke
and do whatever they wanted – the golden rule was to have fun. Bing was so obsessed with the game that he
made a series of mechanical how-to videos that he used to entice the team to a
series of modest and exciting victories.
Without spoiling the story, it is
suffice to say that they ended up drawing record-breaking crowds, exceeded
expectations and pissing off the other teams.
This is obviously part of the charm of the film.
The other charm of the film is how it
aesthetically embraces nostalgia. There
is loving footage of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and montages of ‘70s
newsprint, as well as the usual talking head interviews of old guys talking
about their heyday. There is no real
bitterness from the interviewees, they mostly just want to talk about a great
fun time in their lives.
The film is a Netflix Original, and is
therefore pitched to a Netflix Audience.
The most obvious proof of this is the slightly-dubstepy music that is
present through the whole film, clearly to appease the short attention span of
the viewers. There is also a brilliant
anti-capitalist, screw-the-big-leagues rebellion that is personified in
toughman Kirk Russell as one of the storytellers. But mainly this is just a great story about a
group of guys that took themselves seriously, whilst they breaking all the
rules. And now all I want to do is drink
beer and watch baseball…
No comments:
Post a Comment