The Eagle and the Albatross

I was looking for an interesting and entertaining movie to watch before bedtime and came across this one on FreeVee, meaning I had to endure a few commercials. The theme is golf and, being a golfer for 60+ years, I have a hard time turning away from movies with a golf theme, even a rather simplistic movie like this.

The star is Amber Liu, born in 1992 in Los Angeles, but went to Korea in 2008 to be in the K-Pop entertainment. So, while she is probably 27 or 28 during the making of this movie, she plays teenager Ji-min Kurt, or just "Jim", now an orphan after both her dad and mom died. She now travels to Pennsylvania to officially live with her aunt, the sister of her military dad. She is very good in this role.

The movie is a very mixed bad which to me lowers its rating quite a bit. While the meat of the movie is the young girl befriending an older die-hard golfer, and learning from him, there are additional stories involving her aunt selling sex toys and vibrators to the local country club women, and both the men and women in the country club lounge making frequent off-color jokes about shafts, balls, holes, all obvious sophomoric sexual references. That did not fit the tone of the golfing part of the movie and dragged it down.

All the golf here is bad golf, no one has a decent golf swing, but that doesn't really matter. The core story is about relationships and how you can find your new family if you look for the good in people.

To be honest, the only good part of the movie that I liked was Ji-min and Dan's relationship throughout the movie. That's was the part I was expecting and everything really caught me WAY off guard. I was expecting something like Seven Days in Utopia, but I was hit with a level of maturity like from the movie Sausage Party. I appreciate that they were putting in representation for the LGBTQ community, but all they did was fetishize it. Everything was cliche as hell. EVERYTHING. I was expecting something wholesome and I got this. I just wanted a nice golf movie. That's all I was expecting.

The story is centered at a run down golf course in the middle of nowhere. The club is on the verge of closing but it has its diehard regulars - a group of eccentrics who live for golf.

Enter a Korean teenager who feels lost in the world. The best player at the club takes her under his wing and teaches her golf.

I won't go any further with the storyline (no spoilers!) but I will say that the theme of the movie should appeal to a wide audience. It's about "finding your tribe" as one of the characters says. It's about finding the acceptance most people long for.

The beginning of the movie is a little disjointed, but it evolves into a funny, bawdy and touching film. It's also beautifully filmed and has great acting from everyone in the large cast. Dan Lauria and Amber Liu are the standouts. Their chemistry is what really holds this movie together.

If you're a golf nut or into k-pop, you'll love the movie. But even if you've never held a club and think k-pop is a cereal, you'll be touched by the great ensemble cast and the relationships that form on and off the green.

I've spent plenty of time on golf courses and the movie's total disregard for golf etiquette and customs bothered me. This movie was an insult to golf courses and country clubs as the people just didn't look or act like the ones you'd expect to see at such a venue. How many times were people talking during someone's back swing or standing close to the person when they're addressing the ball? During the tournament, which was announced as a shot-gun where everyone tees off on different holes, everyone lined up at the first hole and waited for each group to tee off? Couldn't they have hired some actors that actually played golf instead of a bunch of hackers that looked like they had never picked up a golf club, including the lead actress? (I cringed watching the actors swing, before the camera cut away, as you could tell they barely hit the ball.) Couldn't they have hired someone who's actually worked at a golf course as a technical advisor? The 9-hole course and clubhouse itself looked like a mediocre, small, public course, not a real 18-hole course that one could actually sell private memberships to. Aside from the poor setting and lack of realistic details, the story itself was pretty cute, albeit somewhat offensive at times with the oriental/Korean jokes and the gay woman. The back story of the lead actress was never really explained, i.e. She was apparently born in Korea but spoke English like she was raised in the US. Only good part was Dan Lauria who had a passable golf swing for someone.in their 70's. Adrienne Barbeau was almost unrecognizable from her days as a well-known actress in the 70's and 80's.

I rented this movie on a whim. I wasn't expecting much (because 2020 has been a hell of a year), but honestly I was blown away by this movie. Sure, it's kinda corny. But it was corny in the best way possible. You don't have to be a golfer to fall in love with this movie. The cast pulled off something amazing. Hats off the fine ladies and gentlemen who made this movie possible.