Tag: The League
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‘The League’ Review: The Negro Leagues Finally Get Their Due in Moving Baseball Documentary
There’s no shortage of great movies about baseball, but there is a severe lack of films about the Negro leagues. The fifth inning of Ken Burns’ expansive “Baseball” covers them with admirable reverence, but feature-length projects — whether narrative or documentary — are vanishingly rare. “The League” is therefore something close to required viewing for…
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Sam Pollard and Questlove Have Another Piece of Forgotten American History to Show You
If you didn’t grow up in Pittsburgh (which boasted rival baseball greats the Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords) or watch Episode 5 of the 1994 Ken Burns docu-series “Baseball,” you may not know much about the Negro Leagues. That’s about to change.Sam Pollard’s “The League” is an eye-opening slice of American baseball’s 154-year history.…
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Sam Pollard Considers ‘The League’ More than a Baseball Doc: ‘All of My Films Are About America and Race’
Sam Pollard’s “The League” Is Not Your Typical Baseball Doc.The documentary filmmaker grew up in the 1960s watching the St. Louis Cardinals, whose roster of players included Black or Latino players including Bill White, Curt Flood, Orlando Cepeda and Lou Brock, but did not know much about the Negro Leagues that existed when the sport…
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‘The League’ Review: Sam Pollard Chronicles Another Engrossing Slice of Essential American History
During the opening frames of Sam Pollard’s “The League,” a wistful and profound documentary about the rise and fall of the Negro Leagues, baseball hall-of-famers Hank Aaron and Monte Irvin share how they played the game as kids, even when they had nothing more than broomsticks.As footage of Black kids playing on a sandlot rush…
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‘The League’ Reunion: Cast and Creators Open to Revival, Share One Regret About Airing on Cable
When the cast and creators of FX Networks’ “The League” reunited Friday night in Austin at the Atx Television Festival the primary topic — threaded between jokes about fantasy football failures and on-set injuries — was timing and opportunity. Namely, did the show air at the right time, could it survive in today’s TV landscape,…