Though we've left out some sentimental choices — cry us a river over "Brian's Song" another time — we're confident that you'll discover some new favorites
From the thunderclap in the first torrential rainstorm — a cue for riotous dancing — to the climactic sunlight on the smiling faces of millions of viewers, this Bollywood epic is cause for joy of meteorological proportions. Surely the longest and most enthralling underdog-sports movie ever, Lagaan stars Aamir Khan (who also produced the film) as the leader of 19th century peasants from the western Indian town of Champaner, who strike a desperate deal with the representatives of the English Raj: if the locals defeat the lords of the British Empire in a cricket match, they get a break on their lagaan, or land tax. One guess as to whether the Champaners become champs.
The most recent of only three musical dramas in India’s glorious film history to be nominated for an Academy Award (after the 1957 Mother India and the 1988 Salaam Bombay!), and one of the few to achieve U.S. release outside of the Desi theater circuit, Lagaan has the capability to win over Bollywood newcomers — to turn snickers into smiles, indulgence to rapture. Writer-director Ashutosh Gowariker finds the spice in a masala mix of melodrama and character comedy, and keeps his cinematic rhythms humid and urgent for the full 3¾-hour running time. Even those who know none of cricket’s complicated rules will bounce in their seats to A.R. Rahman’s irrepressible tunes; here, one can immediately and fully accept the Bollywood trope of music and dance as an expression of life’s deepest, most soaring emotions. As sports film, social document or communal ecstasy, Lagaan is the all-time all-rounder.
A boy’s sport, a man’s game. Baseball lodges in the American male heart because the fundamentals look easy enough for any Little Leaguer to master. Too soon, men realize that pro ball demands a genius for grace, concentration and magnificent egotism. They may agonize over the career path not chosen, the debt too steep, the woman so close but just beyond their reach. For many, though, a dream of athletic stardom is the one that got away. So they stick with baseball, living and dying with their team, analyzing stats with the rapt anguish of a rabbinical student cramming for a final. To their favorite players, they are both sons and fathers — part hero worshippers, part child psychologists. They become a collective, possessive lover of their idols. Baseball fever: boys catch it, men can’t shake it.
In the late 1980s and early ’90s, Hollywood got the fever. Bull Durham, Eight Men Out, Stealing Home, Talent for the Game, A League of Their Own and Mr. Baseball swarmed into theaters like kids onto a sandlot. In 1989, two baseball movies opened in the same month (April, of course): Field of Dreams, which a heartless TIME critic panned as “the male weepie at its wussiest,” and the good-natured comedy we honor here. Writer-director David S. Ward (he penned The Sting) imagines the real Cleveland Indians team as a bunch of loopy rejects from the Mexican, minor and California Penal leagues. Now coming to bat: the veteran catcher on his last legs (Tom Berenger), the Willie Mays wannabe (Wesley Snipes), the pampered third baseman (Corbin Bernsen). And on the mound, a fastballer (Charlie Sheen) with control problems on and off the field. With this gang, in this comic fantasy, the Tribe can’t lose.
Ward doesn’t try too hard or aim too high, but his collection of stock characters, breezy dialogue, dense ambience and instinct for easy emotions is pretty funny. Special mention to former minor major leaguer Bob Uecker, the real Mr. Baseball (Johnny Carson called him that), who plays the play-by-play announcer. “Just a bit outside,” he says diplomatically of a Sheen pitch that starts in Cleveland and ends near Cincinnati.
Well, grown-ups, you no longer have to hide your copies of Harry Potter and the Whatever Whatever during your morning commute, because the author of the popular childrens book series is writing her first book for the olds.
