Sugar (2008)

If anything Sugar succeeds on the most basic level of making baseball, one of the most boring sports watchable. 

I just wish they had gone with my name for Baseball- Steroid Rounders. Anywho, I knew this was just a good movie from the start.

The photography was just so crisp and so picturesque, that it was impressionist-painting-esque and I was watching this on my phone via BBC Iplayer. That good. I had been attracted to watching this because the film-makers, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck had made It’s Kind Of A Funny Story,which I featured on here at the start of last month. I didn’t mention then that I was kinda non-plussed about their debut, Half-Nelson but Sugar is kinda leaps ahead of both of them.

Sugar is a beautifully told rags to riches story of a young baseball hopeful trying to improve his life for his family in the Dominican Republic. Metaphorically... aren't we all?
Sports movies are a strange beast; They're like a music biopic without the music, though I think Sugar has a great recorded music soundtrack featuring TV On The Radio, most prominently.

Not that Sugar is about baseball really. It's more about a guy trying to succeed in spite of his upbringing; trying to use his gift before it’s too late and it leaves him. Like said- very similar to music-biopic country.

The greatest strength of this movie is that of the characters and writing. There aren’t many scenes of the kid being put to breaking point under pressure and there is no final showdown against the ‘big team’, thank god. It’s more about the way you rise up in professional sports these days. Miguel or Sugar as everyone calls him has gotten this far because he has a gift in his pitching throw and that’s gotten him on a training camp, where they seem to be, not just training but conditioning these athletes almost like a factory for the America baseball leagues, where don’t learn English, just the baseball terms.

His success in the camp takes him to America, his true goal all along- to play and send money home to his family but he realise how lonely and desolate professional sports can be especially when you’re in a strange place, you have small contact to your home and you don’t speak the language. He’s not even as high up the ladder as I thought he was. This all sound very dour but this film is so watchable because its characters are charming even though none of them, apart from Miguel are in it that long.

I watched Sugar (2008) online via BBC I-Player.
My 2011 in Movies will return with Drive Angry 3D (2011)...