I’m a big fan of jazz, baseball, and history so when I heard about the 2007 movie “American Pastime” that is based on a real story, deals with the internment of the West Coast Japanese during World War II, and deals with baseball and jazz, I was hooked. What more could I ask than to have several interests addressed in the same movie. Unfortunately, the movie did not live up to its potential.
The premise of the movie is that one group of the Japanese who were interred in Utah were a number of Japanese who loved baseball who were guarded by a group of men who made up a local, class-A baseball team. After years of tension between the two groups they arrange to play a baseball game against each other. During the game they gain some respect for each other, but the movie isn’t spoiled by overly saccharine forgiveness and sweetness at the end of the movie.
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. . . Aaron Yoo plays Lyle Nomura, the male lead in the movie. Lyle is a young man, maybe eighteen or nineteen who has received a scholarship to play baseball as a picture, but the war has interrupted his career. Lyle is bitter that he and his family have been interred so he turns his back on baseball and concentrates on his other passion, jazz. He plays saxophone. This leads him to meet Katie Burrell, played by Sarah Drew, who is about the same age and plays piano. They fall in love but are forbidden by Katie’s father (Gary Cole), who is also a camp guard and star of the town baseball team with aspirations of being called up by the New York Yankees, to see each other. Read the rest of my Review Stream Review
