Field of Dreams

I'd never seen the thing. It looked insipid. I started watching it---it's free on Hulu---and was still surprised at how bad it was.

Kevin Cosner is a farmer who hears a voice that says If you build it, he will come, which he somehow decides means that he should build a baseball field. Then---well, I didn't follow it. Ghosts of baseball players start appearing for some reason. They're probably the last historical figures anyone would ever bother to raise from the dead.

At least they got a lot of the crap out of the way quick. He built the thing in the first twenty minutes.

I looked up a few negative reviews online, mostly from sports writers who pointed out the historical inaccuracy. "Shoeless Joe" was left handed in real life but presented as being right-handed. And he was a Southerner, not an Italian from New York. And they noted that the players were all white. Where was the Negro League and why didn't James Earl Jones have anything to say about that?

In real life, mowing down two to three acres of corn couldn't bankrupt a farm like it did in the movie.

The only thing more dreary than a movie buff is a sports fan. Passively watching a movie is bad enough without it being about people passively watching sports.

The movie was a Reagan era attack on the 1960's. Cosner had committed a terrible injustice against his dead father by preferring a different baseball team and now has to make amends.

Why did a farmer own a Volkswagen bus? He drives it from Iowa to Boston and back. Those things are murder on long drives. Everything seems two or three times as long.

I have no idea what people saw in that father-son thing. It was anti-climactic.

Playing baseball was probably a great job back then, but you don't think any of those guys were looking forward to retirement? Even if you loved playing baseball, doing it beyond the grave for eternity seems way too much.