Sugar

NPR's Filmweek said Sugar was the best baseball film ever. I am not sure I can agree with that since I haven't seen too many baseball films. But I do agree that this is a great film. This is the story of Miguel "Sugar" Santos being invited to the spring training of a major league team from his baseball academy in the Dominican Republic. Raised nearly from birth to play baseball, by the end of the film, Sugar has developed his own mind on who he is. And along the way, we see the difficulty and reality of the minor league baseball system and the lonliness of immigration. We see Sugar realize that the dreams he holds as his own are really the dreams of every kid in the D.R. and maybe weren't his own dreams after all. And the struggle to mesh all of these thoughts together makes Sugar real.

A great bonus here is that since Sugar spends a significant amount of time at a single-A team in Iowa, we also get to see life in the middle states. The filmmakers did a good job of presenting this life in a value-neutral way. Good ol' middle America, with its meatloaf, baseball, corn fields and church youth groups. Lots of stereotypes presented, but not presented as positive or negative, just "this is life in the middle", and this is how strange it all seems from an outside perspective.
5-stars