By Brian Gunn

When Alex asked me to guest host a segment of Bronx Banter, it seemed only natural that I should write about movies. See, I may have grown up a Cardinals fan in the suburbs of St. Louis, and Alex may have grown up a Yanks fan in New York, but when it comes to movies we’re from the same neighborhood. We’re both nuts about Bob Altman, Pauline Kael, and Robert Towne, and we’ve both seen Hollywood from the inside out, each of us working in the film business at various times (just like another All-Baseball scribe, Jon Weisman).

I originally wanted to use this space to talk about some of my favorite baseball movies (Bull Durham, Bad News Bears, even that almost-masterpiece Cobb), as well as some of my least favorite baseball movies – like, say, Field of Dreams. But I didn’t feel right talking about Field of Dreams because I hadn’t seen it since it came out 15 years ago. It’s possible, I thought, that it had improved over time. After all, the film was made for guys like me – yuppies in their mid-30s, about to have families of their own, maybe feeling guilty about their relationship with their dads. If I was going to write about it I needed to see it again, hopefully with an older and wiser perspective. So I rented it on DVD, thinking maybe I’ll actually like it after all these years