Rating: 
Summary: The perfect movie?
Review: "Field of Dreams" very well may be a perfect movie. I don't know anyone who didn't like it. The film's moral message had a profound impact on me. I first saw it when I was a little kid and loved it; I understand and love it even more today.
The story is about an Iowa farmer named Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) and his family. Kinsella hears a voice one day while walking in his cornfields. It tells him "if you build it, he will come." He interprets it that if he builts a baseball diamond in his cornfield, Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta) will appear again. Kinsella proceeds to built it, and magical things begin to happen.
I won't go any farther. "Field of Dreams" is another example of how utterly dumb the Academy Awards are. It lost the Best Picture honor to "Driving Miss Daisy." Whatever. Kevin Costner does a great job in the lead role. The script was sublime, and the rest of the acting was as well. James Earl Jones stands out as a reclusive writer, and Burt Lancaster makes an excellent impression in his last film. And pay attention to James Horner's mystical score, especially in the last 10 minutes of the movie.
"Field of Dreams" is the kind of movie you can watch over and over and never get tired of it. At least not me. A real American classic, it's the "place where dreams come true."
Rating: 
Summary: Doesnt live up to the hype
Review: Field is a sweet movie, but at time it's runs to long. The plot is original, and the touch of spirituality is cool. The classic ending isnt that touching and I wasnt weeping for joy.
Rating: 
Summary: They built it--I came
Review: Costner stars as Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella, who hears the mysterious words "If you build it, he will come," and is compelled to build a baseball diamond in the middle of his cornfield. The meeting of Kinsella and shoeless Joe Jackson was one of the best parts of this unusual movie. While the film has had its many detractors, I loved it, the idea of it, and especially the excellent execution. That final scene, with the line of car lights streaming out over the horizon, still gives me goose-bumps.
Rating: 
Summary: Another coded Hollywood movie
Review: On the surface, Field of Dreams is about the loss of American innocence and the attempt to find healing
and wholeness: Kevin Costner plays a baby boomer who, like many of that era, fell out of favour with his
father through the course of the turbulent 60s. Costner marries a fellow 60s student traveller and finds
himself in a sort of self-imposed exile as a farmer in rural Iowa. One day, as he is in his corn field, he hears
a voice that tells him to Build it and he will come. Costner eventually intuits that this mysterious voice and
instruction is connected to he and his father's never having resolved their growing apart. Costner then
determines that what he is supposed to do is build a baseball field in his corn field and his father's favourite
player, Shoeless Joe Jackson, will appear. On the surface, Jackson, a member of the White Sox team that
threw a world series, represents the tie and bond between father and son and serves as a source of the
re-discovery of what is elemental and good about America as supposedly manifested in baseball. Here,
however, is where the cryptocracy of Hollywood uses subtle symbolic archetypal imagery to affect a more
sinister processing of the Societal Mind. The set-up begins with a loss of innocence, a Fall, where the son
is alienated from the Father. Shoeless Joe Jackson, describe in the movie as the most elegant and dazzling
player, is essentially Lucifer, a favoured angel that falls and eventually causes a rupture between God and
Mankind. In Hollywood gnostic -- kaballistic -- masonic manipulation, however, Shoeless Joe is unjustly
condemned. After Costner builds his field and Shoeless Joe arrives, played by Roy Liotta, he tells Costner
there are more players coming, since he represents only one player of a team of nine. This number is roughly
one third of a baseball team, one third being the percentage of angels in Heaven that fell with Lucifer
according to the Holy tradition of the Church. The townspeople consider Costner crazy since only he and
his family can see the players out on the field, indicating the fact that the others have not yet been initiated.
At this point, Costner receives another message which takes him in a search for a J.D. Salingeresque figure
who wrote brillant, mind-expanding novels in the 60s but has since fallen silent. This character is played
by James Earl Jones which provides an alchemical element of black and white to the set-up. Here, Jones
would seem to be the magus who will provide the alchemical initiation for the New Age. Once back home,
as foretold by the original voice and Jones' character toward the end, masses of people turn off the highway
running by Costner's rural farm to see the Black Sox play again. Build it and he will come sounds like a
recipe for building the political spiritual order necessary for the appearance of the fallen and their human agent
as prophesied in Daniel and Revelation. The Hollywood cryptocracy has once again produced a coded
movie that at its core slanders the Truth of the Gospel of Christ by a subtle means of pyschological processing
whereby people open themselves up to this false New Age and its promises.
