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‘A League of Their Own’ 4K UHD Blu-ray (review)

Sony Pictures

 

Detailing a fictionalized account of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), Penny Marshall’s 1992 comedy drama A League of Their Own follows the exploits of sisters Dottie (Geena Davis) and Kit (Lori Petty) as they join the first incarnation of the professional women’s baseball league in the 1940s.

Formed to keep baseball in the public eye while the majority of male players were away due to the WWII draft, the AAGPBL debuted in 1943, and lasted until 1954 when attendance and revenue began to fail, but the league still made a lasting impact by paving the way for women’s professional sports in America.

A critical and financial success upon its original release in 1992, Marshall’s film is lighthearted fun with just enough depth and melodrama to give it a meaningful edge.

This is evident from how the film manages to balance comedy and sisterly camaraderie with commentary on the type of misogyny prevalent in society at the time, ensuring that the commentary is poignant without bogging the film down as a whole.

Filled to the brim with charm, the film weaves a rich tapestry of memorable characters who share engaging dynamics that range from well-edited baseball montages to screwball comedy set pieces and the women supporting one another through personal struggles of varying severity.

At the center of the film is the sibling relationship between Davis and Petty, the pair’s rivalry being the dramatic heart of the film, as little sister Kit’s dismay at always being overshadowed by her big sister Dottie steadily increases in intensity before inevitably coming to a head, serving as the film’s emotional anchor, and providing a nuanced portrayal of a mundane but relatable type of conflict.

Tom Hanks delivers one of his best performances as the team’s reluctant manager Jimmy Dugan, a former Cubs slugger who has fallen from grace and become a cynical alcoholic who would vastly prefer to find himself at the bottom of a bottle over coaching women’s baseball.

Naturally, coaching the AAGPBL does inevitably give Jimmy some zest for life again, but thanks to Hanks’ laidback, witty performance, his character arc thankfully avoids banality.

Jon Lovitz also deserves a mention, as he steals scenes as the hilariously horrid talent scout in the beginning of the film, delivering terrible comments with deadpan perfection, making the character one of the all-time great assholes of modern mainstream cinema.

In terms of the baseball, where other baseball movies often neglect capturing the the essence of the game as such, relegating the sport to being a backdrop for melodrama that may as well have been set in any other given setting, A League of Their Own makes baseball integral to its narrative while offering a nostalgic look at the game that is in keeping with the overall tone of the film, all of which is further underlined by having 65 original members of the AAGPBL appear in the film playing baseball as well as reenacting their 1988 induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Extras include audio commentary, deleted scenes, featurettes, Madonna music video, and 3 episodes from 1993 tv series.

As modern movie classics continue to be re-released and, by extension, re-evaluated, some inevitably lose their luster out of the context of the time period they were created in, whereas others still have narrative and cultural value for contemporary audiences due to good filmmaking often being defined by a film’s timeless appeal, and A League of Their Own easily stands the test of time three decades on.

Verdict: 8 out of 10.

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