charlieh14
After not watching this movie for over 10 years, I happened to buy the DVD on a good sale. I haven't stopped watching it since! I'd forgotten how enjoyable this film is! Those negative or low reviews generally do so since they think many parts are predictable. SO WHAT!! Very few movies can more can be unpredictable anyway! This is one of those fun movies you can watch and enjoy over and over. The formula really works in this movie. If you like baseball, you'll like it even more. It's about a clash in cultures and the cast is excellent! Roger Ebert even liked it, predictability and all. I can't believe this only gets a 5.5 overall rating by the members! Tom Selleck is perfectly cast as the aging pro ballplayer who's contract gets sold to a Japanese baseball team and is not thrilled about playing in Japan. All of the supporting cast, especially Dennis Haysbert are also perfect for their roles. Anyone who follows baseball or has lived in Japan can confirm how the foreign ballplayers "gaigin" are treated differently. This film covers this area perfectly. Again, a truly enjoyable movie that's fun to watch over and over.
ray-280
Redo the Oscars from 1992, and this film might get nominated, or even win. It was SO good at capturing its era and dual cultures that it belongs in American and Japanese time capsules. If you wanted to know what living here or there was like back then, this film will show you. As an American, you'll feel like you tagged along for an extended Japanese vacation, and by the end of the film, you'll be a die-hard Dragons fan, as you accept the injection of Japanese tradition and culture into their baseball, much as we have done with our culture in our own game.Jack Elliot (Tom Selleck) is a slumping, aging Detroit Tigers' slugger who is traded to the Dragons, perennial runners-up to the dynastic Yomuri Giants, Japan's answer to the Yankees. The Giants are admired for their success, yet that success also has everyone wanting to surpass them, something which is rarely done. The Dragons' manager recruits Jack as the final piece of the pennant-winning puzzle, and we're left with what could have been Gung Ho on a baseball field, but instead was much more.The casting was outstanding: Selleck proved that with a good script and a character that suits him, he can carry a film as well as he did his television show, and the Japanese cast was equally good, down to Mr. Takagi from Die Hard back as the image-conscious owner. The other actors, including the one who plays the love interest (also the manager's daughter), strong and independent yet simultaneously a believer in Japanese traditions, beyond what was forced on her. She is a proper and supportive girlfriend for Jack. Even her father never tells her not to see him, almost sympathizing with Jack for what he endures from her, and a bit relieved he at least knows the man she has chosen to love.The baseball scenes are great, bolstered immensely by a pre-fame Dennis Haysbert as another American ex-patriate and Jack's western mentor. The usual fish-out-of-water elements are there, and you can almost feel yourself stumbling right along with Jack to fit into a country that doesn't speak our language, and doesn't practice our ways, yet copies everything we do, including our national pastime. one of the funnier scenes occurs when Jack, clutching a magazine, informs his manager that he has learned of the tradition in Japan where you can get drunk and tell off your boss, and it can't be used against you, and exercises that right very humorously. The plots and subplots are tied up neatly at the end, but not too neatly, and nothing concludes unrealistically.To call this a comedy is misguided: it's a pure comedy-drama, or even a drama with good humor. The plot is too deep to dismiss it the way it was by critics as an actor out of his league trying to carry a lightweight film. The situations were amusing, but in their place against a far more serious, profound, and precisely detailed backdrop that results in one of the best films I've ever seen. The baseball cinematography rivals that of For Love Of The Game, for realism.Some say the film is about baseball, or about Japan, but more than anything it seems to be about the workplace, and how people arrive at work from totally different origins, with different agendas, and somehow have to put their differences aside for the good of the company, or the team.A truly great film that never should have had to apologize for itself the way it did when it was in theaters.
xbrad68
Mr Baseball was a fun video rental with my Fiancé Susan Nauss. Susan said that she had been looking forward to seeing the movie. Ken Takakura Oda as a tough yet Honorable Manager makes sense. Ken Takakura has made so many wonderful Asian movies, I correct the one reviewer and say Takakura is still a Cinematic Presence with films like Hotari. Of course everyone likes Tom Selleck yet Ken Takakura is the better dramatic actor of the two. Today someone accused me of being Yakuza, well I say that My Great Uncle Shadow President Jack F Kennedy myself and others are part of the legitimate Human leadership in our Universe and thanks to our coCreators Humans are free people fighting all the parts of adversity that President Kennedy talked about in his inaugural address. To be honest someone has kept food prices very low in Canada on things like bread. In honor of our CoCreators please stop eating amphibians reptiles and eggs. I hope that there will one day be a sequel to Mr Baseball with Father Ken Takakura Oda still as Manager. Thank you to IMDb for supporting freedom of speech like the kind President George W Bush and I support. Support IMDb.
smacdon630
I liked this movie, not because Tom Selleck was in it, but because it was a good story about baseball and it also had a semi-over dramatized view of some of the issues that a BASEBALL player coming to the end of their time in Major League sports must face. I also greatly enjoyed the cultural differences in American and Japanese baseball and the small facts on how the games are played differently.Overall, it is a good movie to watch on Cable TV or rent on a cold winter's night and watch about the "Dog Day's" of summer and know that spring training is only a few months away. A good movie for a baseball fan as well as a good "DATE" movie … Trust me on that one! *Wink*
