Yeh, I hadn’t seen this yet, so sue me And I really have no excuse – never mind that it’s one of those movies that “everyone” has seen … I’d forgotten that it also marked the debut of Gaby Hoffmann, in what would prove ultimately to be one of her biggest parts. Even the fact that this is technically a sports movie shouldn’t have deterred me from watching it so long.

Anyway, as to the sports part – I seem to recall a lot of those “what’s the best sports movie?” type polls listing this high if not at the top, in some cases exactly because it’s not all about the sport (Jerry Maguire is the same). There’s a weird moment where the screenwriter seems to make a case for it being so, when Liotta I think talks about it being all about the game, that baseball is America etc (ah, thank you IMDb: it’s James Earl Jones who says, “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.”); but it doesn’t really work and the movie is best as a metaphor for a lot of things rather than specifically America “learning to think for itself again”.

Mostly, though, to my pleasant surprise, I found it one of the funniest movies I’ve seen – I laugh too little sometimes in movies but this one really tickled my funny bone the right way. I love Amy Madigan’s reaction to her husband basically going crazy, lol, it’s so atypical of this kind of story. There’s a corny scene where she basically tells him, “go with it if it’s what you really feel you need to do,” etc, but after that, her face is just a wonder as she takes all the strange goings on with this, “sure that makes sense” bemusement. I love when she turns a whole community meeting around to being against censorship early on in the movie, rushing out into the hallway energised giggling, “It’s like the Sixties again!” which connects to a moment with the similarly exuberant James Earl Jones, when he first meets Costner and says with mock enthusiasm, “You’re from the Sixties!” then proceeds to chase him out the room with an ancient bug sprayer yelling, “Go back where you came from!” LOL.

If there’s one moment it really falls down it’s the moment where Hoffmann gets caught in a tussle between Costner and his brother-in-law and is literally dropped off the back of the bleachers, lol. It shouldn’t be funny, but frankly it is, and it’s such an awful set-up for the plot-point that follows that it threatens to magnify and highlight all the other contrivances of the screenplay that would otherwise be completely excusable.

Overall, however, it’s as wonderful as I’d heard; moreso, in fact, for the humour. It bears that rare wonder, a James Horner score that doesn’t sound like a James Horner score, Hoffmann is adorable, and James Earl Jones and Amy Madigan are simply priceless.

“What are you all standing around for? This is the beginning of the world! Think of it. All of those people goin’ to see the pictures … and a lot of them can’t even talk American! But then they don’t have to because … pictures are a language that everybody understands … it’s like music ... for the eyes … and if you’re good, if you’re really good, then maybe what you’re doin’ is, you’re givin’ ‘em little tiny pieces of time that they never forget.”

I’ll admit, I’m not big fan of out-and-out slapstick comedy, and when I realised how jam-packed with such stuff this movie was gonna be, I thought I might be in for a rather cringing couple of hours. I’m no expert on silent film comedy – I’ve still not even touched on the work of, say, Buster Keaton let alone Harold Lloyd and who knows who else – but I think Peter Bogdanovich pulls just about every classic/cliché gag there is out of the book in this homage to the beginnings of cinema and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t get slightly tiresome once or twice.

However, I really watched it for Tatum O’Neal – I wouldn’t have even heard of the movie were it not for the nice things she said about it in her great autobiography “A Paper Life” (sure, as a member of the cast she’d be biased, lol; but I trusted her comments) – and in that regard I wasn’t disappointed, she’s such a spark it gets me every time. As in Bad News Bears she kind of waits in the wings for a long while at the start of the movie which is good for me as it forces me to get into the other aspects of the story. It’s kind of a like a silent period Bowfinger, the little guys fighting against the Patent company to get a slice of the glorious new form of entertainment, and the small family feel of the thing reminded me very much of the Steve Martin movie, which I love.

As in Noises Off…, I’m awed by how much Bogdanovich is able to juggle at once within the scene – at one point, Tatum O’Neal drives a truck piled high with the cast barely missing a steamtrain over which is flying a hot air balloon, followed by the train (and its passengers) being doused by the contents spraying from a water tower – seriously lol, how much did this thing cost?!; another has the camera pan past a series of period movie sets (within the period of the movie itself lol); all the while people are popping on and off the screen with their own concerns; I’m always astounded by how these kinds of movies get put together, I barely have the patience when I’m trying to just write relatively simple stuff of my own lol.

The movie is shot by Laszlo Kovacs in that long lost way only Seventies period movies were shot. I don’t know why, but to me the costumes and set design, everything, always seems so much more authentic in these productions than even the best of recent times – it always feels more “lived in” or something. Ryan O’Neal, Burt Reynolds, and particularly John Ritter are fantastic fun. It’s certainly as special as Tatum says it is, and I imagine it could grow into a personal favourite of mine sometime. At 2 hours it could frankly be even longer, such is the warm feeling it fills me with. It could even be my long awaited gateway to watching more of the real deal silent stuff, ‘cos it’s that kind of movie that fills you with nostalgia even if you didn’t even witness the stuff you’re feeling nostalgic for. The line I started with above, spoken by Brian Keith (I think?) at the end as the camera tracks in on him is so perfect; again, I’m back to what I said the other day about the Oscars, it’s a celebration of the power of cinema, its importance. I don’t know if this movie would appeal to anyone who isn’t so enamoured of the medium … but it certainly got me.