[episode begins with the trailer for The Hill]
Jeff:
You are listening to invalid Culture, a podcast dedicated to excavating the strangest and most baffling media representations of disability. This podcast is all about staring into the abyss of pop culture adjacent films that never quite broke through because well, they’re just awful. So buckle up folks. The following content is rated I for invalid.
Episode theme song, “Arguing with Strangers on the Internet” by Mvll Crimes:
I’m arguing with strangers on the internet not going out today because I’m feeling too upset arguing with strangers on the internet and I’m winning.
Jeff:
Welcome back to another thrilling edition of Invalid Culture. As always, I am your host, Jeff, and we are joined once again by our co-host. Sarah, how are you doing, Sarah?
sarah:
Really happy outside of academia. How are you?
Jeff:
Yeah, doing great. Inside academia, I’m still on sabbatical, which is why I’m doing really great. Oh,
sarah:
Outside
Jeff:
Still inside academia. Yeah. Yeah, the academia that is my closet and my brain. Now, we also have a very special guest joining us today because as listeners will know, it is May, which means that baseball season is in full swing, and I realized that we have never been inspired by a disabled athlete yet on invalid culture, and I thought it’s about time we got to do a sports movie, but I am not really, I mean, I like sports, but I’m not a sports scholar. Sarah, it turns out, is actually an expert in baseball. So that was good, but I thought we should get another expert, and so I thought we should bring in the star. I would argue of the end of sports podcast friend Derek Silva. How you doing, Derek?
Derek:
Oh, wonderful. Thank you for that. I’m also on sabbatical too, so I’m sharing your insider outsider kind of place in academia right now, but I’m happy to be here.
Jeff:
Yeah, it feels good, doesn’t it?
Derek:
It does. It’s refreshing. Just get out of academia if we can. Let’s just all do it.
Jeff:
Right? And then in our own academia, outside of academia,
sarah:
It’s a test run. This is before you do it for real.
Jeff:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So Derek, for our listeners who aren’t deep into your cv, can you tell us a little bit about the work that you do?
Derek:
Yeah, yeah. So I’m a sociologist of sport. I guess what kind of brings me to this episode would be I’m also a critical media scholar as well. I’m not a scholar of disability, so you both will school me when it comes to that, but I do take a critical lens when it comes to the sports world, and I co-host the end of sport podcasts, which looks at sport from a critical perspective in terms of labor issues, issues of harm and violence in sport. And I also do that in my academic work as well. I guess I’ll give a brief shout out to my forthcoming book called The End of College Football on Harm in US College Football with UNC press, and that will come out in the fall.
Jeff:
Yeah, so, okay, dear listeners, we have a real treat for you here, not just our guests, although they’re lovely, but we have found ourselves a real beauty of a film. We are of course this month talking about The Hill. The hill, which is on Netflix..you can reach it on Netflix here in Canada. For those of you who have not watched the Hill, the Hill is described as thusly: Growing up in an impoverished small town, Texas young Rickey Hill shows an extraordinary ability for hit a baseball, despite being burdened by leg braces from a degenerative spinal disease. His stern pastoral father discourages Rickey from playing baseball to protect him from injury and to have him follow in his footsteps and become a preacher. As a young man, Rickey becomes a baseball phenol. His desire to participate in a tryout for a legendary major league scout divides the family and threatens Rickey’s dream of playing professional baseball. It’s very long description on the back of the box, but how would you say they did here on capturing the tone of the film?
sarah:
Poor given this is a two hour film and it features about 30 to 35 minutes of total baseball or baseball related scripting. So it seems the background makes it revolve around the trope of being a baseball prodigy, but he is really kind of a prodigy at wandering around hitting rocks and complaining about his family. And then there’s some baseball kind of peripheral to that
Jeff:
On the side and a space launch. There’s also a space launch shoehorned in for some reason.
sarah:
That’s true. I forgot about that
Derek:
There were quite a few kind of odd curve ball, pun intended, curve ball moments in this phone.
sarah:
Oh great pun.
Jeff:
It was good. Which of course we all know the faster it’s thrown, the faster it goes out. So curve balls are not good for hitting numbers,
sarah:
But he didn’t really seem to be terribly proficient at hitting fast balls. A point to which they break up repeatedly several times during the 35 minutes of actual baseball footage.
Jeff:
Now, the timeline for this film, I also wanted to bring up, because I think it’s phenomenal, we don’t have to unpack this now. I think we’ll unpack it for the next 18 years of our life. The timeline of the film is never give up hope of our film.
Yeah. Now let’s talk a little bit about who actually made this film, because what you might be thinking is that this film was made by Rickey Hill and that is possibly true. That’s one potential answer, but there are some other names that are attached to this, some names that are a little bit surprising. One of the first names I want to draw our attention to is Angelo Pizo. Angelo Pizo is a fairly big name in religious adjacent sports, bio pit inspiration films. You may have heard of some of these films such as Hoosiers, Rudy, Courage. These films are basically, they birthed an entire catalog of films that still continue today, and arguably, we would not have the hill if it wasn’t for these other films. I think it’s also important that we consider The Hill in the context of these other films because they follow a very typical formula that may or may not have anything to do with disability per se. They’re very focused on this sort of idea of the unexpected guy who overcomes the odds based on hard work and a firm love of Jesus. So I’m wondering, Derek, what do you know about these films? What are your thoughts on Hoosiers Rudy Courage?
Derek:
I mean, they’re that trope of inspirational sports film that’s intended to be the thing you put on at Family Movie Night, and I think that’s where a lot of the viewers come from, and that’s why this film, I think, is done particularly well on Netflix and not in the Box Office because I think it fits that genre very well. And it follows the kind of exact same trope as you’ve kind of laid out in terms of, oh, there’s something that’s made an issue. There’s the nexus of a kind of tension-filled relationships surrounding sport with the main protagonist and someone around them, whether that be their father in this case, or a spouse or the family in general or someone else, and all these roadblocks along the way, and every time something happens so that person gets over that roadblock to kind of reach their dreams.
And I don’t want to put the cart before the horse in terms of talking about the end, but I think the, the final sequence of the film really highlights for me many of the issues with this genre of film. It highlights the fact that the real problematic endpoint or the dreams that have been arrived at aren’t actually beneficial or should be viewed as dreams. In this case, the protagonist went on to play four years in minor league baseball, and we know Minor League baseball has some of the worst working conditions in all of sport before having to give up the game four years later because their spine finally fully succumbed to the issue. So I really think this film masked all of that and really played into the inspiration, and that’s why it fits well for Family Movie Night. I think.
sarah:
Derek, have you ever profiled a Demotivational sports film?
Derek:
I don’t think it’s out there, to be honest.
sarah:
Is the first Rocky properly demotivational?
Jeff:
Right?
Derek:
It could be. I mean, some films, if you take the real view, the end, I think Friday Night Lights as both a film and a TV series did well to highlight the reoccurring cycle of intergenerational socioeconomic issues, trauma, alcoholism, mental health issues that if you move past the stepping stones of like, oh, we’ve made it to the championship game or the state or whatever, we won a ring or whatever it is. If you get beyond that, you realize, okay, society is reinforcing all of these harmful things, and I think it did a decent job. I still think those, the film and the TV series were pretty inspirational in the end anyways, right?
sarah:
So maybe The Hill was an incredibly unsuccessful inspirational film, but if its rubric was how close it came to Million Dollar Baby or Friday Night Lights, it’s actually extremely successful,
Jeff:
Right?
Derek:
Absolutely. And there’s an entire genre. It’s now very much a formula, and I think highlighting Angelo Pizo footprint or hand prints is important here because it falls the same vein as Rudy and all of those other films that were mentioned, like just believe and everything. It’s the American dream, and that’s what this at the end is always about. It’s that if you try hard, you work hard enough, you and you are righteous and believe in God and you’re God-fearing you, fear your dreams will be reached. And in this case, that nexus between sport and religion was completely kind of played open for us to see. It was a movie about that
sarah:
God found Rickey Hill fit for minor league baseball. For the Montreal team,
Jeff:
Yes, for the expos, yes. Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. I mean, the hail I think is very overt. It literally references multiple times David versus Goliath, but that seems to be also at the root of a lot of Angela Peso’s work. Rudy is literally a tiny man, tiny little boy going up against Notre Dame, and this is a big thing. But Angela Pizo, I did not know. This is not the first time that disability has played a role in his work. He also did a movie called Bleed for This, which was about a boxer, a boxer named Vinny. Vinny Pza. I’m terrible with names. Apologies to Boxer. Please don’t come and kill me. This is about a boxer who ends up a car accident, has a disability, overcomes the disability, goes back to boxing, basically. Yeah, we might be doing bleed for this in a future season. Derek, we might need to have you back.
Derek:
Oh yeah, invite me back.
Jeff:
Angela Pizo also wrote one episode of the TV show, knots Landings. He broke this episode two years before writing Hoosiers, which seems really off brand to me, and so I had to break it up. This film has two other full writers though and possibly many more that were not credited. We also have Scott Marshall Smith, who’s also a bit of a name. He has written things like Men of Honor starring Cuba “Somebody sucked that Baby’s Dick” Good Jr. If you don’t know that, look it up. Also, Robert Downey Jr. Is in that one. Scott Marshall Smith also wrote the score, which stars Edward Norton, Robert De Niro, Marlon Brando. So there’s a bit of star power here, and the last listed writer is a guy named Bill Shain who hasn’t really done a lot. He’s written one of the short, also wrote a documentary about a street racer slash Vietnam War vet who partners up with an LA deputy slash pro racer and they end the fe between the Crip and the blood.
I guess they were successful. I don’t think that’s happening anymore. So it was good. So that’s sort of the writing team as we understand it. In terms of the director, the director is a little not really known. I did not know this director previously. His name is Jeff, not me, different Jeff. Jeff Celentano. He’s worked in pretty much every facet of film has been involved in a ton of spinoff movies in the nineties. So he directed American Ninja two, the Confrontation and Puppet Master two, but did that under a different name under the name Jeff Weston. He is now a screenplay writer, director, and active teacher at the Performing Academy in Life Forest, California. A lot of his films are sort of a mix of action comedy. They tend to be pretty B-list kind of made for tv. He has a recent focus, however, in biopic redemption stories, and so I think that might be why he was tapped for this film. Also, a lot of his films are about stark cross lovers with gang or mob affiliation that unfortunately not a factor in this film. I wish. He also has a real interest for psychotic killers in several of his movies included Bosco Heat and Under the Hula Moon, both of these feature characters dubbed as psychotic killers or murderous psychopaths that need to be overcome within the text. But we can finally talk about the thing that we all want to talk about, which is Dennis Quaid.
sarah:
Absolutely.
Jeff:
This film stars Dennis Quaid. Do I need to introduce Dennis Quaid? Do people know who Dennis Quaid is?
sarah:
I think you do, because in your notes you introduced him as the Star of Soul Surfer, and that’s actually Anna Sophia Rob.
