Baseball Girl
       
        
Director: Choi Yun-tae
Year: 2020
Rating: 7.0
Country: Korea
One of my few traditions is watching a baseball film to inaugurate the start of a new season. It Happens Every Spring to me. I skipped it last year because I didn't think that really counted and so will watch two this year. When I was a mere boy I ate, drank and pissed baseball. Not so much anymore but I still check the Red Sox box score every day (they lost yesterday but are still leading their division). I happen to think baseball is the only sport that really matters though obviously many would disagree but I don't think there can be much argument though that only baseball matters in terms of films. There have been so many of them while the other sports have only had a smattering of worthwhile films about them. Basketball has Hoosiers and not much else, American football has more but only a few that anyone remembers, ping pong has Ping Pong a great Japanese film and As One a terrific Korean film, soccer I don't know but who cares about a film with grown men chasing a ball up and down the field for 90-minutes. There is just something about baseball that brings out great writing and drama - the one on one contest within a team sport has a certain mythic quality in films. No other team sport has that. Here I have gone over to Korea to watch one.



Baseball was supposedly introduced to Korea by the missionaries back in the early 20th century. So they brought baseball and Christianity with them. Baseball being the important one. It caught on slowly but in the 1980's they formed professional leagues and are now good enough to have a number of their players make it in the American Major Leagues. So these are very good players who take their sport very seriously - which is needed context for this film. Because a girl is trying to enter the hallowed professional grounds of this sport - where she is not welcome. It is her Field of Dreams but she is no Natural and has no Million Dollar Arm (see how I did that - baseball movies rule).  But she has the grit and perseverance to never give up.



Joo Soo-in can throw a fast ball at 135 km (about 83 miles per hour) which made her a star in high school where she played with the boys and got a lot of publicity - but in the pros? That is a fat pitch. Batting practice. For most of us mortals it would be in the catcher's glove before we even saw it but not for the pros. The casting here of Joo is intriguing. I would have expected them to find a fairly strong bigger than average female but they go with Lee Joo-young, who is very petite and as cute as a batch of freshly baked cup cakes. She became a star of sorts for her role in the TV drama Itaewon Class which I have watched a bunch of episodes of. It's good though I could not say why. In that she plays a transsexual  - a boy who wants to be a girl. She has won all sorts of awards for her acting. But playing professional baseball? That could be a stretch. But she kind of pulls it off - primarily because there is very little baseball shown other than her throwing a baseball. It is mainly a drama with a tiny sprinkling of comedy.



Now graduating from high school she finds herself on the outs. Her mother is like the Bad News Bears and wants her to forget her dream and get this crap job in an office. She just keeps Banging the Drum Slowly - you are never going to make it in the pros - give up. But Joo won't and keeps driving herself but no matter how hard, her fastball won't get up much faster. She has fine form but at her size there is not much you can do. Finally her high school coach (Lee Joon-hyuk) who had also been telling her to quit took my advice. It is not all about speed. Duh. Koji Uehara among many pitchers come to mind. They could not throw much above 85 mph but had incredible movement on their other pitches. He took the Red Sox to the World Series as their closer.



The coach teachers her the knuckleball. A very tough pitch to master. But this being a movie she does in no time and gets a try out for the professional minor leagues. The film is very low-key with a only a few exhilarating moments - mainly it is watching her throw, argue with her mother, argue with her coach and look determined. A few places where you thought the film might go romantically it doesn't. But I quite enjoyed it - the whole underdog theme in sports is almost always a winner and Lee Joo-Young is a pleasure to watch. This is For the Love of the Game.