Pun Salad

I should mention, in case it's not absolutely clear, that those star ratings for the movies I watch are entirely based on my personal reaction. The correlation between a movie's objective quality and my personal reaction is not tight.

This is one example. Fire in Babylon is (supposedly) a high-quality documentary, nominated for a British Independent Film Award. The critics loved it (an 87% score at Rotten Tomatoes). But I could barely keep my eyes open. I'm not sure I did keep my eyes open.

Problem number one: it's a documentary about cricket. This is widely thought of as a "sport", although I've always kind of suspected that it's instead a widespread elaborate hoax that the people involved are pulling on the rest of us. (Kind of like the French "language".) The movie did nothing to increase my appreciation of cricket. It was incomprehensible before, and is incomprehensible now. Brief clips of the game are scattered throughout the documentary, but most of them seemed to be the same: a guy throwing a cricket ball at another guy's chin.

It's about the West Indies cricket team of the 70s-80s, the team comprised of players from multiple nations; they competed and won against other teams from other countries. This was a big deal, we're told. And that's mainly the thing: we're told. The documentary is big on talking heads. And reggae. And, just sayin', I think some of these guys are heavily into the ganja.

The racial bit is played up, because all the West Indies players were black. There's also an anti-imperialism theme, because the West Indies are ex-colonies. This is tedious. We're talking about stuff that happened 40 years after Jesse Owens kicked Nazi butt in the 1936 Olympics. 30 years after Jackie Robinson and Woody Strode. It's somehow a big deal that black athletes finally made their mark in cricket? Well, I guess to some people it was.