The Final Season - Daran wirst du dich immer erinnern!

Baseball is the perfect metaphor the American Dream: effort = success, anyone can play, and winning is a metaphor for life.

The Last Season is a nice effort by Sean Astin. It is pretty much exactly what a good sports underdog movie should be.

The film about Norway, based on fact, a tiny town of 500 or so that produced team after team that went onto win the State Championship for High School baseball. When threatened with politics and closure due to lack of funding the team does what it knows best, goes in to bat for one last season.

Have to be honest though and say it's not as inspiring as it would like to be in places, it does hit some good home runs by the end, but overall it is a little too clichéd to really succeed.

If sports movies are your thing then you'll enjoy it, but I don't think this will become anyone's (Outside of Iowa) favorite ever movie.

It is a nice effort, and watchable, but as I said it ain't outstanding...

I just saw it tonight at a sneak preview in Baltimore and it was great. I borrowed my best friend's husband as my date since he's into baseball and she's not. I expected it to be okay but schmaltzy and was pleasantly surprised. It never got too hokey, the humor was great and every character "popped" from the bald reporter (Larry Miller) to the bat boy who got laughs every time just by nodding his head. The grandparents were especially cute the way they picked on each other. I think my favorite part was seeing the pastor with a "doo rag" on his head as a disguise. The performances were uniformly excellent. Sean Astin was great as usual and Michael Angarano has really grown into quite the performer. Highly recommended.

This is a Great Baseball Movie, and all peoples who have the sport of Baseball in their blood will love this film.

Passion, friendship, loyalty, family , all we have in this movie, but specially, a good feeling about baseball, the favorite pass time of all us.

I'm from Dominican Republic, where we live the baseball, and we are proud to have ball players like Albert Pujols, Pedro Martinez, Alex Rodriguez, Vladimir Guerrero, Sammy Sosa and others in the MLB, and like i said, we live the feeling and the passion of baseball.. Baseball it's so important to us, and with this movie, we can know the importance of something like that in a town and in our Life.

Baseball for much of us , the baseball fans, it's not only a sport, it's more than that, it's passion, it's feeling, It's Proud...

The movie have a very good acting and good script..

Playball!.....

Until I saw this movie, I thought inspirational sports movies were easy to make, but this movie made it seem otherwise. I was expecting more from a movie with such a good cast, but even they couldn't save this movie from destruction.

The main thing that ruined the movie was the screenplay. The story itself was inspirational but the sequence of events and the actual writing took that story and chopped it up into pieces. It almost seemed as though the writer had gone around to the people involved in the actual story and written down exactly what they said presented as a screenplay, not bothering to smooth and connect events.

Attempting to include everyone in the story, the character development was also lacking. One minute Mitch(Michael Angarano) was the mean outcast, and the next he was a mannerly star on the baseball team. It was too short of a period in the movie for the change to be believable.

Worse than the screenplay and bad character development was the score. Not one moment was the movie devoid of cheesy "inspirational" music. It is okay to use at the climax or a dramatic moment in the movie, but when it is played throughout the movie relentlessly, it loses its impact. It made the movie a joke. The movie would have been better off with no music at all. It ruined any and all touching scenes.

The only reason I give this movie a 6/10 is because through all of the mistakes, there was a fire lit in the viewer that wanted to fight for this small town team and see them succeed.

"The Final Season" is a good respite from the usual Hollywood fare of action/violence, bad comedy, super heroes, mobsters, commercialism, and endless sexual innuendo. Yeah, it might be a little hokey or sentimental, but this seems pretty insignificant given the movie's restraint and its quietly low key approach to life in rural Iowa.

One thing for sure, Norway High School's baseball team, representing a town of 500 people, which won 20 1A class championships over period of about 30 years, and sent several players to the majors, does deserve a big time movie. "The Final Season" covers the final two years of the high school's existence, the team's last hurrah, and town's substantial loss.

Above all, it emphasizes Norway's incredible baseball players, played very convincingly by real teenage athletes, who not only truly look the part, but can play the game. Their infielders are nothing short of modern dancers--and almost as bony. Michael Angarano who plays Mitch Akers is a real standout, moving and original--but so in a way, is the team itself, and their two unpretentious coaches (one of historic dimension).

The school merger theme is also effective. The rousing school board meetings, the reliable relationships, the bonds between coaches and fans, the old homogeneous way of life, are all palpable to the viewer. And as the film goes on and democracy wanes so the collateral damage of NHS's demise becomes apparent in the disposability of the town, its culture & traditions, and most of all in its famed ball players and coaches.