Jeff:
Well, it depends on how you watch it.
sarah:
So I often confuse those two individuals. They’re both impossibly hot and completely charismatically controlling on screen.
Jeff:
See, some people watch Soul Surfer for the surfer. I watch Soul Surfer for the father.
sarah:
It wasn’t Soul Surfer’s Family, it was Soul Surfer.
Jeff:
Yeah, it was Soul Surfer’s Dad, the real hero. Dennis Quaid obviously has been in a million, literally maybe a million things any given Sunday stands out. Another sports film also, I always forget this, he was in W Herb, he played Doc Holiday in Wyatt Earp, which I don’t know how I would forget something like that. But more importantly for this podcast, he was also in a film that haunts my pop culture and disability class at King’s, Johnny Belinda, which is an old film of phase that comes up a lot for whatever reason. So what are our thoughts on Dennis Quaid folks? Where are we on the qua verse?
Derek:
So I think I shared this story with Jeff offline, and when he asked me to watch this and comment and come on the podcast, he told me The Hill. So I read just very briefly about what it was before saying yes, and I thought to myself, I was like, I wouldn’t be surprised if Dennis Qua is in this film. It just kind of seemed like age appropriate for him in that character’s role in the role of the father as well. It just seemed maybe this is just like the rookie, the film, the rookie kind of, and I just see it. I am not surprised. I also said an or a kind of related film draft day, which isn’t about disability at all, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Dennis Quaid was considered for the role in Draft Day as well, and it ultimately went to Kevin Costner. Those two seem interchangeable when it comes to these types of roles. So I was super unsurprised that he was in it, but it’s also kind of jarring because very, very big name for a seemingly not big kind of, this doesn’t seem like a big budget film or anything like that, and kind of quickly taken out of Box Office and put on Netflix. I don’t know if that’s an indication of Dennis CO’s career. I don’t know. I have no idea, but I was kind of surprised.
sarah:
I think he might’ve just liked the script, which my head Canon was actually written by Rickey Hill and then was just edited and substantiated by actual screenplay writers. But if you get the guy who’s a semi-successful gospel singer to play your Come to Jesus, I’m rejecting the church in favor of the Church of Baseball narrative. It’s not just a fan cast. He probably read that and was like, I would love to be this guy. I want my name on that. And then it became the Hill,
Jeff:
Right? Right. He was like, I didn’t get the Oscar for Soul Surfer. Maybe I can get the Oscar for the Hill.
sarah:
Follow it up with my Church of Baseball Prodigy Epic. Yeah,
Jeff:
Yeah, that was the issue, very likely. So Dennis Quaid, of course, plays the Hard thumping Bible daddy, which I was going to say is a fairly one note character. I think there’s two notes to this character. He’s a bit of a loving father. He also is an abusive father, so 1960s.
sarah:
Yeah, I think there were some pretty heavy editorial decisions there around the historical profile of Dennis Quaid’s character.
Jeff:
Yeah, yeah, we will definitely have to talk about that. Yeah,
Derek:
I hope I have some thoughts on that as
Jeff:
Well. Yep. Okay, so we also have Colin Ford. Colin Ford would be the other sort of star arguably of this film. Colin Ford will play, I was going to say an older, older Rickey Hill, a teenaged, Rickey Hill High School senior Rickey Hill, Colin Ford. I found this fact interesting. Entered the entertainment industry as a 4-year-old model in Atlanta, which I find, I have no idea what that means, baby models, man, they’re everywhere. He’s also been in a ton of TV shows. You probably, however, recognized him as Dylan me in the film, we bought a zoo. If you are the type of person to watch that film or possibly as Steve Danvers and Captain Marvel, which he may have watched, he also did two very early two thousands Mormon films. There were historical films about the Mormons called The Work and The Glory, and anytime I see a Mormon, I want to talk about it. So there it’s calling forward. For our listeners who were in the disability verse will maybe recognize him from Dumb and Dumber. When Harry met Lloyd, he was Lloyd Christmas in the sequel to Dumb and Dumber. He also has done voice work in Family Guy, and he was in one episode of the Netflix hit series, Dahmer Monster, the Jeffrey Dahmer story.
sarah:
Oh, is that the daher that most people shortened to just Dahmer? Correct. Because of common sense conventions? Yeah.
Jeff:
It is officially Dahmer hyphen Monster, colon, the Jeffrey Dahmer story
sarah:
Silliness, the one that didn’t get permission from the witnesses to make most of the screenplay about the witnesses, that Dahmer slash Monster slash Jeffrey Dahmer story,
Jeff:
Which was made by the guy who did Glee, an American Horror Story, which also has some really fun disability politics. So yeah, it’s all interconnected. All interconnected. Last but not least, I have to bring this up because it’s going to play a role later. Joelle Carter is also in this. She plays Brie’s mom. She’s had a fairly impressive acting career, most notably appearing as Ava Crowder in the TV show. Justified. There’s another kind of coser in just right. Am I making that up? I think so. Is that Kevin Costner? Is it just
Derek:
Honestly mostly with Dennis? It could be. It could be either. It could be both at the same time,
Jeff:
Both just interchange. Yep. Also it within films like High Fidelity and American Pie too. So that’s sort of our cast of characters. There are a series of other characters that are unimportant. Okay, so some production notes about this film. This movie, it should be noted, was in production hell for years, largely it would appear held up by Rickey Hill himself, not settling on the right director for the project. According to history versus hollywood.com, over 40 directors were considered for this film over the span of 17 years. Ano was eventually selected at the recommendation of his brother. So the story goes that his brother was in a hotel lobby and he overheard Rickey Hill talking loudly publicly about not having a director for this film, and Jeff Tino’s brother leaned over and said, I got the director for you, my brother. I have no idea if this is true, but I find this hilarious.
Rickey has publicly stated that his intention for this project was to inspire. He says on his own website, I hope audiences find inspiration in their depiction of my life and that it offers encouragement to anyone with a physical disability because loving what you do is the key to a wonderful life. We can confirm Rickey’s family was quite poor while growing up. In some interviews I’ve heard it stated that they ate cat food. In other interviews, I’ve heard it say that they eat dog food to survive. Per the end of the movie, Rickey Hill does eventually sign a pro contract with the Montreal Expos, RIP, but he never played in the majors. He quit several years later due to injury. A local newspaper article written by Sally Kroger does say that Rickey has been through 49 surgeries in his lifetime, living most of his days of chronic pain, but never let it stop him from his dreams. He’s broken nearly every bone and has been in three near death car accidents where ribs and his fever have been smashed. His skull was cracked, and one wreck resulted in a year long concussion. In the last accident, troopers were surprised to find he was still alive. Why is the hill not about the car accident?
sarah:
That’s true. My other question, if you’ll indulge me for a second, was I do like that they admit he lived most of his days in chronic pain. He is got chronic illness, he’s got permanent disability, but I’m literally struggling to recall more than two or three scenes that even referenced the chronic illness. So if that’s your movie’s premise, wouldn’t that have taken up more of the screenplay?
Derek:
Absolutely. Not only did I notice that as well, but I think it was particularly interesting how the only time the disability crept in was when it was an obvious manifestation of getting in the way of something that he was supposedly dreaming of. That’s the only time or wanted even when he went to kiss his partner, the reunited with the long girlfriend from when he was four years old, which is also a little bit creepy, but also that’s a side story they’re going to kiss for the first time, and that’s when you see the back pain. That’s supposedly been always happening, and then you don’t see it again for the entire film, not
sarah:
When he is doing the big wraparound swings,
Jeff:
Full body rotation, Sarah, full body rotation.
Derek:
Okay. I don’t think, I am shocked that the actual script writing had full body rotation in the 10 times that it did
sarah:
Full body rotation.
Derek:
It just seems like there was probably a better way to write that dialogue than full body rotation every time.
sarah:
I felt that same thing about just about every single line of dialogue. I think whenever someone spoke, I was like, there had to been a better way.
Jeff:
You would think,
sarah:
But there wasn’t,
Jeff:
But no, but no, the last production note, I will say, so this movie was set in the sixties slash seventies, mostly as I like to do, I counted. We got four cripples in this text. The word cripple was used four times. Was that more or less cripples than you expected when you first started this film?
Derek:
Far fewer for me, to be honest, considering the time I expected
sarah:
I
Derek:
Texas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just the whole scene seen, but yeah, yeah. Far fewer than I.
Jeff:
Far fewer. Okay. So we’ll give it a passive grade maybe on that one. Okay, good. Good.
Okay. Now, we of course have our own opinions about this film strong and maybe not so strong and definitely silly, but we are not the only ones. There are legitimate people in this world who write critique. Then there are more important people in this world that write critique. So how has the Hill fared critically? Well, as you can probably imagine, critics have not been enamored with this film. It currently sits with a 44% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, how it holds a dazzling 97% fresh from over 500 verified audience members, meaning that it is a better movie than Alien, only 94%, and Lawrence of Arabia only 39%. It similarly has a ton of perfect scores on IMDB and Amazon. Most of these positive reviews talk exclusively about how great it is that this movie has no sex or swearing. So take that for what you will.
sarah:
It was God’s perfect film.
Jeff:
Yep. That’s what made it great. Five stars, no sex. I don’t fully know what you thought this movie was going to be if you went into it beginning line. I hope there’s not a lot of sex in this film.
sarah:
You know what? I’m going to stand up for the viewer on this one. I was just speaking to my friend the other day. I was watching, I don’t even remember what anymore. I think it was Immaculate, the New Sydney Sweeney movie, and I said, I think we’ve taken the turn away from Cinema Bashfulness way too far. I think we need to bring back some of the bashfulness that was originally in cinema because as not a sex haver, as an asexual, I don’t like any of it, but I find myself regularly having to sit through 10 uninterrupted minutes of either foreplay or full on sexual action, and I keep having to ask myself, even if I was a sex Haber, what is the purpose of this scene being longer than about 30 seconds? And it’s endemic at this point. It used to be a flag for HBO, and now it’s a flag for modern cinema and television.
Derek:
Yeah. I mean, I can always get, I’m with you. I don’t understand the sort of fetishization of sex across cinema and in, I think in this case, it tells the interesting story of who’s actually watching this film a little bit more. A hundred percent. The people who are watching this film are Go Hard Christians. I don’t know. That’s speculation, I should say.
Jeff:
I think it’s pretty fair speculation. Explain to you why that is in a moment. Okay, so let’s hear some critique here. So Raven Brenner running for the Decider. This is what they had to say about the film. The movie story is cliche and rather preachy, but it isn’t bad. Rickey’s story isn’t important and engaging. Whenever viewers aren’t being weighed down by the pastor’s repetitive prejudice against his family and community,
sarah:
I’m often weighed down by a pastor’s repetitive pettiness toward community.
