If you’re going to crib from Stephen King’s “Stand By Me,” then you’d better do a good job of re-tooling it. Thankfully, and miraculously, David M. Evans directs one of the best coming of age dramedies in cinematic history. “The Sandlot” is a film that takes the “Stand By Me” premise and adds a baseball-centric theme to the story that becomes the crux of everything the film is built on. It’s the reason characters are able to connect, it saves characters from immediate danger, and it’s the macguffin for the entire movie. “The Sandlot” thankfully doesn’t shove the baseball Americana themes down the audiences throat, but instead focuses on the characters featured in the film as actual characters with complexities and flaws that decide whether they succeed or not.
Mill Creek delivers a dozen family friendly films for anyone looking to wile away a weekend on light G rated television movie fare, for a low price. “The Best Bad Thing” features George Takei about a young girl named Rinko who discovers the nature of her Japanese heritage during the depression. Never quite feeling American or Japanese enough, she learns about her culture and comes of age and her culture. “Bonjour Timothy” about a young boy named Timothy who is tasked with hosting a foreign exchange student named Michael.
I quite like the premise of “Hell Comes to Hollywood.” Create a short horror story that in some way involves Hollywoodland and its devices. In that general framework, Eric Miller’s compendium of various horror stories from a cadre of actual Hollywood screenwriters and television writers makes Hollywood feel so bleak and hopeless. There are no happy endings in any of the stories presented here, and thankfully there isn’t a bad story to be read either.