Spent part of the second day of the Chinese New Year holiday watching Bull Durham with the Tim Robbins / Kevin Costner commentary on. Among the things I learnt from the commentary:
- Kevin Costner has a man-crush on director/writer Ron Shelton - he couldn’t stop talking about how great Ron was.
- After all these years, Tim Robbins still sounds like he’s besotted with Susan Sarandon. Aww.
- More to the point, Costner thinks he never quite got that great speech near the beginning (“Well, I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman’s back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch…”) right, but that the words are just so good that it didn’t matter. He may have a point. (Here’s the full speech.)
- Robbins hated that he couldn’t get his breaking ball to break like a major leaguer, but Costner rightfully pointed out that it was impressive that he even got it to break - the major leaguers have been throwing them forever.
- Baseball players like to come up to both of them and quote random scenes from the movie, often befuddling them. Damn lollygaggers, they should’ve memorised it by now!
Such a good baseball movie. Bull Durham is quite possibly my favourite baseball movie, and one that’s nice to dip into every now and then, especially when spring training is coming. It never tries to be grandiose, and Annie Savoy is just a great, great character.