Sugar (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, 2008): USA

Reviewed by Aleksandra Mraovic. Viewed at The Santa Barbara Film Festival.

This is a movie for those who are tired of seeing documentaries and movies that leave you confused over details. Sugar is an entertaining movie for all ages and a perfect movie to see with your loved ones at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. You can relate to the film if you have ever been in a country where you don´t know the language and everything is different from where your home is. You will laugh and find it amusing.

Through the movie we follow Miguel ”Sugar” Santos, a Dominican Boy, with a dream of becoming a baseball player for the New York Yankees. This movie does not only show us what it takes to become a famous baseball player but it also has a deeper meaning. He struggles with a different kind of culture than he is used to and learns that you don´t get a lot of chances in life to succeed.

The movie starts of in the Dominican Republic where boys are trained to become baseball players and with hope of someday being seen by agents that will recruit them to the big American leagues. Their families live under poor conditions and by becoming big baseball players they can earn a lot of money to support them. An American agent sees Sugar and teaches him how to through a screwball which helps him to improve his technique. He leaves his girlfriend behind in Dominican Republic and meets girls with different mentality. During the movie you get to see that baseball is not his only passion.

The directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck created a movie that many can relate to and the audience is entertained through the whole movie. You get to know Sugar ´s (Algenis Perez Soto) character and his background really well and you hope that he fulfills his dream. There are a lot of movies out there that follow the same story whether it is about baseball or dancing but even though you think you know what is going to happen, the directors have made the movie surprisingly different. Whether you find it good or bad is up to you, but you will ask yourself in the end if it all was worth it? The movie leaves you hanging and wondering which can be the directors’ way of making the movie feel less like a Hollywood movie where everything is predictable.

The movie is interesting and whether it leaves you disappointed or satisfied is up to you. In my opinion, real life is not a fairytale and neither should movies be. The movie is amusing and it´s fun to see how he learns the language and gets familiar with the culture.