Recently, Amazon remade an ancient female inspirational movie "Red Pink League" into an American drama, and received a high score of 9.2 on Douban.
In fact, before the remake, the original film, which was released in 1992, was already very brilliant.
Directed by the famous female director Penny Marshall, Cass gathers Tom Hanks, Gina Davis, Lori Petty, Madonna and other well-known actors, with a strong cast.
In the movie version, the Dolly sisters, played by Gina and Lori, have impressed many people. The story takes place during World War II, when they changed their lives because of baseball, killing all sides in a male-dominated sports project, inspiring generations of women to break free from the shackles and realize themselves.
But due to the limitations of the times, the end of the movie version of the story also stops here, and after the return of men from the battlefield, the women's baseball league has become no longer important. Dolly also returns to the family and becomes a legendary presence. Many of the more poignant topics, the film does not do more in-depth exploration.
30 years have passed, the drama version has also made a drastic adaptation when it was restarted, in addition to the inspirational framework of the overall women's baseball team unchanged, the character relationships and story lines in the play have been completely arranged, bolder and more profound.
During World War II, men went to war because of the war, and there was a labor shortage in the rear area, as did sports events, which also gave women the opportunity to move from home to other professional fields.
In order to keep the baseball game running, the Baseball League decided to recruit girls from all over the United States to form a women's baseball team, which was also the predecessor of the National Women's Professional Baseball League.
Carson, the heroine of the play, is one of the girls dug up by the scouts. Before that, she was just an ordinary housewife, her husband was fighting on the front line, and she ran to play baseball without her family.
As soon as Carson appeared on the scene, in order to catch the train to the audition, he ran to the bra and was side-eyed; Unlike many of the housewives of her time, she loved to play baseball and read at the same time, because she watched Jane Austen on the train, expressed her own unique opinions, and was regarded as a neurotic by the old lady next door.
In that era, such a woman was destined to be incompatible with everyone, but it was also destined to be extraordinary.
The people who participated in the selection with her were also ordinary girls with very different personalities. There are inseparable sisters Greta and Joe, powerful bowler Lupe, Jace who is fined and also wears pants, 17-year-old Cuban girl who can only speak Spanish, Blonde Mabel, timid girl Shirley, etc...
Unlike the one-line story of the film version, the drama version is divided into a two-line narrative, one is the counterattack of the women's baseball team under the leadership of Carson, and the other is the story of the black girl Max who constantly breaks through the obstacles and pursues the baseball dream after missing the women's baseball team.
Both story lines are centered on baseball, but the theme of the narrative is not only to depict the passionate inspiration of women's sports, but also to explore the issues of racial segregation that the film version failed to unfold.
It can be said that the difference from the previous women's sports inspirational films is that "Red Pink League" moved the group that was dismissed by the times as an outlier to the center of the stage, women are the only protagonists of this film, and even the most important male coach in the film version quit coaching less than 3 episodes at the beginning of the series, which is a legendary story built entirely by the mutual help and growth of girls.
In order to present the real situation of this women's team, the series uses lengthy foreshadowing in the first few episodes to tell us the various prejudices and opinions about them in that era.
The male owners of the Baseball League formed this women's team with various stereotypes of the opposite sex, so they specially customized a pink miniskirt baseball uniform for the Peaches, did not wear any protective gear, and specially asked someone to make up for them before the game to attract male audiences.
In addition, with the various etiquette of the lady, these female baseball players are also required not to speak dirty words and not to tease the audience, and the big guys want to build them into an ornamental baseball team with female charm.
And the coach Dave, who was sent to them, was also dismissive of this group of female baseball players. In the beginning, the female baseball players were full of reverence for the former star bowler, expecting Dave to take them to the Blue Sox, but Dave never treated this group of female baseball players as a professional player, and did not believe that female baseball players could play professional games and cope with this errand.
Because they always lost, the players strongly asked Dave to take them to train and adjust the strategy of the game, but Dave was furious after being challenged to authority, and he gave up in anger, which made the team have a real turnaround.
The protagonist of the play, Carson, took up the responsibility of captain and coach at this time, unlike Dave's paternalistic coaching, Carson fully respected the personality of each team member, encouraged them to exert their potential and strengths, and trained within their own capabilities, she let this team that was not optimistic about the team refuel the morale, so that this group of girls who left the family and gambled desperately realized their personal value here.
The power of mutual help of women is reflected in this play all the time, they exist in the way of friendship, the way of their predecessors, and they also exist in the way of love.
The relationship between the heroine Carson and Greta is emotional. As a country girl, Carson, who first came to the big city, was also cautious and timid at first, and she married early, but when her husband wrote a letter to return home from the battlefield, she chose to flee to play baseball, and the guilt caused by this impulse has always plagued her.
