Continuing to revisit other people's favorites and 1990s Jim Carrey

I followed my Thursday night viewing of Bull Durham, a favorite of other baseball fans but not a favorite of this baseball fan (points to self), with a Friday night viewing of The Mask, a favorite other Jim Carrey fans but not a favorite of this Jim Carrey fan (points to self).

I had only seen each movie once, though, so it was time for a reconsideration of The Mask just as it was time for a reconsideration of Bull Durham.

It also follows a little mini theme for Carrey himself, since I only just rewatched Carrey's The Truman Show earlier this month as well, also for the first time since I originally saw it in the 1990s.

It also happens to mark 30 years since The Mask was released, though that's just a fortuitous additional benefit rather than a driving force behind the viewing.  

The Mask viewing went better than the Bull Durham viewing, and I think it had everything to do with expectations. 

In checking out the star ratings I gave these movies retroactively when I added all my movies to Letterboxd in 2012, I saw it fit to consider Bull Durham a four-star movie, while Carrey's second major feature after Ace Ventura: Pet Detective was worthy of only 2.5 stars. I wouldn't say I could flip-flop those ratings, because four stars is too high for The Mask. But 2.5 stars also might be too high for Bull Durham.

I assumed no one else really thought The Mask was all that great, but my experience recording with two younger guys for The ReelGood Podcast convinced me otherwise. They seemed to both have a genuine fondness for the 1994 Chuck Russell film, considering the "Cuban Pete" number in particular to be comedic gold. There was one podcast we did where one of the other guys made a bit of a meme of the "Chick-a-boom" refrain from the song, which of course didn't mean anything to me because I didn't remember it. Back then, a seed was planted that I should probably rewatch The Mask, which I have now finally done.

You'd think I should have liked The Mask more. I went for Ace Ventura: Pet Detective quite a bit, watching it three times during a single five-day rental (a weird sort of anomaly that I have never repeated with any other movie), and Dumb and Dumber and The Cable Guy constitute two of the three Carrey movies in my top 50 on Flickchart (the other being Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). The way Carrey commits to his comedic choices is one of the things I value most about him, and he certainly commits in The Mask.

So what held me back? I think it's the same thing that keeps me from embracing Looney Tunes as much as some others of my generation and some other animation fans embrace it. I don't think seeing eyes bug out of Carrey's head or his heart bug out of Carrey's chest is as fun as some people find it. I don't think watching a man who is literally and figuratively a tornado, where everything he says is in quotation marks, is such a hoot. In short, tone it down a little please.

On this viewing, I wasn't significantly more ingratiated to the alter ego of Carrey's Stanley Ipkis, though I didn't find him actively annoying, which was good. And I found all the material where Stanley is not possessed by the mask to be better than I remembered. Since I feel I am quite familiar with the other Carrey from this era, having seen each of the movies I listed previously at least four times, watching The Mask was kind of like uncovering a treasure trove of hidden material from an actor whose other work from this era had already provided me plenty of joy.

Of course, you can't talk about The Mask without talking about Cameron Diaz, who was first introduced to us here. (She even gets an "and introducing" credit at the start, which is appropriate since this was her film debut.) Friends and I were instantly infatuated with Diaz from this movie, which isn't surprising, because the movie presents her as what we would have called a "sexpot" back then. In part because she seemed to actively avoid this sort of role afterwards, this is a unique version of Diaz that we wouldn't see again -- even the shape of her face seems to be different in the many other roles she immediately started getting after this one. So while this shouldn't be considered Diaz' signature role and it certainly isn't her best example of the craft of acting, it does hold a certain unique spot in her career as such an anomaly in the types of roles she played. It was immediately apparent the sort of star power she had, and she immediately took that star power and transformed it to speak more to the sort of persona she wanted to cultivate. That's a hard trick to pull off in your early 20s. 

I also find myself really skeeved out by the look in the eye of Peter Greene as the villain. As I was watching the movie, I realized he shares a sort of glower with someone like Aidan Quinn when he has played a villain, even with recent Oscar winner Cillian Murphy when he plays a villain. Is it just me or do you see something similar in the eyes of all three of these actors? The comparison to Quinn first hit me because I looked up Greene to see if he had been in Stakeout, and of course that was Quinn. (Which would be another movie to rewatch, though that one would be a personal favorite of mine.) In fact, it was difficult for me to believe that the only other movie I really know Greene from is Pulp Fiction, where he plays Zed. That look in his eye must be ingrained in me from that movie and not from some other performance of his that I've seen multiple times.

