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By Jared Curtis

‘The Final Season’

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After living in Iowa for most of my 27 years and playing baseball throughout my youth into high school, I was surprised that I didn’t know about Norway baseball and its tradition. But after watching “The Final Season,” I related to the story, even though the sentimental shutdown of a small town baseball program never affected me, and in the end, “The Final Season” falls flat.

The story of coach Jim Van Scoyoc (Powers Boothe) is chock full of tradition. After winning 19 championships in 23 years, Norway baseball put the small town (population 586) on the map. But a decision by the school board to close the school and merge with a larger district caused an uproar that not even their sacred coach could help. After deciding to fire the beloved coach, the school board believes that the team will destroy their season, bringing an end to its winning tradition. But they were wrong. After working as an assistant coach the previous season, Kent Stock (Sean Austin) is asked to leave his job and return to coach the team in its final season.

Star of “The Goonies,” “White Water Summer,” “Rudy” and “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, Austin has been acting for a long time, even though it doesn’t show in his performance here. He ho-hums his way through the entire film, trying to be the heart and soul of the team, though he fails to bring enthusiasm to the role.

After moving from Chicago to live with his grandparents, Mitch Akers (Michael Angarano) becomes a big fish in a small pond. Moving to Norway, which has a population as big as a Chicago city block, he mopes around causing trouble for his grandparents with the kids in town, who are gang-like and won’t allow “city boys” into their group. They argue and poke fun at each other until we find out Akers’ dad Burt (Tom Arnold), was a former Norway standout. Akers gives up his rebellious attitude and makes the team (what a surprise?).

The team wins its first game of the season, but begins to struggle like they never have before. Better players have moved on and other players aren’t interested in playing for anyone but their beloved Coach Van Scoyoc. After Coach Stock gets the boys believing in themselves, the team manages to roll into the playoffs.

Director David M. Evans knows how to direct a baseball movie. “The Sandlot” is one of the best baseball movies, even though its main focus is about a group of kids growing up and building a friendship through baseball. I think he was trying to do the same here, but reversing the formula, showing us how baseball is more important than life. Unfortunately that isn’t the case. “The Final Season” isn’t filled with an entertaining cast of misfit pre-teens; it is just some small town farm kids playing the game they love.

When a baseball movie only has a few moments of action spread over a thin story, you know you’re in trouble. Rachael Leigh Cook (“She’s All That,” “Josie and the Pussycats”) shows up as an advisor to the school board. Pushing for the merger, she quickly turns into a love interest for Coach Stock, which could have been left out all together. Cook adds nothing to film, and, among other things, slows the films pace.

Overall, I was bored with the film. The final game was intriguing, but after looking into the story, I knew the outcome. A great moment, however, came before the team got on the bus to play in the championship game when players grabbed a little bit of dirt from their home field and carried it to the game. After taking the field, they dropped their sacred Norway dirt onto the field, giving them the power of home field advantage. Still, when a moment like this is the best part of a baseball story, the director and the film have struck out. CV

‘Rendition’

Movie Trailer

After overblown stories of walkouts by critics during its Toronto film festival debut, “Rendition” proves to have enough substance, momentum and drama to validate its entertainment value as a politically charged thriller.

Reese Witherspoon plays Isabella, the pregnant wife of Egyptian American Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), a chemical engineer who gets abducted by U.S. Special Forces on suspicion of terrorism upon his return from a business convention in South Africa. El-Ibrahimi is secreted to a North African dungeon where local police kingpin Abasi (Yigal Naor) gleefully tortures him with the tacit assistance of CIA cat’s paw Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal) who survived the suicide bombing that gave rise to El-Ibrahimi’s abduction.

Isabella discovers duty-free charges on her husband’s credit card that refute the airline’s claim that El-Ibrahimi was never on his return flight, and visits former college friend Alan (Peter Sarsgaard) in Washington D.C. where he now works as an aide to Senator Hawkins (Alan Arkin). Running parallel to Isabella’s quest to locate her missing husband, and the barbarous abuse he suffers abroad, is the back story of the suicide bombing, of which El-Ibrahimi is suspected of being involved, as it relates to Abasi’s romantically confused daughter who mistakenly dates a terrorist.

Audiences concerned that “Rendition” errs on the side of bleeding-heart liberals can take solace in the film’s willingness to cast blame for the origin of “extraordinary rendition,” as part of U.S. government policy, on former President Clinton. Humanitarians will find encouragement in the film’s scathing tone that takes aim at the very nature of torture, secret or otherwise, as an impotent method for discovering facts. Gyllenhaal’s increasingly sensitive CIA agent does some impressive thematic dart throwing by quoting Shakespeare on the subject in the third act, lest anyone forget that the subject of torture has been well chewed over by stronger minds in history.

Suspicion is a powerful deceiver that turns a quick circle back to its creator. At the helm of the CIA rendition program is Corrine Whitman (Meryl Streep) a brainwashed black widow ideologue whose views on terrorism prevention ironically align with Abasi’s limited sense of justice. Director Gavin Hood (“Tsotsi”) does a serviceable job with upstart screenwriter Kelley Sane’s written-on-the-wall script. And although supporting cast members Arkin and Streep suffer from underwritten roles, the actors appropriately emphasize their characters’ egos as guiding beacons of damning hubris. They are people who live in self-promoted private hells that they are only too happy to impose others in the form of living nightmares.

“Rendition” comes out in a season of R-word film titles (see “Redacted” and “Reservation Road”) set to assault cinema marquees with bloody threads of alliteration. What these films share in common is the death of young people by mechanized forces. Cars, bullets and bombs dismantle callow human life with an abstract force and logic that most people can comprehend, if not rationalize, in a way that lets those responsible off the hook. “Rendition” is the best of the three movies because it’s a humanitarian film rather than a political one even if that subtext is present. It might not rise to the complexity of “Syriana” but “Rendition” isn’t a flimsy movie either. CV

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