How The Sandlot Shaped My Childhood

The Sandlot is a film that has played a major role in my life I'd like to do something different with this article I don't want this to be a formal movie review in which I grade the film and talk about all of its merits or criticisms or whatever I kind of want to talk about what the film means to me how I discovered it and how it kind of shaped My Life as a kid and how it helped me in a lot of ways and I'd love to do more videos like this in the future where I just talk about experiences with film and not necessarily feel like I have to you know dig for Flaws or whatever it's not always the thing that I enjoy doing I kind of like to talk about films that I appreciate it and and sort of just relate stories that are specific to me because everybody can talk about The Sandlot and mentioned things about the movie but everyone has a story with a film and I think that that's what makes videos interesting when people talk about their purse makes videos interesting when people talk about their personal experiences with something and they just make it more relatable on that way and I'd like to do that plus I owe you guys some sports content I've only reviewed one sports movie I said I would review more I first saw The Sandlot when my mom took me to the Akron Public Library as a kid and they used to rent out VHS tapes in these black plastic sort of clam shell cases that had these really tight little buttons you had to press and I would almost always get my my fingers stuck in there that like the tips of the the skin of my thumb would get like cut from those boxes all the time and we rented it because he knows you guys know I was raised Jehovah's Witness and so it was PG so okay we'll give it a shot probably acceptable content it's a baseball film looks like it's Family Fare my parents didn't know I don't think that the film had the boys doing a lot of things that they did not want me to do but I don't think they cared cuz I remember the first time I saw it I was alone which really helped and I actually I was alone which really helped and I actually still have a visual imprint kind of burned into my mind of the giant dog and thinking oh my God that looks so scary I don't know how old I was I must have been maybe six the movie came out in theaters when I was five and I unfortunately did not see it in theaters nor did a lot of people to film wasn't exactly a massive success in fact critics of the Arab sort of passed it off one of the few critics hurt usual who kind of got it was Rodger Ebert the man knew what the f*** he was doing and he enjoyed the film but a lot of critics criticize the movie for being too sentimental and too nostalgic this is something that I don't really give a lot of Merit to Nostalgia is relative to the person it's 100% subjective to your own personal experience of course you can tell when a filmmaker is nostalgic about something and they're really trying to communicate feeling which you know I don't really see what the fuc which you know I don't really see what the f*** is wrong with that but if I want to try to put myself in the head space of the critics who criticized movie for being too nostalgic I have to say that as a kid of the 90s this movie is incredibly nostalgic to me and it's very important to me although the film is about the 1960s which as a child was not something I really thought about you know there's some lines of dialogue in the film and things they do that's very 1960s or talking about older films of the era and things that kids did in the 1960s as a 90s kid all of that made sense to me you know even though it was 30 years after the fact it's still works for me and it it it felt like it was right and the Nostalgia aspect of it never occurred to me it just seems like that's the story that's being told and even if the filmmakers nostalgic about the 60s the filmmakers nostalgic about the 60s I'm watching it in the nineties and still feeling kind of that way about it even though I have no Nostalgia for the 1960s and so I've never really given a lot of weight to that criticism although I can understand why some people do but as a five or six year-old watching that tape I was immediately taken by the film and it wasn't because I enjoyed baseball as a sport and I had friends that we played baseball with there was this sense of neighborhood camaraderie that I think every kid would just love to have you know I mean not everybody has this perfect group of friends and the fact that Scotty Smalls in the movie and learns how to be friends with people and end kind of learned how to play baseball and gets taken under the wing of Benny the jet Rodriguez who by the way was like my childhood Idol every other person I knew my age wanted to be Benny the jet Rodriguez he was so f****** cool and so I kind of saw a life in this movie that I did not really a life in this movie that I did not really have friends we can play baseball we can play basketball occasionally and it was like a very Jehovah's Witness thing where people from the Kingdom Hall would meet up and we would play a game or whatever and you know that existed for sure sometimes we go to the park and we would play with the other kids and I always feel like I was doing something wrong but like this movie just felt right it felt like a world that I wished I lived in and so since I wasn't really living in that world this film really helped me alot it kind of became my go-to movie I would watch when I was sick because it always made me feel better and if I ever had to stay home from school I wanted to watch The Sandlot it just comforted me it made me feel like I was watching a world that like I said felt right and I love that I'm part of a generation that kind of adopted this movie because I said critics didn't really care that much for it and wasn't exactly at the box office its biggest star the box-office its biggest star was James Earl Jones and he's in the movie at the very end Denis Leary and Karen Eleanor in the film as well but it's really a movie about the kids and people didn't really show up if you look at the box office numbers but it became one of those rentals or in my case a library rental that was just a staple before you knew it every kid I knew had the clamshell VHS recording it all the time you're killing me Smalls they would have smores at bonfires and they would recreate the scene in the act out things I certainly did that and you know this film became special to a lot of people the VHS rental error really helped a lot of film Sandlot was a big one Shawshank Redemption as well got huge on VHS you know the fact that you could just go to Blockbuster and constantly rent this movie that's what I did for a long time until I realized I should just f****** buy this tank that way I can't really do an informal review of The Sandlot play I can't really do an informal review of The Sandlot it just means so much to me I just unabashedly love this movie and if I did have course it would be an A+ and I have nothing but good things to say about it but I just can't it's just so special to me there's a handful of movies from my actual childhood and then some from when I was in my early teens when I was realizing I wanted to be a filmmaker that basically molded me into who I am and as a child The Sandlot was a big one Field of Dreams is another one also was sports baseball film it's a really well-made film like it doesn't get discussed that much it's just one of those movies we all kind of except as like you have a lot of kids and every character is important but there's also the narrative with Sky Smalls that has to play out in a certain way and everything Smalls that has to play out in a certain way and everything just has to work and it f****** did like the kids are amazing in the film every single one of them stands out there's not a single character in the movie that doesn't feel like a person like they've just been there forever you know like when I watch The Sandlot Nostalgia aside it feels like every kid in that movie will live on after the film they just feel like they exist but it also captured that wonderful sense of childhood imagination where your kind of open to believing things that are little bit Fantastical like this giant dog the Beast and when you see him he looks like a 1950s B-movie monster your kind of seeing what the kids imagine he is until later in the film when he's just a dog it was one of the first slightly more adult edged kids movies I had seen this movie would not be made today at least in the way it is a bunch of kids who get on music park ride chewing tobacco and then they vomit all over lady chewing tobacco and then they vomit all over ladies like come on like that would never pass today and I love that I I watch that when I was five the film definitely helped Inspire my first feature I made when I was 15 years old from the field which is horrendous and every way of course I was a child but we made it you know we actually f****** finished it somehow but like without The Sandlot and especially Field of Dreams I don't know I might not have done that and I got used to making films as a kid because of films like The Sandlot and I don't know that main criticism of this movie is too sentimental or nostalgic it means nothing to me it means nothing to me meant everything to me in my life and made me want to make movies so thank you David Mickey Evans for making The Sandlot thank you David Mickey Evans for making The Sandlot because it legitimately change my life guys I want to do more videos like this in the future and I plan to you no not so much like reviews of movies but just appreciating movies I love and just kind of sharing that with you and also being able to share a little bit more personal side too and just I think that's fun thank you so much as always for watching as I said I want to do more videos like this and I'm looking forward to that but I also want to give a big thank you to the 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Published On :15 Aug 2022