Sugar came out in 2009 to excellent reviews and relatively small audiences. Somehow, despite the fact that baseball movies are something of an obsession with me, I only just got around to seeing it – and, wow. It’s an understated movie, but never uninteresting, beautifully made, and more honest about the game than all but a handful of films have ever been. I liked it significantly more than Field of Dreams and about five million times more than The Natural, and though I can’t imagine that Sugar will ever get the kind of mass audience that those movies did, I still hope it manages to stick in the cultural consciousness.

In its outlines, the story is a familiar one to serious baseball fans: kid from the Dominican Republic signs with a major league team, struggles to deal with culture shock and professional competition in a small minor-league city. We’ve all read articles and interviews with international players that fit that profile, and beyond that, nothing hugely dramatic happens in Sugar — except that this story in and of itself is, really, a pretty dramatic one, even if dozens or hundreds of players a year go through it. And while I don’t want to give away the ending, I will just say that it feels honest, and very refreshingly so for a sports movie. There is no Big Game that will make or break everything, no villains, no inspiring speech, just a series of events and decisions that together make a story.

The movie opens at the just-barely-fictional Kansas City Knights baseball academy in Boca Chica, Dominican Republic. It establishes the rhythms of the place, which is part school and mostly training facility – the camaraderie and competition between the players, the strict coaches, and life on the weekends at home in the town, where Sugar (Algenis Perez Soto, doing a good job in his only American film role to date) lives with his family. The scenes in the DR were some of my favorites, for their laid-back slice-of-life feel: peeling, brightly painted buildings, beaches, friends playing dominos, stray dogs, music, dancing, beer.

Sugar and an academy teammate finally get their long awaited call to Los Estados, attending spring training with the Kansas City Knights (who I assume were named after the New York Knights, Roy Hobbs’ team in The Natural). He and his Dominican teammates are taken under the wing of Jorge, a slightly older player who’s been slipping down the prospect lists after a knee injury – and who explains to them that you never drink the beer in the minibar, gives Sugar his old I.D. so he can get into bars, and takes the newcomers to a diner where, following his lead, they all order French toast. It takes weeks before Sugar, incredibly sick of French toast, figures out how to order eggs.

More than anything else, the movie does an excellent job of dramatizing the cultural disconnect and language barrier. There are no villains – some people are nicer than others, some are less helpful, but no one is evil. When Sugar gets assigned to the Knights’ single-A team in rural Iowa, he stays with a local couple, older farmers who live in the middle of cornfields. They are religious, reserved, extremely different from anything Sugar’s experienced before, and he feels deeply isolated living there – but they mean well. The movie is as much about finding a community in a new place as it is succeeding at baseball, and suggests that the latter may not be possible without the former, anyway.

If I had one issue, it’s that Sugar himself is a little bit of a cipher, as a character. I think partly this is by design – the character did not finish high school, has thought about almost nothing besides baseball for years, and once he reaches the U.S. is restricted by language and cultural differences – he’s quiet because he so often doesn’t know what to say or how to say it. Sugar’s favorite player is Robinson Cano; he’s never heard of Roberto Clemente. He loosens up a bit with the other Spanish speakers on the team, but even so the details of his personality come across only vaguely. Perhaps that makes it easier for the character to stand in for so many real-life immigrants.

The whole movie is excellent, but it’s the end that sets it apart for me – realistic and wistful without being depressing. He doesn’t make it to the Majors and throw a perfect game his first start out, and he doesn’t end up a drug addict with a life in ruins. The movie’s restraint doesn’t make it the least bit boring – on the contrary, because it rings true, it’s that much more engrossing.

Bags Grooves to Matisse at the Modern.

Danny Meyer is one of the most successful and well-respected chefs in New York. Most everything he touches turns to gold. But here is a good piece in the Atlantic Monthly on how Meyer deals with closing a restaurant.

[Photo Credit: The New York Observer]

Flipped.

