Rating: 
Summary: Thanks for the reviews
Review: I wrote and directed "Stealing Home" with my partner and good friend, Steven Kampmann. We'd both like to thank the people who wrote the reviews in amazon.com. We really appreciate the kind words. Nice to be remembered.
Rating:
Summary: TOO MUCH TOO PUT INTO WORDS
Review: In the 1000 words it says I have, I wouldn't even begin to be able to share how I feel about this movie and how it has affected my life. I wouldn't have enough space to write about how I listen to this movie or watch it almost daily or have even visited locations from the movie (Chestnut Hill, Margate, ect..) I first saw this movie when I was about 9-10 years old and am now 23.
Rating: 
Summary: Caution
Review: Indeed, it may be well acted and solid story, but because of the sad realities portrayed in the movie, the viewer should be in an emotional place to handle them. Poignant yes, but may not be suitable for someone who suffers from depression.
Rating:
Summary: An Overlooked Classic
Review: It seems that many reviews before me have all presented sentiments similar to my own about this movie. I saw it for the first time as a freshman in college, purchased it on video a few years later, and I'm now adding the DVD version to my wish list.The story ties together a magical combination of love, friendship, family relationships, being lost/found again, spirituality, youth, and longing for understanding. Obviously this movie has the power to touch people. How many other movies on Amazon have an *average* rating of 5 stars? Buy it, watch it, love it. The soundtrack is also wonderful. It calms me and makes it seem like there are no worries in the world...
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Summary: She Stole My Heart!
Review: It's like a movie with a split personality. One romantic, sensuous, laden with symbols, foreshadowing-the other personality feels an audience has to be inundated with comedy, stereotypes from other movies like Summer of '42, even when the film is a double tragedy contrasted with scenic beauty, an imaginary playground perfectly set for the affluent and banal strangely mixed together by the ocean, a breathtaking perspective likely the single most important factor in romanticizing the ill fated love relationship between the two main characters, Katy, the unfortunate more sophisticated decedent, and Billy the perennial boy. The banal is Billy's aspiration, and ultimately failed life in a boyhood pasture of strutting and trotting in a repetitive life on the playing field. This shows his personality or emotional development to be below the level of his mentor babysitter who sadly, like they say any suicide does, gave him every opportunity and signaled she wanted him in her life; even a remark on the pivotal strolling beach scene about the career tracks of men, in her world of wealth, being so mundane as to motivate what in fact she finally undertakes in the story. The film is shot in retrospect from the announcement of Katy Chandler's suicide to Billy over a payphone outside a motel where he's devolved with a cocktail waitress to the bottom rung, In her will, she has placed the final responsibility with the only person she trusted would know what to do with her ashes. Or is it: she finally decided to foist a painful and terminal reminder on someone she struggled to motivate into pursuing her, and finally in life had to give up on, for all her tokens of betrothal and bonding are lost on his irresponsible and simpler nature. His baseball rule-book sensibility and sentimentality for life, a fatal flaw hammering him a foul ball behind the backstop, must coach the audience on a moray about age as it pertains to felicitous lifelong bonding . Billy never throws away the rule book on Katy, or lets his evil umpire call a six year age gap between him and Katy, "safe!". Perhaps he is too safe, fears being ruled, "out", or never sees unspoken symbols Katy presents to him arguing for another call. Elements of fiction in the story are like John Cheever's. There is an escapist flight of freedom in Billy and Katy's repeated rush into the water element. The metaphor of the pool where touching the drain at its greatest depth signifies a challenge of bravery and her opening up to him about how she would test herself with this feat and always come up feeling better about life. This magical scene of underwater photography, where she uses this challenge to seclude her feelings for him in a very formally presented kiss, is pure dream consciousness. (Credit the writers!) They rise to the surface only for her to find in the world of air and sound, he is lost to her, awoken, unresponsive, guided by guilt or fear, the oblique smiling unsure boy, reticent and undefined, tragically late into his adult life when he learns of perhaps the price he ultimately pays for not seizing identity and intuition. This is almost made up for in the resolution to their fight when he does go to her to make up; and the film reaches it's zenith in music, light, romance, and love. This is also where she sets off for her European newlywed life that she returns from years later too despondent to live after a second failed marriage. How a woman to be soon wed, spends an ocean twilight zone's romantic