Sturla Gunnarsson | Through the Shattered Lens

Former player-turned-manager Joe Torre (Paul Sorvino) faces the challenge of his career when he’s hired as the new manager of the New York Yankees. Working with a team full of tired veterans and troubled rookies and having to deal with opinionated owner George Steinbrenner (Kenneth Welsh), Torre leads the team to the World Series. Meanwhile, Joe’s brother, Frank Torre (Robert Loggia), battles for his life when it’s determined that he needs a heart transplant. Soon, the team is playing for Joe and winning for Frank.

I guess this was made for HBO, after the Yankees beat the Atlanta Braves in the 1996 World Series. I was just a kid in 1996 and I certainly wasn’t a baseball fan at the time so I didn’t watch that World Series when it was played. Luckily, so much footage from the series is included in Curveballs Along The Way that I now feel like I did watch the entire thing. Curveballs Along The Way is a good film for baseball fans. Paul Sorvino comes across as being the ideal manager. He’s who you want in your team’s dugout, going with his gut and deciding whether to replace the pitcher or keep him in all the way through the final inning. The main appeal of the film, though, is all the real game footage that is used. Of course, you can see most of that footage on YouTube now so I guess there’s really no point to watching the movie unless you’re a big fan of Paul Sorvino or Robert Loggia.

Curveballs Along The Way is a baseball movie that celebrates the game and that people that play it and, most importantly, it was better than Here Come The Tigers. I liked it.

It’s a story as old as time.

Ricky Nelson (Greogry Calpakis) is a star on his parents’s TV show but what he really wants to be is a rock and roll singer. Ozzie (Jamey Sheridan) and Harriet Nelson (Sara Botsford) don’t know much about the strange rock and roll music but they do know that girls love it when Ricky plays the guitar and sings. Ricky becomes a star and a teen idol but chafes at his parents’s attempts to control his music and his image.

This is another one of those behind-the-scenes entertainment biopics that were all the rage of television for a while. This one was made for VH-1 instead of the any of the major networks and, as a result, it’s a little bit explicit in its depiction of Ricky’s sex life and his later drug use. Ricky goes from being a teen idol to being a long-haired proto-hippie, getting booed by all the squares who only want to hear the oldies. Not surprisingly, it’s a pretty shallow movie. Ricky is played by Gregory Calpakis, who appears to be the same age of Jamey Sheridan, who plays his father.

Movies like this will never go out of style. It’s inevitable that eventually, there will be biopics of Cobain, Bradley Nowell, Mac Miller, and all the rest. They’ll be AI-generated which will make them seem even worse.

Again, a story as old as time.