Baseball for Dinner Presents: Movie Mash-up Mania!

This is baseball for dinner.  Yet the baseball content is limited.  As is the dinner content. And that’s just looking for one of the two.  Looking for both is an exercise in futility.  This makes me slightly sad inside.  Know what else makes me sad?  Finding multiple Top 10 lists of baseball movies and dinner movies, and not having either on BaseballforDinner. Now granted, BfD doesn’t condone the Top 10 lifestyle, we’re more in tune with the Top 5.  It’s simpler, more elegant, plus we can pull articles out of our asses in half the time.
So to help combat the two issues currently making me sad, I’ve combined the two and made it the topic for today’s Top 5.
Roscoe’s Top 5 Double Header, Heaping on the Seconds, Double Feature: Baseball for Dinner Movie Nights
People are fans of baseball.  (America’s pastime and all that.)  People are fans of dinner.  (America’s favorite evening meal.)  People are fans of movies.  (How America passes the time when they’re not eating a meal.)  Given all that, why not have a baseball for dinner movie marathon.  If you have three or four hours to kill, why not paste your eyes to the nearest screen (these days that could be found in your pocket or screwed to your wall) and watch one of these carefully chosen evenings of cinema.

5) – Angels in the Outfield + National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation

Now some of these mash-ups of movie mania may seem a little bit counterintuitive, so before you storm off in a huff, let me explain.  Dinner brings the family together, especially during the holidays. One such holiday steeped in such a tradition is Christmas.  What family celebrates Christmas better than the Griswolds?  And who’s the reason for the season?  Jesus.  Whose birth is foretold in dreams by angels.  And after one of the angels heralds the birth of the King of Kings, he takes the form of Christopher Lloyd and answers the prayers of a lonely kid looking to connect with his distant dad.  And the only feasible way for this to happen is if a shitty ball team wins the world series of baseball.  But the kid is a gullible child, and his dad is a sarcastic prick.  When asked when they’re going to be a family again, the dad answers, “From where I’m sitting, I’d say when the Angels win the pennant.”  And the kid, being a kid, (see Scottym70’s article on how you can lie to kids here) believes his deadbeat dad.  And since angels have the innocence of youth, C -Lloyd also believes him and helps by being the 10th man on the field with the Angels, turning them into a coed community softball team.  Hence a night with the Griswolds and Danny Glover and Christopher Lloyd and some dumb kid.

4) – A League of Their Own + Home Alone

First off, “own” and “alone” rhyme.  ‘Nuf said.  Secondly, the whole premise of Home Alone stems from Kevin’s family sending him off to stew by himself after disrupting the family dinner.  Thirdly, there is no crying in baseball.  Besides, the thematic elements of these two films is pretty much the same.  Except in one, a kid is left by his family over the holidays and has a party and fights bandits, while in the other women are left by men when they leave to go fight in a war so the women have to play America’s pastime with Tom Hanks (not the Forrest Gump or Saving Private Ryan Tom Hanks, more along the lines of Big or Splash! Tom Hanks).  So the basic thematic structure is the same, unless we’re splitting hairs here.

3) – The Sandlot + Donnie Darko

Both of these films feature the pains of youth.  Jake and Maggie dig deep and go after one another like they were actually related during the family’s dinner.  And the Beast goes after Smalls’ baseball like it was his dinner.  Donnie is to the bunny as Smalls is to the Beast.  Really, both are simply reflections of each other, one being a multidimensional being that travels through time and space to confront itself and the other being a dog representing the fears of isolation and not quite fitting in of a young boy trying to make some friends.  All in all, they are metaphors about life, and the choices we make in it.

2) – Major League II + Back to the Future (Part II)

The night of the sequels!  Michael J. Fox has a nice family dinner with himself twice over, before after (stupid temporal paradoxes) thwarting Biff’s evil empire based on betting on sports.  Like going back in time and putting some money down on the Cubbies.  Who play baseball.  Just like Charlie Sheen attempts to do in Major League II.  Ever wonder why Charlie was the one who took over for Michael on Spin City?  Watch these two double-downs to find out.

1) – Bull Durham + American Beauty

Both movies start out with a voice over by one of the main characters.  In one, Kevin Spacey let’s us know that our little pointless life will end some day and then we can be happy.  In the other, Susan Sarandon talks about her religion: The Church of Baseball.  Both films focus on a character played by an actor named Kevin, both of whom throw things.  One throws his dinner, the other throws a baseball.  It’s a match made in heaven.

So there you have it, folks.  A Top 5 that also is a Top 10.  And all of BfD’s integrity remains intact, and you’ve got a week (of the business variety) of baseball for dinner movie mash-ups. Enjoy.