Jeff:
Yeah. I was wanting to hate this review until the ellipses Raven really wanted me over with the dot, dot dot. I was like, is this important? Is it engaging
sarah:
The depths of his hatred while proclaiming God’s love?
Derek:
Yeah.
Jeff:
Yeah, yeah. That was pretty, yeah. Carla Hayes similarly was not super impressed writing for culture mix. Carla says, the Hill is a poorly constructed faith-based biopic about disabled baseball player. Rickey Hill, this long-winded and preachy drama leaves big questions unanswered about his life,
sarah:
Such as when he was disabled, which was apparently not all of the time,
Jeff:
Or also his 18 million near death car accidents.
Derek:
The runtime on this was close to two hours or maybe even more than two hours.
Jeff:
It was over two hours.
Derek:
This was over two hours. Yeah. It did not need to be that long. And the fact that we know very little about Rickey’s life outside of baseball and his father, it’s shocking for a film of that length.
Jeff:
Now, rotten Tomatoes user, Kathleen agrees, and I’ve got to read you this. This is what Rotten Tomatoes user wrote. The character portrayal of Mother seems inaccurate. I believe her roots were Jamaican, so mother did not look Jamaican. Also maybe by choice. The life after baseball did not say Rick had continued in his father’s footsteps and nowhere, even in Wikipedia, doesn’t say anything about marriage. Children, a lot of unanswered info. Now, I read this and was very confused because I think we could all agree Rickey Hill’s mother in no way seems Jamaican in this film. No. Now I looked it up and there is a Ricky Hill with no E, R-I-C-K-Y, Ricky Hill from Britain, who is I believe, a soccer player. His mother is Jamaican and his father is Indian. But otherwise, I have found no evidence anywhere that Rickey Hill’s mother is Jamaican. So with
sarah:
Kathleen not confused that Rickey was also playing the wrong sport for the entire
Jeff:
In a different country.
Derek:
Not a sports fan. Not a sports fan.
Jeff:
Kathleen did answer with a lot of unanswered info. One of them being, when did he switch to soccer?
sarah:
Also moved to the uk.
Jeff:
Yes. And his father was also Indian,
Derek:
And nothing about accents then. It’s a little bit shocking.
Jeff:
Now, of course, these are professional criticisms and professionals. I mean, east Coast elites, they don’t really know what’s going on in films. The real reviews we can find in the comment sections of Amazon and IMDB. So let’s hear what real Americans, real people, they’re probably American, but who knows? Real people have to say about the Hill. First off, we’ve got Rotten Tomatoes user, Lori, I love that. It’s all first names on Rotten Tomato. It’s very personal. Rotten Tomatoes user. Lori gave this movie a five out of five and said, quote, wonderful, clean God-honoring movie. It was also a movie that was true to life and one that my friend and I enjoyed, but also we’re able to discuss and apply to our everyday lives. So the question I have for you is, have you discussed this with your friends and what are you applying from the hill to your everyday life?
sarah:
The Hill taught me that if I want to succeed as per dreams that seem on their face unachievable, I just need to possess the power to pause or entirely interrupt my disability at the kind of pivotal moment when he is banging out Homer after Homer after Homer and his back’s not hurting. So during my dissertation defense, I just had to have the innate ability to dial off my schizophrenia for three to three and a half hours, and with that, my dreams were achieved.
Jeff:
Yeah, overcomeable purely over accountable.
Derek:
I mean, I haven’t spoken about this to a soul other than you two. So in terms of that, but I guess you’re my friends, so yeah, so you’re my friends. So I guess that is one thing, and in terms of yes, what I’m taking out of it, it’s that for some religion truly is the opiate of the masses, and it can overcome everything and it can make life just fine and dandy. Also to echo what is with power of God, yes, with the power of God and with hard work, you can just overcome everything, including a supposedly debilitating thing that is every day affecting you, but we don’t really see it at all, and all of the kind of consequences and day-to-day issues are not really represented. But you’ll get the girl, you’ll get the job, you’ll get everything you want.
Jeff:
You’ll get Montreal,
Derek:
You’ll get the Montreal Expos
sarah:
…get the Montreal Expos. This was kind of a bitter crip community take from me, but I couldn’t help but notice that in that pivotal scene where he is begging the agents to give him another shot, even though there was a rule stipulated five minutes prior that said, please do not beg the agents to give you another shot, A, they made an exception for him because he is special and his disability is probably special, and B, he still whiffed that opportunity. But even excluding all that, all of it only transpired because I guess God loves him, and he could just miraculously turn off all of these odds that made the movie so inspiring, and I sat there with my arms crossed. Wouldn’t that be nice way to go, Rickey Hill?
Jeff:
So you never gave up hope, as the tagline says, right.
sarah:
I just got to hope harder.
Derek:
Yeah, just got to hope harder. Yeah. That’s the answer. Hope
sarah:
That’ll get me tenure, right? If I just write to everybody and I say, I just have a lot of hope and God on my side.
Derek:
I didn’t meet any production for the last 10 years, but I hoped I did, so I think I deserve.
Jeff:
Yeah, I would say, I think one of the things that I definitely took away from the movie is the importance of a hat. Wear an investor. If you have a man with money who’s circulating in the background, anything that’s possible, surgeries, training, get it onto teams. You got to get a money guy standing up
sarah:
To your abusive larger than life father.
Jeff:
Yeah, you need a money guy. You definitely need a money guy that runs throughout. For
sarah:
Sure. This movie actually might’ve been more interesting, had it centered on his angel investor slash coach. I would watch a two hour movie about how this guy finagled Rickey Hill into the position he got him in.
Jeff:
Yeah. Who is essentially running an auto shop slash wrecking yard, I believe. Yeah.
sarah:
He was a part-time professional baseball coach.
Jeff:
Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So Amazon, Amazon user Shield court gave this a three out of five title with great movie proofing. All things are possible. Good movie for families to show children. You can do anything in life. If you want it bad enough, you can succeed. Did Rickey Hill succeed?
sarah:
No, he didn’t. That’s kind of the central irony
Jeff:
Of the movie. Harsh, but fair.
Derek:
Yeah. So many, or a couple years ago, June Lee from ES PN broke a news story basically highlighting all of the horrendous working conditions that existed in minor league baseball, horrendous. That caused extreme deprivation in terms of socioeconomic status, home insecurity caused some mental health issues, physical health issues amongst players, and that just in 2022, finally, finally stimulated the minor league baseball, minor league baseball as a whole to start providing housing just simply somewhere to live for Minor league. So by having that end scene, oh, he spent four years in minor league baseball. It seems like dreams were made, but no. Okay. So Rickey went and worked for four years in one of the most brutal working condition areas of sport that we know borderline. That’s not professional. You can say they’re paid. So that’s simply not professional baseball, and it certainly isn’t the major leagues. And then it ended with an injury that ultimately rendered impossible to play. So did Rickey succeed? Certainly, certainly not objectively not, but this movie hides that fact completely.
sarah:
On a scale of Amazon warehouse to iPhone factory, where would Minor league baseball sit?
Derek:
Ooh. I would say it’s probably closer to the Amazon factory where they probably bean count literally everything. And if they’re not there for practice, if they have to go to the washroom too many times they get fired, that type of thing. Wow.
sarah:
That’s really fascinating context to add to is hope will achieve exactly what you’re looking for. Stories. Yes.
Jeff:
Right. So you’ve heard of Angels in the Outfield now, while peeing myself in the outfield,
sarah:
Turns out he took a really arduous route of applying for grad school
Jeff:
Right
Now. Okay. Our final review, this one’s a long one, you’ve got to indulge me, but it’s a ride and I could not, so this is an IMDB review, which is a great place for reviews. This is from EMDM md, I believe. This is just like that person smashed their head on the keyboard md. They gave it a 10 out of 10. I love this movie is the title. Okay. I thought I would like it since it has Dennis Qua, I actually loved the movie. It’s so refreshing to see a realistic movie with good actors and no cg. I thought the storyline was interesting, and I didn’t even realize the movie was over two hours. I’m not usually in for a long movie, but this one kept my interest. I just really liked Dennis Qua in this type of role. See, it was excellent, and all the actors were great in their roles. If a movie is going to have a sport in the background, I prefer it to be baseball because that’s the only sport that I like at all. I just love the character Red and whoever played them was so entertaining. I’m 55, and that’s how I remember old men acting and comported themselves when I was a child in the seventies. I enjoyed the historical setting, was quite accurate. I saw some things that were a little off, but overall it was excellent.
sarah:
I love this review because it admitted straight up that this movie was not even tangentially about baseball.
Jeff:
They got it. I love that. They’re like, if there’s a sport in the background, I’d prefer it to be baseball. The
sarah:
American sport. Yeah.
Jeff:
Yeah. The only one that they like at all
Derek:
At all. Emphasis.
sarah:
I also really liked that he pointed out that there were some historical inaccuracies, probably the most glaring one being that the fundamentalist mid Texas sixties preacher was not beating the shit out of his wife. I couldn’t stop bringing that up.
Jeff:
That is the thing that Sarah could not stop bringing it up. The thing that the people on the internet cannot stop bringing up is the fact that the car that he drives was released right around the time of when he was driving it, and yet the car he’s driving is like a 50-year-old beater, a beat up car, and that really upset people on the internet.
sarah:
Interesting. People love pointing out
Jeff:
They couldn’t handle it. That broke the realism for some people. Yeah.
sarah:
Yeah. Avatar was basically real life, but the shade of Blue James Cameron used actually was not released until post 2012. So we know that at least that part of Avatar was inaccurate.
Jeff:
Not accurate. No. I think we all know that the Navi hadn’t become water tribes until well after the 15th century split.
sarah:
Yeah. Thank God. Someone pointed that out.
Jeff:
Multiple people talked about the car, which, cool. The other thing I wanted to talk about, okay, there’s two things I wanted to talk about. Thing number one, this mention about no cg. I just want to do a real quick start temperature check. How were we feeling after he broke his ankle on a sprinkler and then they showed it? That was pretty wild that they showed it.
sarah:
Maybe a 70. No, he said he was 50 something, but grew up in the seventies maybe he thought that we do actually break actors’ legs for the bit.
Jeff:
Yeah. Well, better back then, back when you actually killed the actor and they died on set, it was better. Yeah.
sarah:
Yeah. War movies were just massive casualty fests.
Jeff:
Yeah. I don’t know if you know this, but Tom Hanks did not die at Saving Private Ryan. Yeah. It breaks everything with the movie.
sarah:
I’ve been memorializing him for years.
Jeff:
Well, and then the other thing was this question, this thing about how old men acting and comported themselves when they were a child in the seventies. Okay. I want to know what you think this person was referring to.
sarah:
I already told you. I think he’s referring to corporal punishment
Jeff:
That you believe that’s the lament
sarah:
Sixties Texas? Yes.
Jeff:
Yeah. Okay. But they loved that. They loved that part.
