61*

Rating:
Summary: Billy Crystal's Ode to the Summer of Mantle and Maris
Review: Billy Crystal grew up during that time, as he tells us in the informative documentary that accompanies his fine film. He KNOWS what Yankee stadium looked like. He knows every bit of trivia about all the Yankees - their batting stances, their body language, even the way they stood in the on-deck circle.

As we discovered with McGwire and Sosa, then Barry Bonds, some of the most cherished records in any American sport are the Home Run records. We dig the long ball.

It's difficult for someone like me who was not born yet to completely imagine what it must have been like to have TWO awesome home run hitters on the SAME team bearing down on that record - and to make it even better, the record was held by Babe Ruth, who was ALSO from the same team. The Yankees, love 'em or hate 'em (I'm a National League Fan, myself) are the most legendary team in baseball, and this year was one of their most legendary.

That forms the setting for this truly entertaining story. Mickey Mantle had the movie-star aura and Roger Maris was a quiet family man from the midwest. EVERYONE was pulling for Mickey to break the record. Hardly anyone outside his own family was pulling for Roger.

It was interesting to me to see in the film just how close Mantle and Maris were in real life, and the movie argues that they probably both had a positive effect on one another. Certainly the film hints that Roger's decency as a man influenced Mickey to concentrate a little more on the game and less on drinking and womanizing. At the same time the movie shows us that as the pressure of approaching the record began bearing down on Maris, he had no bigger supporter than Mickey Mantle.

Barry Pepper looks so much like Roger Maris that you can hardly tell the difference between the two in the documentary accompanying. Thomas Jane also has an uncanny resemblance to Mantle and they both obviously studied the newsreel footage for hours because everything from their posture to their home run swings is a faithful duplication. Baseball movies in the past have often showed actors taking a weak swing with a cut to a ball flying majestically out of the park. Billy Crystal must have used some fantastic CGI imagery to produce shots where you see Mantle and Maris take their swing and without moving the camera, follow the ball arcing up into the upper deck of Yankee stadium. Awesome.



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Summary: Region 1 Encoding
Review: Just a quick note about the Region encoding for this DVD for UK customers. This DVD WILL work on the PAL PS2 when used with a product called "DVD Region X" (about ?10). Just make sure your TV can display 60Hz. 50Hz TVs will play the movie in black and white.