The Long Game: Hole in one!

The Long Game (2024) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG, for mild profanity, racial slurs and brief rude material

Available via: Netflix and other streaming services

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.28.24

We’ve enjoyed an impressive run of fact-based sports sagas during the past year — Nyad, The Boys in the Boat and Young Woman and the Sea leap to mind — but in terms of amazing actual events, this one’s the best.

 

As JB (Jay Hernandez, standing center) quietly waits, a clearly surprised Frank
(Dennis Quaid) absorbs the passion that these boys possess, for the game of golf...
and then agrees to coach their fledgling high school team.

Director Julio Quintana’s well mounted drama ticks all the boxes: engaging characters, well played by a strong cast; a story that focuses equally on relationships, racism and distressing history; and a reminder that passion, when properly applied, can move mountains.

And — oh, yes — it’s also about golf: defined so superbly in 2000’s The Legend of Bagger Vance as “a game that cannot be won, only played.”

 

Quintana and co-scripters Paco Farias and Jennifer C. Stetson based their story on Humberto G. Garcia’s 2012 nonfiction book, Mustang Miracle ... and they didn’t need to change much. The actual events are cinematic all by themselves.

 

The year is 1956, the setting Del Rio, Texas. World War II veteran JB Pena (Jay Hernandez) and his wife, Lucy (Jaina Lee Ortiz) have just moved into town; he has accepted a job as superintendent of the local (segregated) high school. He also loves to golf, and hopes to become a member of the local San Felipe Country Club.

 

Alas, sponsorship by close friend and war buddy Frank Mitchell (Dennis Quad) isn’t enough to overcome the club’s color barrier, or the patronizing attitudes of Judge Milton Cox (Brett Cullen) and club director Don Glenn (Richard Robichaux), who function as this story’s racist villains. 

 

“I’m afraid there’s just no place for you here,” JB is told.

 

Both Cullen and Robichaux are persuasively snobbish and condescending, to a degree that makes one want to reach into the screen and smack them.

 

Of course, the club’s white members have no trouble hiring Latino high school kids as caddies, as long as they “know their place.” Toe the line, and they might even get a five-cent tip.

 

The War with Grandpa: Scorched-earth tactics

The War with Grandpa (2020) • View trailer

2.5 stars. Rated PG, for mild rude humor

By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.9.20

Robert Kimmel Smith’s 1984 young reader’s novel is a parable about the perils of escalation, when a grieving widower moves in with his daughter’s family, forcing 10-year-old Peter to surrender his beloved bedroom and move into the attic.

 

Believing they've declared a truce during his young granddaughter's Christmas-themed
birthday party, Ed (Robert De Niro, right) offers a cookie to his grandson Peter
(Oakes Fegley).

The boy wants his room back.

 

The subsequent “declaration of war” involves gentle, low-level pranks, such as wrongly set alarm clocks and hidden slippers. Grandpa, initially distressed, reluctantly responds in kind; Peter’s toothbrush and schoolbooks go missing. Realizing that the situation threatens to escalate uncomfortably, Grandpa has a heart-to-heart with Peter, using Pearl Harbor to demonstrate that, ultimately, both sides lose in a war.

 

Although not entirely convinced, Peter orchestrates one more prank before realizing that he has, indeed, gone too far. He and Grandpa reconcile, put their heads together, and devise a win-win solution that pleases the entire family.

 

You won’t be surprised to learn that Hollywood “goes too far” with this big-screen adaptation, opening today at operational movie theaters. Director Tim Hill frequently yields to exaggerated slapstick, while scripters Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember have turned many of Smith’s mild-mannered characters into two-dimensional burlesques.

 

The result is an overly broad comedy that only barely retains the essential moral of Smith’s book.

 

Yes, Hill’s film is laugh-out-loud funny at times; more often than not, though, we’re dealing with the sort of destructive overkill that turned so many 1970s Disney comedies into eye-rolling disasters.

 

Ed (Robert De Niro) leaves his home reluctantly, not wanting to surrender his independence. The reference to his departed wife is retained via a brief, wistful glance at a photograph, and thereafter ceases to be a plot point. Ed joins the household containing his daughter Sally (Uma Thurman), her husband Arthur (Rob Riggle), and their three children: teenage daughter Mia (Laura Marano), Peter (Oakes Fegley) and 4-year-old Jennifer (Poppy Gagnon).

 

Ed is given Peter’s room; the latter is bumped upstairs, into the attic. (Mind you, every kid I knew — myself included — would have killed to have an attic room. But to each his own, I guess.) The situation might have remained stable, except that Peter is goaded into action against the “room robber” by his sixth-grade posse: Emma (T.J. McGibbon), Billy (Juliocesar Chavez) and Steve (Isaac Kragten).