This is how Diane’s heart stays warm on a cold day:

Dig this piece on Laurel Nakadate in the New York Times.

Here’s her website. Houba.

There’s a piece on Bobby D the New Yorker in the L.A. Times Magazine. Check it outski.

Parsley and Pancetta salad. I’m a sucker for parsley, guess it’s the French in me.

This looks worth trying…from Saveur.

Over at the Times, Janet Maslin reviews a new biography of Bobby Fischer by Frank Brady:

“Endgame” is a rapt, intimate book, greatly helped by its author’s long acquaintance with Fischer, who died in 2008, and his deep grounding in the world of chess. Mr. Brady was the founding editor of Chess Life, the official magazine of the United States Chess Federation, but his book is entirely accessible to readers who have never heard of that publication. Nor does “Endgame” require any prior knowledge of chess luminaries, chess strategies (no charts here) or chess tournament etiquette. It requires no expertise to appreciate a one-liner like the one the 19-year-old Fischer delivered after a visit to a brothel in Curaçao. “Chess is better,” Fischer said.

Mr. Brady, a biographer dangerously drawn to megalomania (he has also written books about Aristotle Onassis and Orson Welles), takes a demystifying approach to Fischer’s eccentricities. He sees the person behind the bluster, and he presents that person in a reasonably realistic light. Mr. Brady also makes use of unusually good source material, from Fischer’s own unpublished manuscript to 50 years’ worth of his own conversations with Fischer’s associates, mentors and relatives. Note the omission of the word “friends.” Fischer never had them.

Fischer was a genius as well as a madman. Do yourself a favor and check out Bill Nack’s terrific SI piece on his search for the reclusive Fischer: “To find him, to see him, had become a kind of crazy and delirious obsession, the kind of insanity that has hounded other men in search of, say, the Loch Ness monster.”

[Photo Credit: Times On-Line]

Caught this on Saturday at the Times Square subway station. Dig Susan Keser’s website and listen to her play:

Game One: The Great Rivalry Continues…Nagurski, Nitschke, Butkus, Bears, Brats, Brews…You gotta love it.

Chow Down:

Word to Pete Rock:

[Photo Credit: How Cook Like a Wolf]

Cold Sunday morning in New York. Take it away, Johnny:

Or here’s the original by Robert Service:

Brought to you by our pal, Matt B.

Bags goes to the Modern:

Peep this fun site, The Monkeys You Ordered (and thanks go to Brad for pointing it out):

Our dog is f****** huge.

Tonight at the Walter Reade Theater, a slept-on Jeff Bridges vehicle featuring John Huston:

I can’t make it, dang it, but man, it should be a good time.

Bowie Friday:

More Snow.

The beat goes on.

The great Charles Addams:

I went to Fatty Crab for the first time last week. My brother and I hit the Upper West Side version and we really enjoyed the food. But our waiter was overbearing–sell!, sell!, sell!–and the food was not cheap.

Then, a few nights ago, I had dinner at  Lotus of Siam, the new Thai place on 5th Avenue just off 9th Street. I went with a pal and we arrived early, at 6:00. The host snarled when we told him that we didn’t have a reservation.

“Did that guy just snarl at us?” I said to my friend. “The dining room is half-empty and he”

It was a chilly way to start the evening. Then our waitress…oh, the waitress. “She’s young,” my pal said. I tried to sympathize even though she was either overwhelmed or simply not especially interested in her job. But at $26 an entree, man, I want the service to be welcoming, informative, at least competent. I can deal with rude, like if an old Jewish waiter spills soup on you and then balls you out, but aloof, I can’t abide.

The food was yummy but the portions were small and it was not cheap. Worst of all, I didn’t leave the place feeling happy. I left longing for SriPraPhai in Queens, for a place where the food is great, the prices reasonable and the atmosphere something less than smug.

From our man in Japan, MrOkJazzToyko: