Sugar (2008)
Directed by Ryan Fleck
Like many young men in the Dominican Republic, 19-year-old Miguel "Sugar" Santos dreams of winning a slot on an American baseball team. Indeed, his talents as a pitcher eventually land him a slot on a single-A team in Iowa, but culture shock, racism and other curveballs threaten to turn Sugar's dream sour.
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What critics compared Sugar to
From Pride of the Yankees (1942) to Bang the Drum Slowly (1973) to Bull Durham (1988) to Sugar (2008), dramas about baseball have always been steeped in romance, whether they follow a winner on his way up or a loser on his way out.
The directors are Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, tackling their first franchise affair after a solid career making small, smart, powerful dramas (“Half Nelson” in 2006, “Sugar” in 2008, a terrific gambling flick no one saw called “Mississippi Grind” in 2015).
The movie was directed and co-written by the team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (“Half Nelson,” “Sugar,” “Mississippi Grind”), and I’m not sure if there has ever been a case of filmmakers this indie commandeering the pop-art canvas of a Marvel movie.
Directed and co-written by the husband-and-wife team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck – whose previous work, including the fine “Half Nelson” and “Sugar,” is all in the indie realm – it’s a lackluster piece of Marvelized engineering.
Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (“Sugar,” “Half Nelson”), “Captain Marvel” is famously the first Marvel Comics film centered on a female character , but otherwise it follows a plotline similar to every superhero movie: evil (in this case, the shape-shifting Skrulls) threatens, good prevails.
Despite its numerous plot points and narrative twists and turns, Captain Marvel remains consistent with Boden and Fleck’s previous character-driven films–Half Nelson, Sugar, Mississippi Grind–about solitary people coping with loss and difficulty from their past lives, stories about a “fish out of water” with a rich interiority.
In the first MCU film to headline a solo female superhero, writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson, Sugar) try too hard to mix empowerment with action poetry while depicting an alien incursion in Los Angeles and an intergalactic war and preparing for Avengers: Endgame.