Derek:
So this review loved the fact that there was corporal real punishment?
Jeff:
That’s what I’m wondering. He says, I’m 55, and that’s how I remember old men acted like comported themselves.
sarah:
I’m hearing him say he really liked the dispositions of people like Red who played the baseball recruiting Phantom and Dennis Quaid, who plays the preacher father because they’re both extreme fundamentalists. Nothing that isn’t excellent is good enough, and all of those traits, the one that you’re missing there is what happens when something is less than good enough.
Jeff:
Right? Yeah. Yeah. That stood out. It’s funny, I think particularly as Sarah and I were watching it, we were talking a lot about they just outright abuse. The movie doesn’t hide by any means, but I mean doesn’t exactly hide.
sarah:
They dance around it
Jeff:
Quite a little bit. A little bit, yeah. Okay, so that’s what people on the internet say. Apparently, if you are an official critic, you did not like the movie. If you were into movies that did not have swearing or sex, you love the movie. That’s sort of the line. So let’s do sort a little round table here or sort of general impressions of the Hill.
Derek:
Yeah, I’ll start. Yeah, happy to start. In general, I think it was just that stereotypical cookie cutter inspirational film that is really about the American dream that chooses to do so through sport, through a tangentially related depiction of sport. It was boring, straight up, just boring all the way through two hours. I couldn’t believe that I was still watching this, to be honest. And I think it’s because of the, there’s no nuance to that story about the American dream. There’s nothing there. It’s a story that we’ve been told over and over again. So we think something is there, and that’s, I think partially why people, a particular niche of movie lover loves this film because they love seeing kind of that American dream over and over and over. Take it from sport, put it on film, put it on banking, put it on whatever story, whatever David versus Goliath story that you can get.
In this case, I think in the first 30 minutes, I actually, I had some hope for the story because it seemed that this was going to be more of a story about how the influence of religion is kind of dying and the influence of sport is growing. That dropped off completely, completely after the first 35 minutes. So I’m actually interested in the first 35 minutes. The movie was boring. It had a lot of weird things that happened, and I think the big takeaways, it was a failed opportunity to actually discuss the kind of true intersection between sport and religion as offering what Karl Marx would say, opiate of the masses, ways to deal with the shit that is capitalism, which was put right in front of us in this film. But it ultimately falls short in exploring that intersection in depth, and it could have done so through a true representation of disability. It could have done that. It was right up there. It was like the perfect down the middle strike that anyone could hit a home run and they just failed to even pick that up. And I think that’s the ultimate failing of this film and why it led to two hours of like, okay, is this film done yet? I’ve seen this film 30 times.
Jeff:
Yeah, yeah.
sarah:
Derek, this is why you’re God’s favorite sports theorist because it is wild how parallel I am to your review. But if you take out religion and you put in disability, that’s how I felt about the film. So I was just looking at it with my lens and you were looking at it with your lens, and I was just continuously frustrated by the mistakes they were making, even to the point of pettiness, if he gets up to the plate and I’m noticing that he’s not struggling at all, because this would not be an opportune moment for him to be struggling, which I bitch about constantly with goodwill hunting, but that’s a mental disability when it counts. There is no disability whatsoever in this film, and the central premise of this film is your ability to pass is absolutely central to whether or not you’ll make it in life, and I think there’s a really interesting relationship between the age cohort that likes this film and that premise. Those things go together. So anybody who was brought up for 60 years to believe, yes, your ability to pass absolutely decides whether or not you get to succeed in society. They fucking love this film because it proves that premise.
Jeff:
Yeah. I got to say, I mean, we’ve watched a lot of bad movies on this pod. This one for a religious film just felt far more soulless than much of what we’ve watched. This thing was so empty from start to finish. There were so many scenes where I think that the rocket launch scene is such a prime example because it’s like they had seen October Sky, that Jake John Hall film, and they were like, we got to recapture the magic of the hill folk going outside and trying to see the shuttle when it goes overhead. So okay, we’ll have them watch the liftoff, and it’s like, oh, get it. It’s the sixties. There’s just so much of that where they’re referring to all of these other cultural tropes, these existing scenes for movies that they’ve smashed together into a pastiche to try to show something that’s familiar and understandable, I think, to the audience as opposed to doing what people actually want from biopic, which is give us the nitty gritty of someone’s life. Give us the dirt, so to speak. There was some dirt here, but a lot of it was made up, which we could get into a little bit later. But unfortunately, we are all out of time for this episode. Oh, no. So if you want to know what actually happens in this film, you just got to come back next week, brothers and sisters to get the true story, or at least the story as told by Rickey Hill about The Hill, the story about Rickey Hill. See you next week,
And thus concludes another episode of Invalid Culture. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it or not. Either way, please take a second. If you haven’t to subscribe to our podcast on whatever platform you’re using, tell a friend, and better yet, do you want to be a victim on the podcast? Go on to our website, invalid culture.com, submit your name. We would love to terrorize you with a bad movie, have a bad movie of your own that you think that we should watch. Again, jump on our website, invalidculture.com, submit it, and we would love to watch the trash. Be sure to tune in again next week for part two where we will start to dig into the movie and find out whether or not it wins the coveted Jerry Lewis seal of approval!
Episode theme song, Mvll Crimes:
With strangers on the internet. Everyone is wrong. I just haven’t told them yet.
Part 2 transcript
<episode begins with a mash-up of young Rickey Hill saying “Full Body Rotation” and screaming>
Jeff:
You are listening to Invalid Culture, a podcast dedicated to excavating the strangest and most baffling media representations of disability. This podcast is all about staring into the abyss of pop culture adjacent films that never quite broke through because well, they’re just awful. So buckle up folks. The following content is rated I for invalid.
Theme song, “Arguing With Strangers on the Internet” by Mvll Crimes:
I’m arguing with strangers on the internet not going out today because I’m feeling too upset wing with strangers on the internet and I’m winning.
Jeff:
Welcome back to another thrilling edition of Invalid Culture, part two of The Hill, the baseball movie that you’ve all been waiting for. As always, I am your host, Jeff Preston. I am joined co-host. Sarah, how are you doing?
sar:
Always amazing. How are you, Jeff?
Jeff:
Pretty good. How many dingers have you hit so far today?
sar:
400 today. How about you, Jeff?
Jeff:
- I haven’t actually strapped on my legs yet. I’m hoping to get some full body rotation after this pod.
sar:
Full body rotation. What about you, Derek?
Jeff:
Yes, ma’am.
Derek:
I think I lost count after 16.
Jeff:
Okay. That that’s pretty common. I mean, 16, 200. It’s all the same in the bigs, my friend. Absolutely. Yeah. Derek Silva, thanks you for coming back. I’m glad you accepted a return to this challenge.
Derek:
Oh, happy to be here. I’m excited for part two of this conversation.
Jeff:
Okay, my friends, I think it’s time we got to talk about what happens in this film. The Hill as told by Jeff Preston, our story begins in 1960 something rural Texas where a young Forrest Gump, sorry, Rickey Cricket, no wait. Rickey Hill is blasting some rocks at gravestones with his perfected major league swing, sassy Child Bride and MLB Doping Investigator Gracie Shan confronts Rickey claiming that a cripple will never make the majors and suspects that the only way he can hit so well is because he’s Chean Rickey, son of a poor Baptist preacher just loves hitting dingers everywhere he goes, including blasting two through the front windshield of cowboy hat enthusiasts and local angel investor Ray Clements. Unfortunately, the Hills are almost immediately uprooted from their home when their pastor father is run out of town by a rabble of drunk angry hicks who wish only to consume tobacco while hearing the good word.
Approximately 30 movies, sorry, approximately 30 minutes of poverty and preaching. Later we finally get our first glimpse of actual baseball. Rickey and disciplines now settled in a different rural Texas town, stumbled upon a group of local boys playing some backyard ball and Rickey wants to join, but oh no, there is no place for robot boys in baseball says local full-time pitcher, part-time hooligan dubbed the flamethrower. A proposition is made if FU can hit a pitch thrown by this young phenom. The Hill brothers will be allowed to play in dramatic fashion after whiffing on two pitches. Rickey overcomes his feeble legs by destroying his leg braces, screams full body rotation, and blasts one into the outfield. The crowd goes mild.
sar:
I just noticed when you were summarizing it, the kind of simplistic parallelism the film itself makes between if you can hit against this really hard pitcher at 10 and then again at 16 we’ll allow you to play. And then the end of the film, spoiler alert, he’s trying out for Muff Red and he has to hit against their most competitive pitcher that’s being recruited. And I didn’t realize that until you were just summarizing now, and I was like, huh. Well, that was obviously entirely intentional and it brings up some interesting film theory things you could say about the point of parallelism or whether there’s any kind of bian relationship between where he starts and where he finishes. But I think all of those conversations are giving the film more credit than the probably simple premise of look how many times he’s being asked to hit a ball to fuel his future.
Derek:
Yeah, I mean, I think the first act of the movie set up what was the problematic premise of the movie, which we talked about in the last episode with this sort of, if you just work hard and you have this sort of Protestant ethic as a sociologist Max Weber, or sorry a male Durkheim would call it, as long as you have this kind of Protestant ethic, you will be able to succeed in life and succeed in a life that is a capitalist life, succeed in a life that they’re also depicting and they’re showing the viewer the really poor conditions of capitalist life, of precarity, of socioeconomic deprivation, of alcoholism, of tobacco and other forms of addiction and really highlighting those things. And then that’s setting it up as that can be overcome as long as you just turn to God. And in this case, the father being the pastor, it all kind of played into that religion trope or the religious movie trope that as long as you live a righteous life, everything your dreams, your hopes will be made possible.
And what I noticed in the first half is it really set up this moral or a series of moral quandaries, if you’ll put it on the part of, not Rickey, but his father James, which I found interesting in the first bit. I was actually intrigued. So the fact that when he was giving his sermon and he’s looking at people who are smoking and people chewing tobacco and then he makes the decision that that’s something wrong, that’s something that you should not do, and he calls it out. Okay, so it seems like cigarettes, like tobacco is being used as this sort of moral, I dunno, moral compass issue. I was intrigued at least to see where that went. And not to put the cart before the horse, but I think in later acts we see that falls flat and I can talk about that in the future, but I think the first act, I’d sum it up with their opportunity, there was opportunity for this film there presented and whether or not the rest of the film actually is just a repetition of that first act or if it actually builds on that. I think we can get in this conversation.
sar:
I think you’re right that Durkheim would’ve loved this movie, especially the kind of continuous unrelenting precarity narrative and how starkly it was contrasted against this kind of chosen one epic of Rickey Hill, which time would’ve been all about that.
Derek:
Yeah, well, any functionalist, and let’s be real, even in contemporary sociologists function, they seem to be like the same people who are writing reviews for this film.
Jeff:
That’s true.
sar:
He’s the core audience.
