2 Movie Reviews: American Pastime and Shut Up & Sin

American Pastime (2 stars)

I picked this movie off our netflix que next in the spirit of baseball season ending. I thought it would be fun to watch a movie that centered around baseball. We had seen a preview for this movie before Letter to Iwo Jima and intrigued had added it to our queue.

The premise of the movie, is that World War II has started and Pearl Harbor has just been attacked. Japanese families on the west coast are forced to leave their houses, their business, their lives with just a suitcase of their belongings. Americans forced the Japanese into internment camps in the Southwest. This movie follows a specific family with two boys, one who is making the most of the situation and the other, who is bitter at having to give up his baseball scholarship.

The men in the camp decide to start a baseball league and the movie culminates with the town, who treat the people in the internment camp very poorly, playing the team from the camp.

While I thought that the premise could be good, as not many movies have been made (at least to the best of my knowledge) about this particular time in American History, unfortunately it didn't live up to my hopes. It was poorly done, the cinematography was not very good, and the story and the acting was incredibly cheezy. Overall we rated this two stars, and we definitely wouldn't recommend it.

Shut Up & Sing (4 stars)

Shut Up & Sing had been recommended to me by my friend Jessica in Boston, when it first came out. It is a documentary that follows the Dixie Chix after they made the comment about President Bush at one of their concerts in England. It goes back and forth between events that unfolded directly right after the comment was made to the recording studio in 2006, 3 years later, when they're writing and singing about that time.

We both enjoyed this documentary immenseley. I thought it was well done, incredibly interesting and I loved seeing the process of making music and just hearing a lot of their music because they are really good and I like their music. I'm really glad we saw this - it made me want to listen to their music more.