Category: Trailers

By Joe Bendel. The last two years have been tough for Mets fans, but there have been a few bright spots. They have had the pleasure of watching Bobby Valentine “manage” another team and R. A. Dickey has posted All-Star worthy seasons on the mound. When he signed with the Mets, he was one of two knuckleball pitchers in Major League Baseball. And then there was one. Ricki Stern & Annie Sundberg follow Dickey as he works to make a name for himself, while his knuckleball-throwing colleague Tim Wakefield chases a series of career milestones in the thoroughly entertaining documentary, Knuckleball!, which opens this Thursday at the IFC Center.

Tim Wakefield did just about everything you can do as a member of the Boston Red Sox, an often overlooked Northeastern team best known for trading away Babe Ruth, including giving up the eleventh inning walk-off home run in game seven of the 2003 ALCS. Honestly, that was something of a fluke. Wakefield always had success against the Yankees, which made the Red Sox’s decision to banish him to the bullpen rather baffling. In a year when the Sox were largely out of contention, beating the Yanks whenever possible would have been a logical fallback goal. Nonetheless, Wakefield saw little meaningful time on the mound at the start of the 2011 season, despite the tantalizing closeness of his 200th win.

A journeyman pitcher who stunned the baseball world – particularly including the Amazin’s, by winning a spot on the rotation – R.A. Dickey finally signed a guaranteed contract. However, a nagging injury threatens to put a damper on the party. Fortunately, Dickey can call on the knuckleball support network – especially his mentor, veteran knuckleballer Charlie Hough, for advice.

Some of Knuckleball!’s best scenes capture the get-togethers of this knuckleball fraternity, including Hough, both active proponents, and Wakefield’s early guru, Phil Niekro. As one might expect, they have some funny stories to tell. Wakefield and Dickey do a fine job explaining what the knuckleball pitch does and does not do. However, all knuckleballers are at a bit of a loss to explain the deep-seated disdain for their bread-and-butter pitch. Considering how radically different it looks to batters, one would think every club would want one knuckleballer on staff – but no, not by a long shot.

Stern and Sundberg do something rather remarkable in Knuckleball! by building to a big, satisfying emotional crescendo, even though they are following two pitchers whose respective teams were a country mile away from the pennant chase. It comes through loud and clear that Wakefield and Dickey are not just concerned with their individual stats. They are representing their pitch, like faithful practitioners of an esoteric martial art. Yet, this is exactly what baseball is all about: tradition.

Dickey and Wakefield are consistently likable subjects – and the old school knuckleballers, including Hough, Niekro, and Jim Bouton, are even more so. Prolific documenterians, Stern & Sundberg’s best known work is probably Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work and their most important project is easily Burma Soldier, but Knuckleball! is by far their most enjoyable. Non-sports viewers will still find it completely engaging, but for baseball fans, it is like a bag of salted peanuts at an office getaway game (that’s a good thing). Enthusiastically recommended to general audiences, Knuckleball! (with exclamation point) opens this Thursday (9/21) in New York at the IFC Center.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on September 18th, 2012 at 2:24pm.

By Joe Bendel. Paradoxically, it might have been the ardent loyalty of Jian Ping’s persecuted parents that saved them during the Cultural Revolution. At least, they never said anything incriminating their children would have been forced to repeat. Yet, the lingering trauma of the experience makes it difficult for her to relate to her Americanized daughter, Lisa Xia. By exploring their family history, the two women come to terms with their own relationship in Susan Morgan Cooper’s hybrid-documentary, Mulberry Child, which opens this Friday in New York at the Quad Cinema.

True believers, Hou Kai and Gu Wenxiu met and married through the Chinese Communist Party. They bought into the Party’s early rhetoric, which proved to be a profound mistake during the “Anti-Rightist Campaign.” Trying to defend a wrongfully accused colleague, Hou only succeeded in putting himself in the Party’s crosshairs. Despite some trying moments, Jian’s father made it through the first reign of terror, demoted but relatively unscathed. The Cultural Revolution would be a different story entirely.

As a school administer, Jian’s mother was directly in the line of fire. To make matters worse, her father’s history as a one-time Japanese POW was a red flag for the empowered zealots. As the institutionalized madness escalated, Jian’s father was imprisoned and her mother was held a de-facto captive in her school’s boiler room, forced to write self-criticism and pressured to denounce her husband. Largely raised by their grandmother, the children went months without seeing either parent.

How cowardly and cruel must an ideology be that it would force a seven year old girl to condemn her father in school? Yet, the Maoist cult continues to seduce Western academics who never had to live through it. Somehow, though, Jian’s parents still cling to their faith, as if by acknowledging that the source of the horror they lived through—the Chinese Communist Party—would somehow make all their suffering for naught.

Jian and her daughter can apprise the past with more clarity, but they remain susceptible to a romanticized vision of contemporary China. Ironically, their big coming together moment happens during the Beijing Olympic Games, against the backdrop of the striking Bird’s Nest stadium, designed by Ai Weiwei. Yet, the government’s relentless campaign against the artist and teacher ought to undermine the superficial images the Party tries to present to the world.

Nonetheless, when looking backward, Mulberry is quite forceful and moving. Combining Jacqueline Bisset’s voice-overs with dramatized episodes from Jian’s memoir, Morgan Cooper vividly conveys an innocent child’s perspective on an era of state sanctioned insanity. Jody Choi and Bruce Akoni Yong are particularly affecting as young Jian and the much abused Hou (“The Big Traitor”), respectively. However, the candid-style mother-daughter conversations do not carry the same dramatic weight. Yes, there is something universal to their generational disconnect, but it pales in comparison to her experience visiting her father in prison—unaccompanied because only a seven year old girl could visit a suspected enemy of the state without reprisals.

Of course, the difficulties survivors like Jian have expressing affection are the least of the Cultural Revolution’s tragic legacy, but it is what most directly affects her and her daughter. Sensitively produced, Mulberry Child is recommended for its up-close-and-personal insight into the chaos unleashed by Mao’s regime (rather than its wishful thinking for today’s China) when it opens this Friday (9/7) at New York’s Quad Cinema.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on September 4th, 2012 at 2:34pm.