The bad influence could be said to go both ways. He gets me to stay out later than I should and I get him involved in useless movie projects.
I don't have a big takeaway about Big Time Adolescence -- it was very enjoyable until a somewhat flat ending -- but I do have a small thing about it I want to nitpick.
The characters in this movie go to the batting cages, but they don't work like any batting cages I've ever seen.
Anyone who has gone to the batting cages knows that you put in your money, step up to the plate, and get something like 30 pitches, either until the balls run out or the timer runs out. The place I go here in Victoria, with a different friend who plays on my baseball team, has a system where you pay for a full block of time, and press a start or stop button when you want a break, to switch batters or to replenish the balls.
When the machine is pitching, it pitches you another ball maybe every five seconds. Which gives you long enough to recover from your previous swing and reload for your next, but not so long that you start to get bored between pitches.
I don't know what the director of Big Time Adolescence was thinking, but the batting cages in this movie worked nothing like that.
So one of the recurring jokes in this movie is that the 16-year-old played by Griffin Gluck is really terrible at baseball, and his older friend (Pete Davidson), who is his older sister's ex-boyfriend, tries to give him pointers on how to fix his swing. They're bad pointers because one of the points of this movie is how all of Zeke's advice to Mo is bad. (Incidentally, I'll throw this in here -- this makes two 2020 movies, with The King of Staten Island, that involve Davidson's character's relationship to baseball and his giving or receiving of tattoos.)
When the two are at the batting cages with a couple other of Zeke's friends, though, the pitching machine pitches a single pitch, then maybe another a minute later, or none at all -- though the hitters keep standing at the plate in their crouch, expecting the next pitch to come.
Maybe director Jason Orley couldn't figure out how to stage or properly direct a scene in which there were also baseballs entering the shot every five seconds. Maybe he should have watched When Harry Met Sally.
Although a trip to the batting cages has been featured in numerous films -- like the squash court, it's a trope that has allowed male characters to have intimate conversations -- the one I always think of is the trip to the cages taken by Harry (Billy Crystal) and Jess (Bruno Kirby) in When Harry Met Sally. You remember the one. It ends with a dumbfounded Kirby asking Crystal, "You made a woman meow?"
The thing I always remember about this, for some reason, is that the balls keep coming in behind both characters even though they have stopped swinging to speak to each other. Because of course. Because THAT'S HOW PITCHING MACHINES WORK.
The fact that Orley didn't notice or didn't care that his pitching machines weren't working that way gets at one of the reasons I can't recommend this movie more highly. It has some smart observations and Davidson has some really hilarious line deliveries -- like when the guy who is tattooing him asks how his name is spelled, and Zeke says it doesn't matter -- but there's a certain disconnect that prevents it from more fully resonating, accentuated by that flat ending. I still give it a positive rating overall, but three stars out of five is a good measure of my hesitation.
I was sure it would be a bigger hit with me, so to speak, especially since the other 2020 movie featuring Davidson as a stunted manchild was my #2 of that year.
If I convert the three out of five to a batting average, though, it's still .600, just not the 1.000 that The King of Staten Island was.
Maybe realistic batting cages would have gotten it that much closer to perfection.
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