Rating:
Summary: One of Costner's Best Movies
Review: This ranks as one of my favorite movies of all time. You don't have to be a baseball fan to appreciate the nostalgia and warm heartedness this movie brings to the big screen - well little screen in the case of the DVD. It's part ghost story, part fantasy, part nostalgia. It's also about redemption and the fulfillment of dreams. The story begins when Ray Kinsella, a reluctant Iowa farmer, although he won't admit he's reluctant, starts hearing a voice telling him "build it and he will come." Ray dreams, ponders and finally plows under many acres of his crop to build a baseball field on his farm, against all rational logic. And the magic begins. This magic takes Ray on a strange quest in search of a '60s radical holed up in a New York City apartment writing children's books played by James Earl Jones - to tell why would spoil the movie. But suffice it to say Jones ends up with one of the most memorable "speeches" in the movie about the nostalgia of baseball. It's hard to really do justice to the plot without spoiling the movie but it will at times give you chills and in the end is very uplifting.
Rating:
Summary: Sentimental nonsense
Review: When I attended the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, we were given one rule: "Never write about Christmas, the circus or baseball." The reasoning was that these three topics were just too ingrained in the American psyche, they were too iconic, and that they had been used too often. Well, I'm glad that Ray Kinsella (author of the book "Field of Dreams") and screenwriter Phil Alden Robinson didn't attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop. FIELD OF DREAMS is a marvelous examination of America's infatuation with baseball and a moving exploration of family loyalties. Ray (as sensitively played by Kevin Costner) has a loving wife (Amy Madigan, making it look so easy) and a doting daughter, but something is missing. A voice tells him that he must build a baseball field in his corn crop (in Iowa!). When he does, the apparition of Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta) shows up to play. What follows is a series of baseball adventures on and off Ray's baseball diamond, as well as in and out of the present day. Eventually, it becomes apparent that what was missing in Ray's life can only be addressed through baseball, and through a cultural icon from his past, played by the ubiquitous James Earl Jones. When everything is resolved, there's a bit of throwaway dialogue that, in reality, is very moving. "It was you," Ray tells Shoeless Joe Jackson in reference to the voice he'd heard early in the film. "No, it was YOU," Jackson replies, indicating that
Ray's conscience prompted the entire adventure. Don't let anyone tell you that FIELD OF DREAMS is just a baseball movie. That would be like someone telling you that baseball is just a game.
Rating:
Summary: 1989 Classic And Kevin Costner's Best Film
Review: On DVD, the movie is loaded with extra features including commentary, interviews, trailer, etc. This was on Channel 7 last week. Kevin Costner stars as a suburban family man who is hearing voices. "If you built it they will come". The voices keep changing their messages and lead him in pursuit of the gathering of baseball legends who have passed away. The goal is to establish a "field of dreams" a baseball park with old pros playing and a magic working on its audience. And it did for many people when this movie was released in 1989. Too many, it was a movie about hope, following your dreams and persistence. Kevin Costner is doing a terrific performance and is perhaps doing his greatest role. He was merely a romantic lead in the early 90's "The Bodyguard" with Whitney Houston and he was not as committed in "Dances With Wolves" which though the right kind of movie for him was not as interesting enough a character as he is in this movie. Other than this movie, his only fine role was in J.F.K. In this film, he plays a dedicated and persistent dreamer who discovers that indeed dreams come true if you hold fast. A great job by all the actors, including James Earl Jones (the voice of Darth Vader in Star Wars) as the hermit and elusive author Terrence Mann, who wrote books in the 60's advocating love and peace. He is supposedly modeled after J.D. Salinger. The chemistry between James Earl Jones and Kevin Costner, especially in the scene in which Costner attempts to pursuade him to join him to a baseball game is exceptional. Magical and unexpected things start to happen as the voices carry him onward through his mission, including a trip back in time to 1972. Bring the magic home in this remarkable DVD. It's as much an adult's movie as it is for the whole family. It's almost a Disney film. Five stars.
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