In contrast to Carson's restrained conservatism, Greta is warm, mature and charismatic. In the beginning, she took good care of Carson, teaching Carson to recognize his desires and pursue his true self, and it was she who encouraged Carson to seize this opportunity to teach her how to believe in herself and become a good coach.
And Carson's presence has also changed a lot in Greta. Greta seems bold and bold, but she is always cautious, arming herself into the appearance that men like, and catering to male aesthetics as her own umbrella. And Carson's sincerity and heat also make him let go of that uneasiness and dare to face his true self.
Carson and Greta's emotional relationship is also a mentor, but more often like a soul mate, changing each other's lives.
Equally touching was Carson's relationship with Max, a black girl.
After the black girl loses the baseball team because of racial discrimination, Carson and Max become friends who keep each other's secrets because of an accident. In front of Carson, Max can truly reveal herself, she is not as easy as Carson to achieve her dreams, the reality that black people can not join the baseball team, her mother's desire to let her inherit the barbershop, and the obstacles to joining the black professional team as a woman, so that her dream path is far away.
In the play, there are very few scenes of them talking, but every time, Carson and Max encourage each other, with simple catch-up practice, help each other find the original intention of playing baseball, and bravely move forward.
Although Max's line is suspected of political correctness, compared to the story of Carson's counterattack, this story line is the most attractive and most delicate and profound in the play.
Around the character of Max, the screenwriter also arranged a love line and a friendship line for her. But in fact, Max's growth story and her search for self-definition, the struggle against the social expectations placed on her by the family and the outside world, are the core of the story.
You can find a lot of resonance in Max's story that transcends the times and still has reference significance in the present. For example, the transformation of her relationship with her mother.
Max's mother runs a local barbershop and has a thriving business and a good reputation. In an era when blacks were still facing racial discrimination, it was not easy for a black woman to have her own independent business and run a good family, so the mother desperately wanted her daughter to inherit the barbershop, and she did not agree with her daughter to play baseball not because she did not support her daughter's dream, but because she hoped that her daughter could live safely and decently in this unfriendly society.
Max knows his mother's thoughts, but she is obsessed with this unrealistic dream, and even alienates her closest girlfriends and family members.
It is precisely in this place that the most authentic place of the series is that Max's journey to the self must go through such a stage of drilling the horns, she once thought that baseball was her whole and the proof of herself.
But when she constantly hit the wall in the process of chasing her dreams, and after constantly failing, she eased up and began to put the baseball aside for a while, to experience the real life, to change her image within her inner scale, to understand her aunt's life, to support her friends, and to reconcile with her mother...
After re-examining the life around him, Max discovered that the self is not a one-dimensional baseball alone, but a self made up of every moment of self with the people and things he loves. When she is no longer so persistent, but this freedom finally gives her the opportunity to enter the black professional baseball team and pursue her dream of success.
In addition to the vivid portrayal of the main characters, the show is easily reminiscent of the American drama "Women's Prison" in that it is also a series with excellent depictions of group portraits.
The supporting characters of the story are not all tool people, each one is real and agile, with their own unique personality and moods. For example, it seems harsh and rigid, but in fact, she silently guards the female housekeeper aunts of the team members;
Lupe, a stubborn bowler who has been at odds with Carson, is finally found to be a single mother, and it is she who gives a Cuban girl who can only speak Spanish the feeling of being in a foreign country;
There is also Max's cute fat girlfriend, who likes comics, puts all the interesting things around him into the pen, supports Max unconditionally, and has always been like a family...
It is these cute supporting roles that make the entire women's baseball league no longer an empty label, it represents everyone's vivid and fiery dream, in that era when women are not favored, they used their stubbornness and brute force to subvert people's stereotypes of women. Let an ornamental women's baseball team play with competitive pleasure and professionalism.
From this level, the drama is a real sense of the avant-garde female drama, it is different from those who are itching in the boots, hanging sheep's head to sell dog meat female inspirational films, it pokes at the key in every aspect, boldly confronts the dilemma of social expectations encountered by women in the process of growing up and the contradictions and entanglements of self-growth, telling us how women in the past gently resisted in their own way in an unfair society and showed their female strength.
Just like at the end of the story, the brave Peaches did not beat the Blue Sox in the big finals, but they were not discouraged, but rushed up to help her to the next base after being injured by Joe, a former teammate who was transferred to the opposing team.
In that era of male-dominated competitive sports, such moments were rare moments of shining female power. They lost the game, but won the friendship and won the applause.
I look forward to the next season of this series, and I also look forward to such a story to inspire every girl to bravely pursue her dreams.
Landlord