Jeff:
Well, I mean the father literally is a Protestant preacher. He’s a Baptist preacher, right? Yeah. Okay. I got to be real. When I started watching this, I thought what was being set up here in the first half or the first third, I thought they were trying to set up this notion of there is a corruption in the outside world, whether it’s the corruption of tobacco, the corruption of white sport idolatry, the corruption of, dare I say ableism. I thought that there was this notion of their family is this pristine unit that is struggling to live right in a world that is otherwise corrupted. So they live in poverty because the capitalist world doesn’t acknowledge the value of good preaching and good family, for instance. It felt like that’s where this thing was going, and spoiler alert, it does not, dear listener, that is not where this goes. I think you’re right
sar:
Though that it does intentionally set up the idolatry arc because of that scene with the baseball cards,
Jeff:
Right? Literally. Yeah, right. It’s like you’re like, who’s your God? Mickey Mantle. Yeah.
sar:
They went as far as exclusively drawing that example, and then I was like, oh, that was actually really good. And then they never brought it up ever again.
Jeff:
Right. And so I don’t know if this is a matter if this is perhaps, maybe this is where a talented writer, if we can go so far as to say Angelo Pizo is a talented writer. A talented writer has come in and said, let’s lay some foundation here, and then it just didn’t get picked up on or it got cut out in edits. I mean, this movie is super long already or is this a matter of, these are just things that Rickey remember happening. He’s like, oh, I remember when my dad got kicked out of that church because he harshed on people smoking and I remember getting yelled at because we had baseball cards. What’s really unclear? It’s like were they trying to build some thematic element here or is this literally just moments that he remembered?
sar:
Yeah, you could give it the bildungsroman angle, but I think especially if you have a talented screenplay writer doing the baseball card scene, which was fairly well thought out, and for people who don’t want to watch this, it’s that he and the Rickey Hill and his brother are trading very, very old baseball cards. This is the sixties of very famous players that they idolize and when the preacher father comes in, they try to hide the cards in their Bible. So then the father knowing that something’s up, opens the Bibles, finds the baseball cards and gives them this whole rant about false idolatry and how horrible it is to hold these people on a pedestal. The kind of central irony of that is that it’s a preacher telling them to do so. And if you’re not fundamentalist, you can fairly easily kind of start asking questions about, well, what’s the difference between listening to my dad, the preacher who’s been kicked out of multiple churches and listening to these baseball phenoms who are not trying to tell me how to live my life? And I feel like you can’t set up that rant being delivered by a preacher without the second half later where Rickey has the realization, oh, maybe my dad is also a false prophet, but he never does. So it could be that Rickey himself has never had that realization and he asked that bit to be taken out because it’s disrespectful to his father.
Jeff:
I mean also the fact that at the beginning of the film, it’s like don’t idolize baseball players in a film that’s about trying to idolize a specific baseball player. Yeah,
Derek:
Yeah. I mean also just I’ll pick up on two points then. I thought that the character Rickey Hill was actually not that narcissistic to use. I think we can get into what that term means, but his father actually was, his father was the center and always put his emotions, I’ll never forget the scene. Well, this is the one scene that really struck out to me, struck me, and it’s when he’s about to beat his eldest son for forging the signature, and I think we can get into that as well, but he’s about to, and what holds him back is his own realization and his own emotion, and then he put the emotional labor on his Sunday, get away from him to give him a moment as if he’s the one there that needs the moment. And he did this in several ways. So I think that picking up on that false idea, that would’ve been amazing. I agree completely. That would’ve been a way in which this story could have been redeemed later on, and that just wasn’t picked up on at all.
Jeff:
And I think that what the movie’s trying to do really badly is it’s trying to show the father, I hate that I’m going to use this phrase liberalizing, that the dad is becoming more liberal generous as he goes. And so he’s like, okay, right. If I tell people to stop smoking in church, I’m going to lose my job again. So maybe I can let that slide and then it’s, I’m not going to let my son play baseball. Okay, I’ll let that slide. I’m not going to watch him play baseball though. Oh, well, okay. I’ll let that slide. And so the whole movie is this downward trajectory in some ways of a preacher giving up on his morals and giving up on his view of the world, which in some ways is a tragedy, but it is pitched in this film I think is being proposed as a good thing that the father is becoming more open-minded and is becoming a better father and a better preacher.
Derek:
But it seems to me they kind of fail in that though, because one of the penultimate scenes, one of the penultimate scenes that Dennis Qua is in, his wife, his assuming wife who works at home brings him his food and he instructs her to put his plate down as if he controls what’s going on. So if it makes me question if that’s the arc, because if that was, he wouldn’t do that. He’d be like,
sar:
I think it’s much more likely that they were setting him up to be just as much a false idol as all of the baseball players. He grew up falsely idolizing, and the only reason I can think of for why they would take out the other half of that parallel because 50% of a half is a fairly significant part of the hole is because Rickey didn’t like it
Derek:
And it can’t be a success story at the end. It can’t be, oh, he made it to the minor leagues. He’s a success. It simply can’t. If that’s the case, if the story is about false idols and it is about change and reflexive thought on the part of both Rickey and his father, it can’t be like a overcomes everything story. You’ve got to be like, oh, well there’s still deeply problematic issues here and I didn’t win and I have this debilitating pain and all of these things that we’re just kind of side skirted.
Jeff:
Yeah, pushed off to the end credits, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s take a step back. So on the heels of Rickey’s Sandlot moment pressure is now mounted for him to try out for the local youth baseball league. Unfortunately, as you can probably imagine, Rickey’s father believes that baseball is the opiate of the masses and would prefer his son focused on a legitimate career becoming a poverty stricken pastor like his old man. This will then set up a clear tension in the film, Richy believing that God put him on earth to hit homers and his dad’s belief that baseball is too dangerous for his un people son and distracts from the worshiping of JC after a near full-blown belt beaten of his brother for forging a parental permission slip, Rickey eventually convinces his father to let him play and he is well on his way to the majors.
The film now jumps forward to Rickey’s senior year where he is officially a baseball superstar on the high school circuit. His child, Brian Gracie, has stumbled back into his life ready to immediately restart their childhood romance and the scouts are lining up to see him play. That is until tragedy strikes after one again, face it off against the flamethrower and coming out once again, notorious Rickey will have a tragic incident, slippery and falling on the nemesis of all out fielders an in-ground sprinkler system breaking his ankle when evaluated by a local doctor, it’s discovered that not only is Rickey’s leg essentially ruined, he also has the spine of a 60-year-old man caused by a rare degenerative spinal cord disease. Rickey may never play baseball again and worse still, he might not recover in time to play in an open MLB tryout coming to his town in two months time. But friends, it gets worse. God does not have an HMO and so Rickey cannot afford his life saving surgery.
sar:
Alright, don’t tell me to back up and then present an hour and 50 minutes of the film. I want to go back way back in that to when he is still in high school because I think there’s a really interesting moment here that is wasted and I like how you phrased it as baseball is the opiate of the press and I know that Derek was talking a little bit about that in regard to religion in the last episode, but if you use baseball as the opiate of the masses, A, you’ve got the cool religion angle because of his problematic father and his problematic family and they’re problematic Winnebago Baptist Church, but also when he gets to high school, you introduce all of these figures besides the angel investor, Ray, whatever his name was that come in to the Baptist setting and start kind of vehemently trying to stand up for Rickey and offering accommodations and all of these things that we associate with good allies than disability theory.
And I was like, okay, that’s actually really getting interesting because they’re introducing all of these ways to try to intervene on the central tension because a lot of people not degrade, but maybe dislike films like Goodwill Hunting and Precious, where the central kind of conflict between ex teenager or young adult and ex adult that’s extremely abusive and oppressive is just not realistically overcomeable and that seems to be one of the driving forces of this movie. This kid and his brother and his mother and whoever the fuck else just do not hold the power to overcome this larger than life preacher. And the film comes ready with answers to that and these guys are so quickly forgotten in favor of this prodigal narrative of his ability to hit Homer’s alone by itself will cause him to absorb himself of all previous circumstances and kind of in turn trivializes the narrative of allies helping out when you need accommodations, legibly or not for disability. So they kind of built it up and then smashed it all in the same 20, 25 minutes.
Jeff:
Yeah, that was one thing that actually that I will am going to give full props to this movie. I like that. Although there are moments and where it’s like the Rigley Hills show of lot of this movie is about how it takes a nation or a village to raise Rickey Hill and Rickey Hill couldn’t…
sar:
There was a lot of advocacy here
Jeff:
Without a lot of support from all intergenerational support and internal and external family system support. And I’m like, that to me is the small town experience that I had growing up with a disability in a small town. That’s what I remember is it’s about the community wrapped around and coming to support. So I’m like, okay, thumbs up to that and maybe a tiny thumbs up. I mean, the movie starts out very heavy with Gracie’s father is an abusive drunk dick. He beats the wife and he beats the kid and he’s terrible, but that’s not Rickey’s dad. Rickey’s dad is a good preacher man, and then by the second act, we actually do get this a version where it’s like, no, he was full on going to whoop that brother in front of everybody. And so I was like, you know what? I’m going to give the tiniest of credit, I think to this film actually engaging with masculinity, fatherhood and abuse at this moment in America. It sort of did try to talk about it even if it didn’t talk about it. Well, and even if it backs away a little bit and it’s like, okay, no, no, don’t worry. He didn’t actually beat him with the belt though, which it’s like, well, what about when the cameras weren’t rolling?
sar:
He totally did. Yeah.
Derek:
Yeah. And I mean I think the end thesis of the movie being that as long as you work hard and you are God-fearing that things will overcome, it was always going to hide all of the things that allies have to do or that people have to rely on in order to deal with the alienation of advanced late stage capitalism. And it was again, the missed opportunity for that to be discussed. It told the story of, okay, mark said religion is the opiate of the masses. I would argue religion simply is not any longer, at least in many advanced capitalist societies, that actually things like sport are the opiate of the masses and you can watch it. You can sit on a Tuesday when you’re come back from your shift work and deal with your shitty job and shitty boss and shitty colleagues and the fact that you own nothing that you produce and you can just crack open a Bud Light and watch the blue Jays face the lose. Yeah, lose against the nationals or something. Not only are we dealing with that, but I think that understanding of society relies on this genre of film,
sar:
And I’m saying this mostly to rile up Derek, but going to your point, and I do mean this if we’re going to say that something like professional sports is an opiate of the masses, I wonder what you’d then think of people treating X sociological phenomenon as sport. So politics being treated like your favorite sports team, watching your current favorite genocide unfolding and treating that yet another sports team. Do you think this film is getting in the way of that at all, or is it substantiating just sports?
