As always, I’m so thankful to Disney for sending me to see Million Dollar Arm with my family. It’s always nice to attend without having to pay, however, as always, I’m going to give my opinions – the good, and the bad. Everything here is 100 percent my own! Let’s dig in, shall we?
What’s my favorite part about Million Dollar Arm, besides the fact that Jon Hamm is in it? The fact that the character he plays in the movie is a LONG ISLAND boy!
Should you go see Million Dollar Arm
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The kids were bored to tears within minutes of the movie’s first scene. My son perked up at one part, where they are in India and there’s lots of music. As we all know, The Boy loves his music. Little Miss laughed at a couple of parts, but wasn’t into it. Basically, if you’ve got kids ages seven and five, don’t take them to see it.
My husband. He loves baseball. He loves history. He was also bored within minutes. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a fantastic leading female he could enjoy on the screen like I could enjoy Mr. Jon Hamm. No offense to Lake Bell, who is a beautiful woman. She’s just not someone my husband is into. I mean, he’s married to me….so he’s into curves. She doesn’t really have them. In any event, he was bored with the movie. It didn’t have enough baseball in it. Which he is totally right about, for a sports movie about baseball…….it didn’t have a whole lot of baseball in it.
Now me? I liked it. Did I love it? Eh. I could wait to see it on television when it shows up on one of my many movie channels. I enjoyed parts of it. There’s comedy thrown into a lot of it, but the most amazing parts of the movie are the moments Hamm’s character spends with the boys he recruited to become Major League Baseball players. The messages of putting others first, and not always putting money and work first, are amazing ones. I’ve many people in my life I adore, and wish this kind of message would get through to them.
Money makes the world go around, sure. If you want to make a lot of money, you have to work hard. If you want a big house, expensive cars, and lots of fancy trips to spend money going on, you have to work hard. Just because you work hard, doesn’t mean you become an “asshole.” It doesn’t mean you treat the people in your life poorly. When you pluck two young men from their homes, and their families, and bring them to America to be baseball players – you want to show them that you’re invested in them as people. PEOPLE. Let them know they are people first, and ball players second.
If you walk away from this movie with nothing else, at least walk away thinking about all the amazing transformational moments Hamm’s character labored through. He created a family once he got out of his own way. It would be great if more people could figure out how to put people first, money second. The world would be such the better place if each human being treated fellow human beings with courtesy, respect, and compassion.
Million Dollar Arm is far from a “baseball” movie. It’s really about the journey a man went through, and how much better a life he created for not just himself, but two young men who wanted more for their families. Two young men who wanted to go to America and be able to improve the lives of their families. It wasn’t even to improve their own lives as individuals, it was about who was left back at home in India.
I doubt it’ll win an Oscar for anyone involved, but man, who doesn’t love a movie with a shitload of amazing messages of hope, love, family, and faith?