Okay, I think I will continue my long four-day Easter weekend with something new tonight. 

A bunch of Bull

The late 1980s were the heyday of baseball movies that starred or could have starred Kevin Costner. He was in both Bull Durham and Field of Dreams, of course, and couldn't you just imagine him playing the Tom Berenger role in Major League?

Well, it's a problematic heyday for me in certain ways. I had a major negative reappraisal of Field of Dreams a few years ago, I was never that warm on Bull Durham in the first place, and, well, Major League, which is my favorite baseball movie of all time and in my top 200 on Flickchart, does not actually feature Kevin Costner.

But a Bull Durham viewing has been brewing for a couple years as a possible choice to watch on the eve of baseball's opening day, as per my annual tradition. Even though it was never a favorite -- as evidenced by the fact that I have only seen it that one time in the early 1990s -- I did generally feel fondly toward it, and thought that its general vibe would be a perfect thing to usher me in to six months of baseball.

I did feel fondly toward it.

I said I liked Durham's general vibe, but the movie is more of a vibe than an actual story. And it turns out I don't like its vibe all that much.

Let's start with Costner as Crash Davis. In my memory, this was sort of a Han Solo of baseball, a wiseass who's flawed but charming, and has the best personality in the room. In fact, I found Crash to be a bitter asshole. He's not as funny as I thought, he doesn't have an instinct for kindness in his body, and he's not above the fray like a Han Solo, falling into an immediate petty rivalry with his charge, Tim Robbins' Nuke LaLoosh, getting into as many as three fights with him, at least two of which he bears the lion's share of the responsibility for starting. We are supposed to want Crash to succeed and to win the heart of Susan Sarandon's Annie, and the trajectory of the narrative and the development of Nuke is supposed to confirm that she was wrong to pair up with Nuke. Instead, I thought Nuke seemed like the more deserving suitor by the end -- a credit to Crash helping mature him, sure, but not something we are supposed to be thinking as the narrative reaches its end.

It occurs to me that rooting for the wrong person was actually a problem with both of these Costner baseball movies in the late 80s. Part of the reason I turned on Field of Dreams (you can read that post here) was because I realized the movie is trying so hard to make a villain out of Timothy Busfield, when in fact his pleading with them not to build a baseball field on their property is the most sane action by any character in the movie. I felt similarly toward Nuke here. Although I loathed him at first -- the movie makes it impossible not to -- I ultimately found Nuke easier to like than Crash, who reaches his bitter low point when he refuses to congratulate Nuke on his promotion to the majors, and then tries to start a fight with Nuke, throwing a billiard ball at Nuke with his back turned while Nuke is walking away. Classy.

And that makes a good transition into the many ways this movie gets baseball wrong. When Nuke gets his call-up to the majors at the end, he's skipping two levels of minor league ball in order to get there. The titular Durham Bulls are a Triple-A team today -- meaning the stop just below the majors -- but in the 1980s they were a Class-A team, which means that both AA and AAA stood between them and the majors as logical stopping points for players on their ascension. It's not unheard of for a major league team to call up someone in the low minors when rosters expand at the end of the season, but it would be pretty rare -- and certainly not immediately after a stinker of a game by the player.

So let's talk about that stinker of a game. As narrated by Annie -- and there is a lot of random narrating in this film that follows no pattern -- the game "got out of hand" once Crash was ejected for arguing a call at the plate. We see one of the fielders make three errors with his cursed glove (more on that later) and a number of other hits sprayed around the park against LaLoosh. And yet when she wraps up her narration of the game, she reveals that the Bulls lost the game 3-2. How is that game "out of hand"?

It would be one thing if we were supposed to believe that Annie just doesn't understand very much about baseball, which would be a bit sexist but at least would explain her sub par assessment of the dynamics of the game. But no, this is a woman who offers players advice on their swing and attends every game. It's writer-director Ron Shelton who doesn't seem to understand baseball, not Annie. (Which is a strange charge to make as Shelton made a handful of baseball movies, including the one I started the 2023 baseball season watching, Cobb.) 