Derek:
It doesn’t problematize that at all. It doesn’t problematize the fact that we in a society are massively polemical and polarized and every way and that we treat everything. There’s been a sport ization of everything that if you’re a liberal, that’s your team, that you’re going hard for that team as if they’re not talking about genocide as if they’re not actually engaging in colonial, settler, settler colonialism, ongoing genocides that are ongoing right now, that there’s way more at stake. And I think part of the argument, the theoretical argument that I would make in my work is that yeah, sport is replacing things like religion in terms of being the way in which we deal with the alienation of shitty advanced capitalism. But I don’t mean to trivialize that. I am not trying to make it seem like sport is just another one of those things. No, I’m trying to actually make the claim that there are a bunch of different things that are making us truly despise one another through and do what capitalism does, which is pit everyone against everyone.
Sport is one of the ways in which we do that, but also we’re seeing politics does that. I live in rural Ontario and I see fuck Trudeau things happen and I see more Trudeau bumper stickers than Toronto maple leaf or Buffalo bills or anything like that, and I think you’re spot on to make the connection and again, an opportunity for this film delve into that a little bit and just nothing, not even, and I mean sport historically and still contemporarily has that is only positive. People approach sport as if it’s only this positive thing. It doesn’t have these kind of negative consequences. They don’t see
sar:
The jingoistic layers that kind of support how it works.
Derek:
Exactly. They uncritically explore, look at sport. It’s just like, oh, it teaches teamwork, it teaches leadership skills, it keeps you healthy. It’s all good for society, but it doesn’t look at all the ways in which it reify social inequality, exclusion, and is an imperial project for instance. Right.
Jeff:
And destroys bodies literally destroys bodies in this film back to disability
Derek:
Absolutely destroyed and there’s literally one of the most popular sports in the world is absolutely intended to ruin your brain, period. Is that football? Yeah. No, the end goal of that game is head trauma and once you look at it like that, you can’t unsee that it’s about staying injury free, which means not getting concussed because that’s what the entire sport is premised on other sports are,
sar:
But yeah, the premise of the sport is running into each other as fast as you possibly can. How do you only sustain three concussions per career? Maybe three concussions per game.
Derek:
Yes.
Jeff:
It’s important to note that there was also a question there though. It’s like, wait, is it football or is he talking about hockey or is he talking about boxing or MMA or Oh shoot. There’s a whole lot of others that also have those same kind of conditions. That’s true.
Derek:
Elite professional sport. I tell people, and I learned this from my colleague and co-host of them, the sport, Nathan Coleman Lamb who said this to me, and I can never pay him enough to because he’s kind of changed my view. The entire project of professional sport is injury prevention.
sar:
May God bless you, Nathan.
Derek:
That’s it. It has nothing to do with skill it nothing. Because if you can’t play, you will never be in the professional. You will never, which is Rickey. Yes, yes. It’s Rickey and thousands, thousands of others. Yes, but you’re right. Yeah.
sar:
Okay. Wait, do I have the quote right? The entire premise of professional sport is prevention of injury.
Derek:
Yes.
sar:
And if we’re translating injury only…Jeff knows where I’m going with this. If we translate injury nly, it is completely antithetical to disabled people playing anything at all.
Derek:
Exactly.
Jeff:
Yeah. Well, this is where I think if you want to get real funky with sports, it’s like, so what does it mean? What do the Paralympics mean? And a lot of people are like, okay, that’s a circle life in square. Okay, but what does Special Olympics mean? Then? What does it mean to build a game or to build a competitive sport where competitiveness is a part of it, but winning isn’t necessarily the top five objective of this type of design of sport and how does sport change when the fundamental roots of it are shifted or if it’s built on different foundation? But that is a whole other podcast.
sar:
You don’t want to talk about the epistemology of sport today?
Jeff:
Well, I think we’re going to continue to, in fact, because our listeners probably want to know what happened to Rickey. We left him on a bit of a cliffhanger. Whether or not Rickey’s legs were about to fall off is where we left off. Okay, so let’s forge ahead. Now, as you could probably imagine based on this podcast, the local community rallies around Rickey launching Operation Rickey Hill, kind of lazy. Brandon donation bins start to pop up everywhere. The local community raises $2,000 in nine weeks, which, okay, I don’t want to throw any shade on a rural community. I’m sure $2,000 that that’s a lot of money back in the seventies. Okay, but come on, do you really love this man? Rural Texas? Of course. Professional
sar:
Fundraiser, Jeff Preston here to hit and dingers about their fundraising ability.
Jeff:
Those are rookie numbers because they raised $2,000, but they are $4,000 short of what they need for the surgery with hope, almost completely lost cowboy hat wearing Angel emerges. Ray Clemens is back and ready to finance the surgery. Rickey goes under the knife after some debate with his father, and we are treated to a lovely recovery montage as Rickey goes from the hospital bed to the baseball diamond. But will he recover in time for the tryouts? Yes. After a miraculous recovery, Rickey is ready for tryouts and fully intends to show that he is the best homer hitter in the world. At the same time, he absolutely still has the spine of a 60-year-old and is cut immediately because he is not able to run, which is apparently a central still in the sport of baseball, you kind of have to run dejected. Rickey storms off, throws his bat and glove away and drives off in his beat up incorrectly aged vehicle.
But Rickey, he ain’t known quitter. This is the hill he wants to die on storming back, get that in there. I’m sorry. Storming back into the tryout and completely against the rules that were just laid out. Rickey demands that the scouts allow him to hit home runs as many homers in a row as you can, and if he is successful, that he be allowed to play in the big final tryout game later that night. For reasons that I don’t understand, they agree to this condition and Rickey begins to blasted Homers out of the stadium and not just out of his stadium, but into the stadium next door, nearly assassinated pro scout, Red Murph. Impressed Red Murph now lays out a challenge. Rickey will prove himself by playing DH for both teams in the big game, and if you can hit off of every pitcher, red will recommend him to the majors. Amazingly or not, Rickey does just that. He goes into the final game, plays for both teams and hits off of every single mustache, handlebar, mustache, hooker in the game. He gets hit, he gets back up. Rickey has overcome and is certified as the greatest baseball player of all time, or at least good enough to be signed by the eighties Montreal Expos and never play in the Natures Good, blessed, good Night. The movie is mercifully over about time,
sar:
Right? Yeah. I felt every minute of those two and a half hours.
Jeff:
Yes. I’ve never been so thrilled for the concluding song to start playing, which encourages you in a very folksy turn to just rub a little dirt on it. Rub a little dirt on it, brother. Well, I’ve scot you down. Rub a little dirt on it.
sar:
Yeah, that’s advice that upper middle class people give to people in permanently precarious positions because that’s generally worked for them, given that all of their problems were really easily surmountable,
Jeff:
Rub a little dirt on it or have $8,000 surgery. Those are your two options.
sar:
Angel funded of course, and that Jeff and I watched these films together because nobody makes us laugh more than ourselves and each other. So when we were watching this, I called it about the halfway point. I was like, if they’ve made this film about how the DH designated hitter position was made, this is actually an awesome premise because if it’s because of a disabled person, I actually love this. I want to know if that was why DH was made. It was not. They dismissed this at the beginning of the third act, and DH is already a well-respected position, albeit only for a few years. That year before this was…
Jeff:
That year! The year that this is set in is the first year that Major League Baseball has a dh.
sar:
It wasn’t because of Rickey Hill.
Jeff:
It wasn’t Rickey Hill
sar:
Would’ve made this one point better for me if this was the story of how we invented DH
Jeff:
Man. Okay, so what you’re talking about right now is an incredible third act in which Rickey Hill goes to war with the powers that be at MLB and says there is an opportunity for players to play. Players who are not able to run or because of the debilitating high school injuries they’ve sustained can no longer play the field, but can still blast the ball as good as Babe Ruth, who if you remember, wasn’t quite a runner himself. I mean probably from all the cigars he was smoking while playing. That could have been an amazing movie, but that is unfortunately not reality. So it is not what we can,
Derek:
I have to say in some of the last scenes, why the hell was Red Murph standing next to the picture?
Jeff:
It never,
sar:
Ever,
Derek:
Ever happened.
Jeff:
Okay. Sarah and I actually also brought this up while watching because I’m like, he’s going to die a line drive get taken out by those. Asked me
sar:
How safe it was that Red was standing there and I was like, oh, he’ll go to the hospital.
Jeff:
He hit at that he will probably die. And also he is like 80 years old. His bones are probably hollow at this point, that wild through
Derek:
His head. Another thing, dead giveaway that folks who were writing the script didn’t actually, I don’t think they know sports or I don’t really think they fully understand, is the scene where red turns to the all-star professional reliever and says, if you hit him again with the ball, you’re done, never
Jeff:
Done. Done from what?
Derek:
Red you are a high school, maybe college age level coach or a scouts. You are not instrumental in changing an Allstar. I can understand if it’s a minor league player. This was a major league Allstar coming for a rehab assignment. He was
Jeff:
On a rehab stint. Yes. Also who does a rehab stint at a tryout game.
Derek:
An exhibition game in southern Texas with old alumni.
Jeff:
With no real teams.
Derek:
Yes. Yes. Made up teams with one DH that’s on both sides. Yeah,
Jeff:
But you needed a hard thrower.
sar:
They proved how brave he was by having that 80-year-old man stand beside the fastest fastball pitcher they had and just stood there against a guy who they already proved could hit it 400 something large.
Derek:
The animosity itself makes no sense. If you want to understand sport or just understand labor issues, if you look at the scout, the scout is hired to do a particular job. The scout doesn’t want animosity towards people that they are scouting. They want to find people in order to do their job, ostensibly do their job. And I think that uncritical take on authority is riddled through this film. It’s just like the authority of red is just assumed. The authority of James is just assumed. And anytime that’s that authority is kind of questioned, it gets just swept under the rug. When the mother-in-law is on the cusp of passing away and says, let Rickey try, it’s like that could have been a moment to confront that hegemonic masculinity, that patriarchal head of family household or something, or later on when he is speaking to his wife about Rickey and there was a moment of conflict. These were all opportunities in which they could have actually tackled hegemonic masculinity. That kind of, it is intertwined in ableism as well and hegemonic ableism as well. All these
sar:
Things. But we also know that that’s never going to happen when your setting is fundamentalist sixties Texas.
Jeff:
That’s right.
sar:
No one in this film is going to argue against an older adult.
Derek:
Yeah. That’s why anytime I see a movie that’s unapologetically the actual plot is just the American dream in any setting, all of these are impossibilities because the American dream is driven on compulsory able bodiedness, on compulsory, compulsory heterosexuality, on hegemonic masculinity, patriarchy, settler colonialism, imperialism, all of these things that just can never be tackled Well, because
sar:
What we’ve epitomized by the original American dream was the straight successful white male. How do you generate that through all these circumstances that only only benefit the straights CI White male. Exactly. And we expanded that imaginary to, oh, now Taylor Swift is the American dream. Now you’ve done all of these kind of subtle corrections to the narrative, but in making those connections, you’re getting at what Derek’s getting at with questioning power structure relationships, or questioning whether or not someone is Jing Egoistically correct. About face or just because they said so. And as soon as you start doing that, you can’t even really say Taylor Swift is the American dream because she still benefits from parts of that narrative.
