Performance

Rating: Null/10 (15 August 2003)

Spoilers herein.
Movies are to many people largely about performance. Actors certainly think so. Spectator sport is about performance as well, though most athletes don't think so. They think is has something to do with "the love of the game," and sometimes personal challenges.
Movies about baseball are often performances about performing because it isn't much of a team sport. And this is the most obvious case because:
-- It adds the extra dimension of sex as performance (to "educate" the baseball performance which produces the actor performance) which dimension is underscore by the capture of Tim Robbins in much the same manner as Nuke was captured.
-- It features that speech by Annie about what she believes in (the Church of Baseball... a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time...), followed after some time by what Crash believes including: "... that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap"
-- Crash calls the majors "the show"
-- The only real teaching Crash gives Nuke is about the TeeVee cliches
-- We have three kinds of actors. Costner who wants the world to come to him, so only offers what he thinks is appealing; Robbins who throws himself into the psychological space of the viewer (at 90 miles and hour), and Sarandon who cheats by attracting us into her actorly Bermuda triangle. They play these roles in the story as well.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.