Terence Rafferty of the New York Times writes about the baseball film festival at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Paragraphs like this must mean that it will be loaded with baseball fun!
What's striking about "The Natural" and "Field of Dreams" is how insistent they are on apotheosizing the national pastime, on treating the game as the stuff of a national mythology. They're less about baseball than they are about an idea of baseball, about a sport that is no longer itself but a theater in which the great American drama of aspiration is acted out over and over again in soft focus and slow motion, to the accompaniment of music triumphal enough to make Wagner (Richard, not Honus) blush.
I often drop the word "apotheosizing" into casual conversation.
Friend: Hey, do you want to go out to eat at Joe's! I hear the food is great!
Bob: Now there's no need for apotheosizing that restaurant's food.
Any baseball film festival without 'The Bad News Bears' is run by booger eatin' morons. And if I wanted apotheosizing I'd go to a an apothecary. You could look it up.
MoMA has a lot of art that's from prior to the 1980s. It could be a case of whatever films they could get. Or whatever the curator thought would draw a crowd. I didn't check, but is there an additional charge to go see these films? Beyond the $20 it costs to get in?
You do not have to pay the museum's admission price to see films at MoMA. Film admission is separate and is about $10 I think.
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