Baseball - A Film by Ken Burns
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VHS Movie Reviews of Baseball - A Film by Ken Burns
Movie Review: A DVD All Baseball Fans Should Own
Summary: 5 Stars
Ken Burns did his usual outstanding job with this documentary. He tells the story of baseball, using a combination of still photos, videos, interviews and quotes quotes. The DVD includes a bonus disc, which includes several great interviews.He hits all aspects of the game: The development of the game itself and the leagues, the labor history, the stars and great teams and personalities, the great moments in the history of the game, and so on. He also gives us a pretty good look at the old Negro leagues and we get to hear some of the great stories from those days before MLB was integrated.
The only bad thing I can say about this collection of dvds is that by the time it was over I was really sick of hearing different versions of "Take Me out to the Ballgame."
The great stories in this collection more than make up for that one drawback, however. He does more than just interview and quote the players, managers, umpires, owners and sports writers. He includes stories from fans. Doris Kearns Goodwin told about how she grew up rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers, then after they moved away, she found herself in Boston, becoming a Red Sox fan, just in time to have her heart broken again.
All fans of baseball should see this collection.
Movie Review: THE BEST IN THE WORLD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
Summary: 5 Stars
YOU MUST BE A TRUE BASEBALL FAN. REMEMBERING WHEN IT TRULY WAS ALL YOU COULD THINK OF IS A GOOD THING IN ORDER TO APRECIATE THESE DVD'S.IT IS SO SAD THAT THE GAME HAS BECOME MORE FOR THE NAME ON THE BACK OF THE PLAYERS JERSEY INSTEAD OF THE FRONT.
Movie Review: complete Baseball history
Summary: 5 Stars
Ken Burns has produced another high quality documentary that rivals his Civil War series. Ken Burns covers the orgins of baseball from its beginings in the 1800s to the present (1992). He uses both interviews and pictures. Each part covers a decade of baseball (except the first and the last). The first covers the origins up to 1900 and the final part covers from 1970 to the present. One part that sticks out for me is Jackie Robinsion's breaking the color barrier and the racism he had to face. Jackie Robinson's entry into the big leagues lead to more African Americans enreing the majors and the eventual decline of the Negro Leagues. This racism prevented great players such as Sachel Paige from realizing their full potential.
Another part that sticked out was the "Blacksox" scandal when 8 Chicago Whitesox were acused of throwing the 1919 world series to gamblers. This almost led to the destruction of baseball. Baseball was eventually saved by the legendary Babe Ruth. There is talk of reinstating Pete Rose. Personally I feel Joe Jackson and the other seven WHitesox players should be reinstated before Pete Rose. Pete Rose knew full well what he was doing. The Chicago Whitesox players were nieve and did not have a full understanding of what they were getting into. I am not condoning their actions but, if Pete Rose is reinstated then they should be reinstated.
Babe Ruth was the center of the most heated rivalries in baseball. The then owner of the Boston Redsox, Harry Frazee, traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees. He was a theatrical producer and loved the theatre more than his own team. He wanted to finance a play so he traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees. According to the video when ever Frazee wanted to finance a play he would trade one of his top players. Most of those players whent to the Yankees. This led to bad feelings between the two clubs that still exists today. The trade turned the Yankees around and was the begining of their dynasty. Up to this point it was the Giants, not the Yankees, who were the major baseball team in New York.
The history of baseball is always being written. The series ended in1992. It did not include the strike in 1994 and the cancelation of the world series. The documentary did not include Sammy Sosa and Mark Mcguwire going for Roger Maris' single season home run record and Barry Bonds breaking Mcgwire's record a few years later.
Ken Burms vividly captured the the culture of each time period. Baseball is very much a part of American society , culture and history.
Movie Review: Good, with some reservations
Summary: 4 Stars
Ken Burns and his team are absolute masters at putting together a visual picture of past eras from archived footage, still and documents, and this series is no exception. It protrays the history of baseball as the great pastoral American pastime as portrayed in "Field of Dreams". As historial documentation, though, Burns films fall a bit short.The problems is that wherther he's filming baseball, the Civil War, Jazz or whatever, Burns' method is to take an era or a theme he may not know much about, find one person or theme that strikes him as central, and use that person or persons as the central theme to build his story around. He also tends to pick one "authority" to tell his story, and he's not always a terribly good judge of who to choose. The result is good storytelling, but not very good history. In the case of "Jazz" it was Louis Armstrong, and in the case of of "Baseball" it's Jackie Robinson. Both important figures (Armstrong especially so) but in both cases he missed important parts of the big story by spending so much time with his favorite character.
Like all Burns' films, "Baseball" is a wonderful collection of images that will delight the fan and at the same time infuriate the knowledgeable viewer. Veiwers unfamiliar with the history of baseball- even those who dislike watching baseball- will also find it fascinating viewing, although they should realize that Burn's story isn't always the real one.
Movie Review: Error
Summary: 2 Stars
I looked up Curt Flood in the index, turned to p. 339, and found a story told by Flood that is quite obviously inaccurate. Flood said that in 1957 he had a very distasteful experience with a segregated clubhouse. This is the same story he told to Ken Turan of the LA Times a year or so before his death. But then he placed the story in 1956, when he was playing in a different league. Unhappily, there appears to be no substance to the story. A check with Bill White, former president of the Nat'l League in Danville where Flood placed it, elicited the response that no such situation existed. Othere attempts to corroborate the story also fell short. One has to conclude that if there is one serious error in the book, the rest of the stories might also be invented.Stuart Weiss---slw8125@lvcm.com