Sugar

Sugar is either a baseball movie about a Dominican or an immigrant movie about a guy who plays baseball. After training in the Dominican Republic, Sugar leaves his family and a simpler life to strive for his dream of playing baseball with the Yankees. I won’t tell you the ending, but it is not predictable. The movie spotlights what it must be like for a non English speaker to come to a place like Iowa (where he plays on a minor league team) and try to assimilate. The boy/ man who plays Sugar is a real Dominican played by Algenis Perez Soto, and he’s very charming and is able to show his sense of displacement with just a look. We get to experience America through his intense stares. There are moments in the movie where you almost don’t want to watch it anymore because you fear the worst for Sugar and you want the best for him, but I’m glad I made it to the end. So, baseball fans, and fans of a quality American made movies in Spanish, I think you would like this movie. By the way, the directing/writing team behind this movie were also behind the great movie Half Nelson, a favorite movie of mine.

I also saw Beauty in Trouble, a Czech movie about a troubled marriage. The fact that it was a foreign movie and was supposed to be pretty good did not make it so. Another movie that I watched so you don’t have to. 