The rose goes in the front, big guy

Bull Durham

(1988)

Funny thing happened when I first saw this. Lots of people had told me how much I'd love it, but I found it merely OK, nothing great. Then not long afterward, I saw Kevin Costner's second baseball film, Field of Dreams, and I found it beautifully poetic, one for the ages.

How to explain this pair of wrongheaded responses? Well, I could blame it on the back pain and rehabilitation that occupied virtually all of 1988 and much of 1989, but I have instead adopted the pair of films as exemplars of a much simpler principle, the Where My Head Was That Day principle. Clearly, when I first saw Field of Dreams--and I'll grant that the back situation had something to do with it, because I can remember, almost two decades later, that this was one of the first times I felt ready to sit through a movie at the theater again (and I remember what theater it was: the long-since-defunct Thunderbird, in Urbana, Ill.)--my mind and heart were wide open to the sort of cliché-ridden, sentimental slop that I was horrified to discover characterized the film when I saw it again a few years later. And for some reason, the first time I saw Bull Durham, there must have been a lockdown somewhere that prevented me for appreciating its nearly perfect portrait of the myth and reality of God's Game--and as unenthusiastic as I was the first time, it's lucky I gave it another chance a few years ago. But since I did, it has become one of my annuals, tied loosely to March or April--spring training or early in the season. And it has never again failed to have its way with me.

So I've tried to keep the WMHWTD principle ever since, particularly when I disagree with the assessment of a film by someone whose opinion I ordinarily respect. Clearly, that person's head was just in a funny place when she or he saw the film.