Kids TV and movies can be a hard slog for modern adults -- at least for this one. From PBS cartoons featuring bilingual Hispanic dragons playing wheelchair basketball to mega-zillion-dollar features where cars become robots and fight each other very, very loudly, watching video with my boys was often as an endurance test.
But then there was The Sandlot -- a light in the CGI darkness. It’s a coming-of-age baby boomer tale about a group of boys who play pick-up baseball obsessively, only to lose balls into the junkyard next door, which is patrolled by a huge monster dog. It’s cute, funny and (important in my household) deeply reverential to the game of baseball.
Is it Casablanca? No. It’s a kids movie. And my sons loved it. MLB loves it, and is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year with events around the league.
So naturally, a feminist at the lefty sports site Deadspin hates it. Hannah Keyser just saw The Sandlot for the first time and recorded a “Reel Sports” video and blog post about it. “Not having any nostalgia for the movie certainly dampened my enjoyment of it,” she wrote. (I was 25 and married when it came out and never saw it until 10 years later. I have no nostalgia for it.)
What didn’t she like about it? Keyser expected better plot and pacing, it seems. And she was disappointed that “the almost redeeming scene,” in which James Earl Jones plays a former Negro League player didn’t quite have the social justice impact she’s like.
But Keyser’s real complaint comes in the video where she sputters, “This movie is so f*cking sexist!” and “way too sexist to enjoy.” (Did I mention she’s a feminist?) When one of the characters in an insult match with a rival kid pulls out “You play ball like a girl!” Keyser calls it “so bad, so beyond beyond the pale, so egregious, that the f*cking soundtrack stops.” (She likes to say “f*ck.” Almost as much as she likes to say "like." But, like, whatever.) "I understand that ‘you throw like a girl' was a thing in the 9os, but I always thought that if the person said that, that was like a signal that this was not a great person.” (Did I mention Keyser’s a millennial feminist?)
In the blog, Keyser writes that “girls and women … are so explicitly exempt from the transformative baseball experience that Scotty Smalls marvels that a ‘girl’ such as his mother would so much as know who Babe Ruth is.”
Right, because it’s a story about boys. In the early 1960s. Crew cuts and soda pop, not man-buns and latte.
More understandable is Keyser’s objection to the scene when the character Squints tricks a female lifeguard into kissing him. Seen through the #Metoo prism, it might be troubling. But the movie plays the scene innocently and with with a clear sense of the silliness of a prepubescent boy determined to get a kiss from a college-age girl.
Keyser ends her video indulging another “woke” millennial preoccupation -- suggesting that the movie is really about the character of Smalls falling in gay love with the character of Benny. “This movie needs like a 2017 update in which Smalls is allowed to like accept his own -- his own self you know?”
No, that’s what we have PBS cartoons for.