And let's also talk about Crash's ejection. It takes ages to happen. While arguing an out call at the plate -- which he does to try to fire Nuke up -- Crash is nose to nose with the umpire for minutes of intimate shouting before he's thrown out. He even bumps chests with the umpire early in the argument, to which the umpire lamely responds "Don't bump me!" (Physical contact with an umpire is an automatic ejection, and likely suspension, today, but even back then it would have been unusual and warranted an immediate response.) Finally only after the umpire baits Crash into calling him a cocksucker does he get thrown out. No self-respecting umpire would put up with that much crap before ejecting a player.

It's clear that Bull Durham does not fancy itself a conventional sports movie building toward a conventional climax. I mean, it is the anti-Major League in that way. The loveable losers in that movie work their way up to winning the big game -- not the World Series, but the single game that decides who is going to win the A.L. East, which is still pretty big stakes. The loveable losers in this movie have a winning streak that's underpinned by Nuke's abstention from sex -- as though Nuke might pitch every game the team plays, another misunderstanding of how baseball works -- but then I don't even remember if we find out what becomes of that season. The movie sees fit to end on Nuke getting promoted and Crash getting released, with post scripts that have to do with Crash trying to set the minor league home run record on a different team (a big deal, you'd think, but the movie considers it an afterthought) and with him finally bedding Annie.

I know these are different times, but if a player were about to take the all-time lead for minor league homers -- a dubious honor, of course, because it means you're just good enough for a lot of at-bats in the minors but few if any in the majors -- it would be celebrated and the player's pursuit would be monitored. Instead, the Bulls release Davis even though he's having an indisputably good hitting season. We know he needed 20 homers at the start of the season to set the record, and you don't release a player who is having that sort of productivity at the plate. Especially because you want to "call up" a young catcher. Um, Class-A is pretty much as low as it gets, though technically, rookie ball is one step lower. 

The movie views Crash Davis as some great tragedy, because Crash views himself as some great tragedy. I didn't feel sorry for the guy in the slightest. He's a jerk to everyone and he had a minor league career in which he hit 247 homers. In a season in which you've already hit 20 homers, there would be no reason not to keep playing next year. Instead, the movie makes it seem as though he has no other option than to consider a coaching gig the following season. I'm sorry, any player who can hit 20 homers is going to be wanted by somebody.

But Vance, you say. It's just a movie.

Yes, I'm probably doing it wrong if I am scrutinizing every detail of a baseball movie. But a baseball movie needs to be good enough in the other things it's doing to make me relax my tendency toward this sort of scrutiny. I'm sure there are things about Major League that don't add up, but they don't distract me the least from my love of what that movie does. Here, I'm muttering and distracted constantly.

Even if Bull Durham wants to be more of a hang-out movie than a sports movie, it needs to do that better. The "fun" sequences don't even strike me as such because I don't care much about the main characters and they didn't do much to introduce me to the supporting cast, another way this falls short of what Major League accomplishes. 

I was frankly shocked at how labored this script is. I can't remember any examples off the top of my head, but there were moments here where a dialogue exchange goes on for any number of words longer than it should have because Shelton failed to excise clearly superfluous material, like little semantic exchanges about what someone said, or needless repetitions of things not heard properly. If the semantics are the point, a good script can make that funny. This script is not good, from the overall story structure to the inconsistent use of voiceover to the details of the dialogue. 

I don't want to say I hated Bull Durham. That's too strong. I do enjoy certain isolated parts of it, though I don't ever think it's funny. I think it thinks it's funny, which is really unbecoming.

Oh I mentioned earlier that I was going to come back to the fielder who thought his glove was cursed and made three errors, a guy named Jose, played by Rick Marzan. This guy is always rubbing beads on his bat and is a believer in voodoo. I thought that was funny because the character of Pedro Cerrano in Major League, played by Dennis Haysbert, is basically an expanded consideration of this plot. While that would sound as though Bull Durham finally has the advantage over Major League on something, again I can spin this in Major League's favor. Major League takes something that was ventured tepidly by Bull Durham and makes it big and richly comedic, if probably a little culturally insensitive by today's standards. What's more, it's another example of how we know the characters better in the later film and better appreciate their specific traits and foibles. We don't know anything about Jose. Heck, we barely even know anything about Crash.

So Bull Durham did not really psych me up for the season, which is my stated reason for this little Cerrano-like ritual of mine over the past decade or so. (My wife even referred to it as a ritual last night.) But that does not matter, because baseball itself psychs me up for itself. 

Happy opening day, everyone.