Stealing Home
Okay, I’ll admit how much I find myself zoning out while watching this movie – it’s incredibly cheesy, clichéd, pretty badly written … you can read a good bad review of it by Roger Ebert here – but it’s still a movie I could watch over and over because of:
1) Jodie Foster’s performance – not just the performance but the whole damn character, based on a real person from the writer-directors’ lives I think. In response to Ebert’s review, I’d argue that the reason she killed herself, though it’s never stated, is hinted at in her very last line of the movie, “God I wish I could do that,” and the look on her face as she says it – she’s a dreamer who knows she’ll never get her dreams, and the whole tragedy, the hopelessness, of the movie is that sometimes that’s all it takes …
2) David Foster’s, yes, also cheesy but tearjerking score, just makes me tingle every time the movie starts.
There are plenty of other little pockets of innocent / naïve (you choose) beauty in here too. But just to reiterate, it’s the music and the Jodie that get me, and when they’re both soaring in unison, like the scene on the end of the pier, this kinda becomes the only movie in the world to me.
May 29th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
[...] Once again the story bears at times weird similarities to Barrymore’s own life and there are a lot of standalone moments that for me called to mind the images I got in my head while reading her autobiography, it’s kind of weird. There’s something about the movie, too, which lifts it above a lot of other movies of its kind, and that’s the way that no matter how cheesy it gets (and it does, believe me, it does), it always feels like it actually happened somewhere and that the story means something to the people behind it. Maybe it was the baseball connection too, but in this way it reminded me of the Jodie Foster movie Stealing Home. It’s nothing special, but it is at times overwhelmingly cosy, and I can’t say too often how in love with Drew Barrymore I am right now. [...]