liaison with her protege soul mate and then leaves the next morning journeying far with her alternate chosen husband is an unexplored complexity to the Katy character the movie robbed itself of, and us, indulging instead in the pacification and condescension to the American film audience mistakenly believed to be severely malnourished of sugar, athletic pass-times, trite comedy premises, and cliche devaluation of earlier national treasures of expression. I think she made Doobie Epstein up, even Billy didn't believe it! Existentialism, what the film is really cut from, is mentioned, placed in that formative beach stroll conversation that foments the future sea. Katy sarcastically details the conversations she hopes to have around cafes in Europe with all the erudite types that are legendary connoisseurs of the more aesthetic and natural existence there. Where the brunt of world war was met up front and personal, scattering all lives, America was always spared this durable realization in the last century, and spared in her art the cleansing anguish of accepting tragedy and emptiness, defeat and longing as essentially the pavement to order when there is none, save the longing for the lost. So too, the paradise of an easy upperclass life with the bubbly, soulful and charmingly enlivened character Katy, (totally to the credit of the actor Yodie Foster), is lost by Billy, who never has incubated to the level of the leading man candidate Mark Harmon (adult Billy) we might have assumed was the sell to this picture-a subtle touche of existential privation which endures, disheartening us to the the end. These two ships never pass in this existential night. Billy admits betraying a sacred charm she had placed on him in his adolescence, like an advanced order on lay-away. He's squandered it on his first trivial lay, a traded baseball pendant on broken chain, symbolizing both his decline from devotion, a maturing long developed love relationship, and a would-have-been career as a sports celestial, or any career. Sidelining to rescue you from this plummet, the film places nets and jocular accouterments to absorb free fall. But in the end, no releasing, euphoric ninth inning throw of an urn and scattered ashes from way out in left field will ever make it better again. The pool, has become in his reconnoitered loss, the plot.
Rating:
Summary: Never forget who you are
Review: Mark Harmon plays a man who looses track of his purpose in life. He is forced to confont his mistakes when he is willed the ashes of his childhood babysitter who was also his first adult romatic experience. William McNamara prtrays the younger Mr. Harmon. This is one of my all time favorite movies.
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Summary: It was the best movie ever made
Review: My best friend Katie Kampmann was in the movie and she is my BFF and I think the movie was very intriguing and realistic.
Rating:
Summary: One For A Lifetime
Review: Not only is this movie touching but the music is brilliant. David Foster adds 10+ stars! What a compliment of great directing and composing. I first saw this movie in the early 90s, I still watch to this date on the 'rainy days'. You must get the soundtrack, it's like watching the movie all over again. Thank you for such a wonderful film!
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Summary: A pleasant surprise for me....
Review: Nothing much to add, as most reviewers have pointed out how "Stealing Home" came to touch our hearts in some way or another. Yet I want to express some of my feelings after watching this movie once again, this time on DVD. 1. The DVD itself kind of let me down due to its lack of so many features I'd expected (commentaries, producer's notes, deleted scenes etc...) Hopefully Warner Bros. will release a special or collector's edition to make up for that. 2. I may be wrong, but "Stealing Home" obviously tends to become a "classic" -- in the sense that it brings up a lot of memories or nostalgic sentiments to the viewer, just like what "Summer of '42" or "The Big Chill" always does to me. That being said, I got myself a pleasant surprise while going over all the reviews on Amazon.com and found one written by Katie Kampmann -- who played "baby Hope" and whom the main character played by Jodie Foster was actually named after. If this wonderful movie grows with the "real" Katie, well, it also grows with many other people -- no doubt about it. And whenever we feel lost in life ("... when things get confusing, and believe me Billy, they will"), we can always go back to the treasure chest of our memories to find a mystical face or smile that'd give us the strength to move on in the right direction...
Rating: 
Summary: It deserved to do better
Review: Now this is one moving film. Jodie Foster was fantastic in it, best supporting actress worthy in my opinion, but I thought Mark Harmon could have done better as Billy. Great soundtrack too. It really made me think about my past and how short life is. It went straight to video here ten years ago unfortunately and can only be rented, not bought. It's quite rare to see it in video stores. I think it's mainly Jodie Foster fans that have made the effort to find it.
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