Derek:
Absolutely. You can’t have a happy ending. There’s not a happy ending in society. There’s simply not the way we’ve built society. It will not be happy. It will not end well for you. Won’t
sar:
Someone think of Galen Weston?
Jeff:
Right. Finally, please
sar:
Someone create alogia for the billionaires.
Derek:
Let’s just talk about one of the people I despise most on this point.
Jeff:
Oh man.
Okay, so that’s our movie. Long and short, very long. There was nothing short about this that long. It was extremely long. It was long. So, okay, I think we probably should just address before we get into our closing thoughts. So quite obviously, this movie has lots of overcoming narratives, the idea that one special ability will help someone to overcome their disability. So Rickey’s inherent wealth is tied to his ability to hit dinners and dinners he will hit. But the thing that I really wanted to talk a little bit about, because we haven’t talked about it yet on the pod, is this notion of disability presented as a test from God. That it is a challenge that is to be met and then forth opportunity. So Sarah, I’m going to turn to you first, then we’ll go to Darren. What do you think about how this movie sort of positions disability in its relation to religious intervention?
sar:
Yeah. I’m not going to beat you at a religious argument because you grew up Baptist and I grew up Buddhist,
Jeff:
Catholic, Catholic. Whoa. The Pope is the head of church here. Come on.
sar:
I didn’t know Jesus was Jewish till university. I made it to 19 years old without ever having learned that fact. But I can approach the disability angle. I think this movie does a really good job with some of the most fundamentalist heritage disability. And if you really strongly want to believe in them, this movie is just your wildest dreams come true. It’s like angels in the outfield meets goodwill hunting meets a beautiful mind, meets insert your favorite overcoming narrative that was modestly, religiously based. And I think a lot of people would actually relate to some kind of form of God’s will or nobody can give you things that you can’t overcome or those narratives because I am surrounded by people who are very quasi-religious at best. And I’ve heard that plenty of times in relation to my own schizophrenia. There’s nothing you can’t overcome if that’s what was meant to be.
You can take God right out of it and make the kind of secular argument toward that. And I think that will resonate with people that it worked for. So it kind of self worth in so far as if you were able to overcome it, you can look back with this nostalgic lens of, ah, it was because I was always meant to overcome it. But when you create that narrative, you also create the inverse even if you didn’t want to. So all of the mentally ill people who end up hospitalized, who end up the infamous cases like Rosemary Kennedy who spend their entire life institutionalized for similar illnesses, are we then saying that God did not want them to overcome. We had Destiny written in the stars and Rosemary’s Destiny was a depressing institution. Ward. Those are the kinds of things that you’re saying without saying when you agree with the premise that for you God’s child or Destiny’s child or W’s child or academia’s child getting spicy now it’ll work out for you from the realm of what’s already happened. And if it doesn’t, fuck you deserved it. So it’s just the deservingness narrative done over and over and over again. And if you want to do it with sports, you can do it with sports. That’s what this movie did. Yeah.
Jeff:
But the inspiration of this film is that he achieves his dreams, he makes the majors he, he doesn’t achieve, but that is the end of the film. The end of the film is he married his sweetheart at home plate of the expos field, and then he played four years in the minors and then it’s cut to credits and that’s the end of the story. And so I think it’s fascinating that from Rickey’s own words, the intention of this film is to inspire physically disabled people that he hopes that physically disabled people are inspired by it, which to me, I would say means that he hopes that you would watch the film and say, if Rickie Hale can do it, I can do it too. I just have to put the time in, got to put the work in. I got to hit a lot of rocks with sticks and I can do it even if people say that I can’t. And it’s like, okay, so that is on its face, not necessarily a bad message on its face.
sar:
I’ll disagree. Continue.
Jeff:
You should not necessarily listen to stereotypes that people try to place on you. I don’t disagree with that. But if you actually look at the actual narrative and the actual set of the story, it really is saying having unique ability and then relentlessly to the detriment of your body, pursue that one ability and drive yourself into the ground doing it. And that’s the path to success. And that’s how you too will earn to be commemorated in film. Right. I think the whole, to bring us back to that disability as a test from God, it’s all about trying to make disability meaningful. Something that is seen as sort of senseless or empty or meaningless that we can’t wrap our heads around. We give it meaning as well. It’s just a test from God or you two shall overcome or it’s a party. It’s an interesting part of your story that you’ll then tell in your film once you’ve overcome it,
sar:
If you deserve it, if it was meant for you, it will happen. It’ll happen. The non secular version of that myth.
Jeff:
Yeah, a hundred percent. And so I think that’s one thing that I found really fascinating about this film is how there is the public narrative of what this film is supposed to be as he sees it, as Rickey sees it. And I think probably as the people that wrote it see it versus what it actually is saying, these things couldn’t be further apart. And I don’t think that there’s any actual understanding that these two roads have diverged as far as they have.
sar:
The only hope it’s generating is if you are good enough at passing, you can have some of what you surmised you deserved. And that’s a way different message than if you hope hard enough, you’ll get literally whatever you want. It’s about adjusting your expectations via your actual ability level. And then even then you’ll probably only be able to do part of that.
Derek:
Yeah. Yeah. Just to echo your point, I think you’ve put it perfectly, Jeff, in terms of I think what the message here doesn’t just impact folks with disabilities, it, it actually sends the message that you should, and we should all be willing to put our bodies through an incredible amount of pain, harm and potentially long-term consequences in order to do the things we love. We quote unquote love. And that that’s a really terrible message, especially in sport when you realize so many people get injured, like lifelong injuries. So many people are dying. So many people are, I think mostly of American football when I talk about this. There are other things boxing, there are other violent sports of course, but people are literally subjecting themselves to years and years and years and years and years of head trauma and receive no remuneration ever.
Jeff:
Yeah. There’s no payoff.
Derek:
And in this case, there was no payoff here. So in 2022, if you played aaa, which is the highest level of major of minor league baseball, you were getting at most $700 a week, a week. That is not some
sar:
To be at the top of your game
Derek:
In 1975, I would say that was probably, and he was what, single or aa max? Like 20 bucks. I would say.
Jeff:
You were paid in steroids. Yeah, he paid in steroids.
Derek:
You have travel to the away game. That’s your payment.
sar:
I agree with all of this.
Jeff:
So I think what we’re all sort of saying here is that I think this movie may have been a horror movie by accident.
Derek:
Well, certainly not for the 65-year-old evangelicals. They love this movie.
Jeff:
They just don’t realize it yet. They don’t realize that they are in Get Out.
sar:
It supports comfort viewing in so far as if you don’t think about it at all, it is an inspirational film about a disabled guy who makes it into the minor leagues. And as soon as you apply a modicum of thought into the scenario, it’s actually a disempowering film about hiding disability at all costs and how disability is antithetical to anything you could hope or dream of.
Jeff:
Right.
Derek:
But here, look, there’s Dennis Quaid.
sar:
Yeah, but
Jeff:
Do you like Dennis Quaid?
sar:
Made by Dennis Quaid? So whatever. Yeah.
Jeff:
Hell yeah. Hell yeah.
Now, as you will know, if you’ve listened to the blog before, we have a perfectly empirical, scientifically rigorous method, which we use to measure all of our movies tongue firmly in cheek. This is of course the invalid culture scale. Now, like golf, we play this with the lowest score wins or the lower the score the better the film did. So let’s take a look and let’s see where the hill falls on the invalid culture scale. So first up, on a scale of one to five, with five being the least accurate, how accurately does this film portray disability?
Derek:
I would say a 4.5. Can I do point fives here? Wonderful. I think that the day-to-day lived reality are completely put out of focus and just hidden. And as we’ve talked about on the podcast, and Sarah’s mentioned several times, the ability to pass was centered and throughout the film, so portraying disability as kind of the only this quote nuisance that arises only when something good is about to happen, I think that’s really problematic. Incredibly problematic. When you think about the lived reality of everyday dealing with anything, with anything that might make you less able-bodied or able mentally than other people. I think you had an opportunity to really dig deep into that lived reality and you had two hours to do it and you didn’t do it at all. So I think it was not accurate whatsoever.
sar:
I agree with everything Derek said. I’m a little harsher. I want to give it a five because it kind of went out of its way to obscure disability at best. And given the runtime, disability is about as tangential as baseball itself. It is a minor character if you consider it a character. I’m kind of surprised Jeff picked it, but I think Jeff did not know upon picking it how little this disability film had to do with disability.
Jeff:
That actually is completely correct because if you look at the Netflix description of this film, it is like watch this man overcome his disability. And it wasn’t that at all. For some people they tricked you with baseball. For me, they tricked me with disability.
sar:
Goddamn right
Jeff:
Marketers, man. Can’t trust him. Okay, so I I’m going to split the difference. I gave this a four a little bit. I was not as harsh. And the only reason I was not as harsh on it is that I love that they not love. I appreciate that they had the ES to openly acknowledge that if Rickey could not have raised the money, his body would’ve just been left broken. So despite the fact that there is a medical treatment that he just wouldn’t have got it. And so I’m like, whoa, this is an American movie that is about rah rah America. But it also was able to be like, oh man. But also, wouldn’t it be weird if we just didn’t raise that $8,000 and he just had broken lines for the rest of his life? Whoa. That would be weird. So I’m giving them one bonus point for openly discussing the
sar:
…accidentally in favor of Obamacare?
Jeff:
Of being accidentally critical of capitalist medicine. Okay, next question. On a scale of one to five, with five being the hardest, I don’t think I even need to ask. How hard was it for you to get through this film?
Derek:
I think that I originally wanted everything in me to not give it a five and I wrote down four. And one of the reasons why, because the happy go lucky storyline, it’s easy to get. I’ve seen it a million times. It’s actually quite easy to get through a fight. But now talking about it for two hours in a couple episodes here, I have to change that to a five because it was so long I wouldn’t have continued watching it past 46 minutes, which is just getting into that. After that 35 minute buffer, I would’ve stopped watching it and I will never watch it again, nor will I ever speak about it again, probably in my life. So I have to give it a five
Jeff:
Except at my funeral. You will be bringing it up at my funeral.
Derek:
It’ll certainly be in the eulogy
sar:
Thanksgiving dinner. If somebody really wants to start the table fight, they can bring up the premise of The Hill and Derek’s going to stand up and go like, this is my Roman.
Derek:
My father-in-Law will just say, oh, I watch this really interesting movie The Hill. It’s about sports. Derek, let’s talk about it.
sar:
It’s gone. I can’t do that.
Jeff:
I’m filing for divorce.
sar:
I’ve watched some pretty brutal films with Jeff, but they don’t usually have this length of runtime. And I did think that you could have done this movie in 40 minutes and told the entire story as it appeared on the screenplay as it’s written now. So I got to give it a five.
