The Hill (#459)


This must be my week for sports movies and based-on-a-true-story movies.  After tennis and auto racing, I saw a film about baseball, which was also faith based, and unexpectedly very religious.  THE HILL is the supposedly true story of a young boy who wears unwieldy braces on both legs  but who can his a baseball farther than anyone else and who lives with his family in a small rural snd poor town where his father is a by-the-book minister (played well by an almost unrecognizable Dennis Quaid probably because he never smiled) and his mother and two siblings.  Quaid is fired because he asked two parishioners to stop smoking and spitting in church and ends up in an even more poor and remote church.  Through a series of improbable events, the boy, named Rickey Hill and well played  by Colin Ford, eventually gets a tryout and wins major league contract after a hard-to-believe performance in front of all the major league scouts, hitting 11 for 11 as a designated hitter for both teams.  There’s a romance, and it is intended to be a feel good film.  Critics only gave it s 38% thumbs up, but audiences approved it by 97%.  Sorry to be so cynical but it’s hard for me to accept most movie versions of true events.  Previews were all over the map, including another Kenneth Branagh playing Hercule Poirot and two or three Christmas releases including a musical, Journey to Bethlehem, recounting the life of the Virgin Mary.  Will wonders never cease?


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