1918, the baseball team Boston Red Sox won the World Series for the
last time, then the teamowner sold its ace-up-the-sleeve Babe Ruth to the
New York Yankees to produce the musical No, No Nanette. Since then,
the Red Sox didn't even come in striking distance of the World title, a
phenomenon that was eventually labelled The Curse of the Bambino.
It's
2004, and Tony Tapler has just been left by his girlfriend because he's
such a big Red Sox fan that he forgot her birthday over it. To fill this
void, Tapler wants to end the Curse of the Bambino and lead the Red
Sox to the World series title.
But how does he want to do it, being in
no way affiliated to the team as he is?
He wants to hire Bill Buckner,
the man who in the eyes of many actually messed up the last chance of the
Red Sox to the World title in the 1980's, to star in his off-Broadway
production of No, No Nanette of course ...
Out for
Buckner is a fun, light-hearted half-hour film about an amateur
theatre group that makes up their lack of talent with an abundance of
enthusiasm and their belief in a higher goal. The film is decently paced,
layered with some rather uplifting tunes from the musical (in particular Tea
for Two and I Want to be Happy), and quite funny to watch - but rather honestly, for people like me who
don't have the first idea of baseball history and not an ounce of love for
the sport as such, it's rather hard to grasp the emotional undercurrents
of the story. Sure, the whole movie isn't about baseball as such and only
features very few actual baseball scenes, but the all the motivations of
the narrative are rooted in the sport and thus someone not at all familiar
with it has problems understanding the film's deeper meanings, is message.
Robots and rats,
demons and potholes, cuddly toys and shopping mall Santas,
love and death and everything in between, Tales to Chill Your Bones to is all of that.
Tales to Chill Your Bones to -
a collection of short stories and mini-plays ranging from the horrific to the darkly humourous,
from the post-apocalyptic to the weirdly romantic,
tales that will give you a chill and maybe a chuckle,
all thought up by the twisted mind of screenwriter and film reviewer Michael Haberfelner.
Tales to Chill Your Bones to
the new anthology by Michael Haberfelner