Jeff:
Okay, so we are aligned on this one. I love to be punished by movies for what you will about me as a human, but this one was brutal. I was bored throughout. I wanted it to end. I would not have gotten through it if it wasn’t for you guys. Thank you, Jeff. Don’t watch this movie. Having said that, if this movie was a tight 88 minute, I think they probably could have pulled this off. I think they probably could have held my attention for 85 minutes probably if you cut out basically his entire childhood, this movie actually probably would’ve been decent. And maybe the entire father storyline and maybe the entire, you know what if the movie was just the final game? Yeah, just that time. The film. Yeah. I think if…
sar:
The childhood and the father storyline is like an hour and a half of this two hour film.
Jeff:
So yeah, I think, yeah, it was brutal. That’s a five. That’s a pretty solid five.
sar:
That’s a five.
Jeff:
Okay. On a scale of one to five, with five being the max, how often did you laugh at things that were not intended to be funny?
Derek:
So I went through, and to the best of my recollection, I counted the number of times that I actually did this. And I said, if it’s from one to five, that’s the number that I’ll give it. And it was four and it was four times, and it was mostly due to, it had nothing to do with anything substantive. It was like the cheesy one-liners that I just couldn’t get over that were so bad. They made me laugh. And I am not really a motive when I watch films, so I wouldn’t laugh. Even in comedies, I don’t really laugh very often, but for instance, when the sort of scout I, it kind of put the MLB player in to face Rickey right at the end, and then the camera pans to the angel investor and he says he’s sending in his final attempt to ruin Rickey’s day.
That stuff makes me laugh. That wasn’t necessary. That dialogue was not necessary. And it makes me laugh. Or when Dennis Quat actually seemingly aged when he went from, I don’t know if you guys noticed that, but he seemed to look younger when Rickey was older and I couldn’t fully understand that. And then the final scene, another one was when they are reunited and Rickey realizes his father, the hard ass pastor is actually at the game for the first time because of course, and Dennis Quaid looks to him and goes, I guess we’ll have to get used to your new career now. I’m like, what? That’s not even aligned with the character arc whatsoever or, yeah, I think I had one other, oh, and I think I laughed out loud when Rickey just objected to being sent away and every other player was being sent away and they were arguing and they sent, and then Rickey’s just like, but just give me a try. And they’re like, okay, here you go. I laughed out loud. That makes no fucking sense. Why would they do that for 30 players? And then Rickey, you’re just made no sense. So four times I laughed out loud, so I’ll give it a four. That was a long-winded answer to that. No
Jeff:
Fair. I think for our viewers, for those who care about authenticity, Rickey Hill has also stated that his father did not, basically, his father didn’t come to a lot of baseball games, but his father came and checked on him after every game they talked about it. His father was actually pretty actively involved in his fall career throughout. So anyway, I don’t know why they thought it was super important to make his dad a dick in this film. But I
sar:
Do also remember laughing at Rickey Hill’s plot armor moment where they have the big explanation, do not disagree with the coaches. If you’re out, you’re out. And as soon as our main character was out, he was like, no, wait, but I would like to disagree. And it was just accepted, no questions asked. I did laugh at that and I hate this question every single time, every single episode because I’m laughing throughout the entire film every time, but it’s because I’m watching it with Jeff and we amuse each other. So then I have to go back and try to piece out, okay, when was I laughing at Jeff and when was I laughing at a legitimately funny thing the film did, and I think it was very little, the film. This film was kind of bleak for an inspiration porn narrative and spends a lot of time with the kind of poverty porn circumstances of his childhood exploitated to the nth degree for the purposes of this film, because it just makes a better story. This was like narrative journalism 1 0 1 as a film, but if you’re going to do it as narrative journalism, it’s not funny. So two,
Jeff:
Yeah. Okay. I was actually right. I’m lined up exactly where Sarah is on this one. I also gave it a two. And the reason is the only time that I legitimately actually laughed out loud at a non-intentional laugh out, loud moment again, man, I’m going to come off looking such a bad person in this episode. So he is in the doctor’s office and the doctor is, every tendon in your life is destroyed, everything in your body is broken. And also you have this spinal cord of a 60-year-old, and then there’s this sort of like, but you’re telling me there’s a chance. And I’m like, this doctor’s literally just told you that your body is broken, irreparably broken. And he’s like, okay, but I can probably make that tryout in two months.
sar:
You laughing in the face of this young man’s optimism.
Jeff:
It was so straight faced and so silly that they have this super serious, we’re going to give ’em this terrible medical. And I’m like, okay, but you couldn’t even make it six months after the surgery. You had to make this two months. I had a bad ankle sprain and that sucker was at least a month and a half of recovery. And that wasn’t even surgical. That was literally the amount of damage that they described. And then they’re like, oh yeah, you’ll be ready to play in two months. I was like, objectively, that’s hilarious. I’m in the power of prayer baby, but otherwise boring, not funny, even when it thought it was being funny. So I gave it a two. Okay, last but certainly not least, my favorite question, if that last one is Sarah’s worst, this one’s my favorite. On a scale of one to five, with five being the most, how many broken leg steps has this film put back? Disabled people?
Derek:
I would say five. If you approach, I have two answers. If you approach this film as a film about disability, it’s a five. Absolutely. If you think that that’s going to be a centerpiece of this film, it’s a five, it’s a 10. But I think most people are not approaching this as such. And because it’s actually not part of the plot line, it’s not one of the fundamental things. Keeping this film together, it’s actually just a story about believing in Jesus and following capitalist rules. I would say a three or a four for most people that the underrepresentation of the issues is a big issue, but I think most people aren’t even going to associate this with disability whatsoever because it was so few scenes that actually showed anything.
Jeff:
So we’re going to call that a four. Is that a five? A three and a four. We’ll split
Derek:
The difference. Yeah. Sounds a four sounds. Yeah. The very empirical objective measurement here. Yes. We’ll do a four.
Jeff:
It’s scientific folks. Yeah,
Derek:
Scientific, of course.
sar:
Derek, is that your final answer?
Derek:
Final answer.
sar:
Gotcha. Okay. I think it puts us less overall steps back than quid pro crow. And I don’t think it deserves a one or two either, because as Derek so aptly put it, this film is in no way about disability. So if you read the back of the box and you think, oh, this is disability overcoming narrative. You’ve been bamboozled. Not it’s a shitty baseball movie that has very little baseball in it. It’s a coming of age. Bill D’s Roman from a bunch of preacher kids in sixties, Texas. So three.
Jeff:
Yeah. Yeah. Again, we’re pretty aligned. I waffled a little bit on this a little bit. I was also in the five range. At first I was like, God, I’m like, you probably shouldn’t tell people with debilitative disabilities to ignore science and ignore doctor’s advice.
sar:
Try harder,
Jeff:
Brother. If you just hit a few more dinners, you’re going to make it, brother. So I was there, but then I came to the same place that all of you did, which is that mercifully, I think this film largely left us out of the mix. That disability was such a small part of it. They were like, we’ll give you your Forest Gump moment where he is running in the straight leg brace and we’ll give you the for gum moment when he breaks the brace off and gets full body rotation. But after that, I mean, if we imagine the film started when he’s in high school, this actually feels more like the film about just a injury prone athlete, which it’s like, is that really a disability text or, I think that for most audiences, they would separate this out and they would see it more as just sort of an injury prone and not debilitating disability, which is separate from the reality of course, of Rickey Hill as we understand it. So I landed at three. I think three is probably where this fits. It’s not the, I mean, you can’t even compare this to Quick pro quo. I mean, come on. That’s not fair. It’s not fair to anybody.
sar:
Do you want to know, do you want a drum roll or do you just want to hear it straight up?
Jeff:
Yeah. Well, we never do drum roll. I mean, we’re very low budget here.
sar:
You need to be a drum roll. Last episode,
Jeff:
I called for it and then I did not do it.
sar:
I did all this math for you. I added these numbers under 10.
Jeff:
Would you say that you overcame your disability?
sar:
I did.
Jeff:
How much addition did you do in the creek when you were a
sar:
Child? There are probably people from primary school who would come on here and argue with you that I’m mildly dyscalculus.
Jeff:
It’s a reason I make you do it and not me. For the same reason.
sar:
God gave me a Windows machine and a said machine on the seventh day it Unoo gave me calculator. So I just run that through twice. So Calculator came up with a score of 46.5,
Jeff:
Just barely making the major leagues with a score of 46.5. I am proud to announce that Hill qualifies for the prestigious and sought after Jerry Lewis seal of approval, our worst score than you could receive, an invalid culture. Congratulations. The Hill. Wow, you’ve won your Oscar.
sar:
That’s close as they’re going to get.
Jeff:
Dennis is still waiting for the call. It’ll come in a day now.
sar:
Honestly, in his role of shitty fundamentalist preacher, he killed it. I don’t have many notes for him in terms of how he played that role. I have a lot of notes for how that role was written. I don’t have any notes for how Dennis Quaid played it.
Jeff:
If you’ve taken nothing from this episode, take Dennis Quaid. Consummate professional.
sar:
Yeah, phenomenal actor.
Jeff:
So this concludes another episode. We are at the end. Thank you so much for joining us, listeners. But more than that, thank you so much for subjecting yourself to this Derek.
Derek:
Oh, thank you very much for having me. This was a lot of fun.
Jeff:
Absolutely. And this means that we probably should do another sports movie next season. I don’t know. Is it time to do Soul Surfer?
sar:
Angels in the outfield?
Jeff:
Is there a disability in Angels in the outfield? I don’t know. Think viewers, listeners don’t think if there is a disabled character.
sar:
See, since I was a child, there’s about as much disability in Angels in the outfield as there is in the Hill. So if the Hill qualified, I feel like Angels in the outfield should qualify.
Jeff:
Fair enough. Okay. That actually maybe. Maybe that’s fair. Maybe. Alright, well fans, if you have a movie that you would like us to do a baseball, no, we’re not doing another baseball movie. No, no. If you have another sport movie that has a disabled character and you want us to do it, please. Well, okay. Sorry. Hold on. Boys and girls, I need to back up. I have been completely ignoring the fact that we started this podcast with a movie about soapbox derby. So we have done a sports movie on this podcast. I’m so sorry. But if you want to do more, give us another one and we’ll talk about it. So tune in again next month. We have a very special movie with a special guest. It’s going to be a ton of fun before we go on our summer hiatus. Take care. Be safe and do not watch this movie.
<Mvll Crimes theme song>
Jeff:
And this concludes another episode of Invalid Culture. Thank you for joining us. I hope you enjoyed it or not. Did you have a film you would like for us to cover on the pod? Or even better? Do you want to be a victim on Invalid culture? How to word to our website invalid culture.com and submit. We would love to hear from you. That’s it for this episode. Catch you next month and until then, stay invalid.
