burnj451

I really enjoyed the Baseball series. The segments on the Negro Leagues, Jackie Robinson, and Ty Cobb are especially strong. and as a lifelong Giants' fan, I got shivers watching the segment on Bobby Thomson's Shot Heard 'Round the World.

However, there is a major flaw in the series - especially the later parts - its very evident New York bias. The people being interviewed, aside from former players, all seem to be New Yorkers. In the segment about the Dodgers and Giants moving west, for example, we are repeatedly told how it was a horrible tragedy for the teams to leave New York, but it's barely mentioned that, before those teams left, New York was barely supporting them, or that, while New York had three major league teams, the entire western half of the United States had none. And while some attention was payed to the post-move Dodgers (specifically Sandy Koufax), the episode on the 60s pretty much ignored the post-move Giants, even though their teams included several future Hall of Famers, including Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, Orlando Cepeda, and Gaylord Perry. I'm sure other teams were similarly overlooked in favor of the Yankees and Red Sox, but as a Giants fan, that especially stood out for me.

This movie takes a great, rich, wonderful novel and reduces it to the level of near soft porn. So much time is spent on silly, pointless nude scenes that the plot has to be severely condensed. Major plot points seem to happen suddenly, without context or explanation and characters are poorly developed And the nude scenes aren't even very good, they were just cheesy - after the second or third time Rochester and Antoinette stripped, I was laughing out loud.

The film has some great Jamaican locations, but that's about the only good thing I can say for it.