BULL DURHAM
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
(1988) **1/2 (out of four)
"Baseball is my religion," Susan Sarandon announces at the beginning of BULL DURHAM. And apparently, her form of communion is torrid sex with one minor league baseball player a year. The movie follows the minor league Durham Bulls (whoever named the movie was apparently cixelsyd... excuse me, dyslexic), more specifically, Sarandon's two prospects for the gigolo position. The first prospect is young Tim Robbins, the impulsive pitcher who "f*cks like he pitches." (At 95 miles an hour?) The other prospect is aging catcher Kevin Costner, who has been busted down to A-ball from the big leagues.
Touch choice, eh? The elimination round comes as Sarandon invites them both back to her place -- and wouldn't _that_ be the threesome from hell! Costner storms out after learning what the arrangement is all about, leaving Sarandon to tie Robbins to her bed and read poetry to him all night. You see, it's not all sex, she also teaches her young charges the rules and secrets of life. They acquire the essential knowledge of life through wild, animal sex, which leads to the obvious question -- why don't the state universities offer this kind of program?!
Costner is assigned by the team manager to do much the same thing with Robbins in a non-sexual way. So, over the course of the movie, Robbins hones his talent into major league-quality pitching with advice from Costner and Sarandon. According to BULL DURHAM, the way to succeed in baseball is to wear garter belts under your uniform and learn to breathe through your eyelids like the Mayan Indians. You didn't hear it from me, but that's also the key to succeeding in the movie-reviewing business.
BULL DURHAM has an intriguing premise, mixing America's two favorite pastimes, and follows through with it for the first half of the movie, but gets off track around the five-inning mark, when Robbins gets on a winning streak and decided to quit slipping Sarandon the screwball every night, a duty we all know Costner will take up sooner or later. He does, of course, in a sex scene none of us ever wanted to see. Still, the film has its moments, comedic and dramatic, and is worth watching for its big-league talent. No rookies here, baby.
--
Visit the Movie Critic at LARGE website at http://www.missouri.edu/~c667778/movies.html
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews