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Hardball Customer Reviews (1 - 3 of 20 Reviews)

Hitting Close to Home
As a Christian, I didn't like the foul language in the movie "Hardball". But sometimes, the world isn't perfect, and kids raised in the projects don't tend to talk the way kids from the suburbs talk.

For four years, I worked as the Management Information Systems Specialist for YMCA Child Welfare, a division of the Chicago YMCA which managed the cases of numerous foster children. (When I first started that job, we were managing the cases of about 950 kids, most of whom were African-American.)

For the first year or more, our offices were located in a long two-story cinderblock building just a block south of the ABLA housing projects, where "Hardball" was filmed. I didn't drive to work, I took the Roosevelt Road bus, and then walked the rest of the way. So I had plenty of chances, five days a week, to observe the kids who lived in the ABLA projects. And I have to say that I think that the movie portrayed them pretty accurately. If anything, it may have portrayed them a little bit too sympathetically.

Of course, I may be slightly biased on account of my experiences. One time, when walking to the bus stop after getting off work, I passed by a large group of ABLA kids, who were playing in the water from an open fire hydrant. (No, it's not legal for them to do so.) Naively, I thought they'd leave me alone. Instead, they surrounded me and started throwing buckets of water at me. Innocent fun, if I had been wearing a swimsuit at the time. Not so innocent, since I was dressed in my work clothes, and I had my bookbag of papers with me, and I was on my way to my second job at the time. (I had to call my boss at that job and tell her I wouldn't be able to make it to work that night.)

And then there was the time several little kids decided to start throwing rocks at me as I walked home from work one day. I wanted to remind them that rocks can do serious harm to people. (Just ask St. Stephen, the New Testament Christian who was stoned to death.) Fortunately, their aim was lousy, and none of their rocks hit me.

I'm a white man, and I think that it's pretty rare for kids in that neighborhood to see white guys, particularly white guys who are walking through their neighborhoods rather than driving. That may have made me seem like an attractive target.

CHA projects in Chicago are not typically good places to raise kids. When kids are surrounded by adults and teenagers who are involved in gang activities and other forms of antisocial behavior, it tends to rub off on them as well.

Hardball is by no means a great movie, but it seems to me that it's a pretty accurate depiction of what life in the projects is like for children.

The profanity used is the reality of the inner city children...
I chose to watch this movie for a class in college. Many people have dissaproved of this movie because of all the swearing. Needless to say, the words used by the boys on the baseball team are the exact words that the children raised in the inner city use. The movie is very realistic. I would recommend this movie...it is not a good idea for a younger child to watch it because the conditions in the neighborhood are very bad. The movie is sad but real!!!

Yet Another MUCH Better Film Than The Critics Said
Why is it that a slightly-flawed Hollywood motion picture with great directing, great writing, great performances, and one of the best original film scores ever recorded never gets the credit it deserves? If this were a foreign film, the reviewers would be falling all over themselves to give it 5 stars.

Some professional reviewers overly dwelled upon the unexplained extraordinary talent of the young athletes in HARDBALL's story. I think that director Brian Robbins understated that on purpose. Not only is this over-sentimentalized in most sports movies about kids, but, more importantly, the often untapped talent in the impoverished inner city should already stagger the imagination if one just looks at adult black and Latino athletes in almost any sport and really thinks about how most of them "got to where they got." The answer is not just "they rose above dire circumstances" but more obvious, although still left unspoken by most Caucasians (and I am one of them), even on the Sports pages: The awesome and pervasive African-American and Hispanic talent in most team and many other sports today (like boxing, track, and dare I mention golf?) is genetic and had to rise to the top from somewhere. Enough unsaid, so why should Robbins bother to explain it?

However, the characters portrayed by Keanu Reeves and the terrific young actors in HARDBALL are only superficially developed. Although the Reeves character's gambling addiction is apparent, one does not get a full sense of his inner torment, other than his eventual desire to quit gambling by sublimating his energies into coaching a ghetto baseball team. And although his highly suspicious black team members obviously give him a break by letting him coach them, their motivations for wanting to play baseball in the first place - rather than more culturally-correct basketball, for example - are equally unclear.

That said, these are the only two flaws in the film. After that, the movie goes so far beyond the Hollywood banal norm, it can only be compared in deepness to one of the greatest films of all time, PAY IT FORWARD, another greatly-underrated Hollywood film. In its own understated way, HARDBALL touches upon, with grace and humor and heart, almost every important issue facing the inner city today. Only the most jaded, novocane-brained, MATRIX-overstimulated [...]tube watcher could not like this film.

And it is all tied together with an original score that can only be compared to Gustav Mahler. If the viewer wasn't listening to or didn't like Mark Isham's gut-wrenching score, then obviously he or she is one of the many unfortunates today in America who grew up in a community that cut back or completely eliminated music education in the public schools, an issue no longer limited to the inner city - try the so-called "rich" American suburbs as well.

How many films have you cried at during first viewing? I can name only three, and this is one of them. How many works of art or music were blasted by the critics - like Vincent Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" or Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim's "West Side Story" - only to go on to demand the highest price in art auction history or be deemed the greatest musical ever written? HARDBALL is another deep-sleeper.

The "gambling addiction redemption," "gang violence vs. sports alternative," and "doing what you love as opposed to what you have to do" themes are interwoven so subtly and beautifully in this movie, it makes you wonder what today's critics look for in a film. Perhaps they're not doing what they love to do and feel they have to take out their frustrations on Hollywood directors, writers, actors, and composers.

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