Review of A League of Their Own (1992) by Niloo R — 21 Jul 2014

I don't really know what to think about this film - I mean it's supposed to be feminist, dealing with women's baseball and all, but I felt like underneath its facade of feminism it had a lot anti-feminist ideas/themes.

For one thing, the protagonist, who was beautiful and smart and good and the best baseball player of them all (yea ... that's feminist ...) didn't even want to play baseball, because she wanted to go home to her husband and have kids and be a wife.

And all the other characters, as soon as they found a man, quit baseball and went off to be married wives. It felt like the women were using baseball as a way to attract male attention or as a substitute for men.

Like even the way the film portrayed them "being successful" was by having guys give them flowers and telling them they're pretty - I mean is that the only measure of success for a woman - what men think of her? Despite having the intention of being feminist, and being made by a woman, this film implicitly represented everything feminism stands against.

Moreover, the main protagonists - the sisters - were the most unlikable and annoying main characters I have ever seen. Both of them were completely one dimensional - the one beautiful sister who is good at everything and is completely moral, but has no passion for any of it and just wants to be a mom, and a younger, less attractive sister, who's always whining about how everyone likes the other sister more.

I mean through out the whole film, we see no instance of them being sisters and actually giving off a sense of family, until the very end where the good beautiful sister lets the poor ugly sister win the final game, because she is just so good and moral, and also because she doesn't give a shit about baseball, even though she's practically the best baseball player there ever was.

We get no insight into either character, we get no psychology, or any sense of humanism from either of them, beyond their initial, one-dimension personas. Having said all this, I still thought the film was pretty entertaining, and tom hanks was great as always.

Also, ironically, the side characters (rosie o'donnel and madonna in particular) were actually pretty well developed, and much more relatable and likable than the main characters. Over all, the film was better than I expected because it wasn't a total bore, but still lacked substance.