Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Thanks for the memories!

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

I was always surprised this film did so well at the box office. If you are a baseball fan it is almost unwatchable. I like Tom Hanks but he mostly snarls and growls in the film. Madonna is a complete anachronism and painful to watch. Most of the other women are simply irritating. Only Genna Davis is worth watching. Completely fails to capture the spirit of the wartime America. Don't waste your time with this turkey of a film.

Tom Hanks comes very (*very*) close to stealing "A League of Their Own" (he's flippin' hysterical in this) but this has one of those pitch- perfect casts in which everyone just feels like the ideal choice for his/her role; especially Geena Davis and Lori Petty, whose sibling conflict anchors the whole story. Even Madonna does a fantastic job (god knows how much crap I've given her over the years for "Dick Tracy", and this would be the spirited counterargument). it may be an unconventional baseball movie with its proud feminist streak, but the sentiment's warm and these are characters I very much enjoyed watching. Plus, the humor's spot-on. When all is said and done, this is thoroughly entertaining.8/10

I watched this film for the nth time after many times as part of the "Trailblazing Women" series on Turner Classic Movies. After watching the Rosie the Riveter documentary, it really stands out how much women were "used" during World War II. They were told how important they were to the war effort. What wasn't emphasized was the transient nature of the situation, that it was "until the men come back", so they got used to doing something other than housework if they were married or pretty mind numbing low paying jobs if they were not. The women working in the factories during the war had good paying jobs and some independence for the first times in their lives, the same with the girls in this movie. They not only had good pay, but a place in the limelight, doing something they were good at doing - baseball - with crowds rooting for them, but like Dottie and Kit, they had just been playing as amateurs pre-War. Dottie doesn't want to join the league at first. What Kit says is true - Dotty is the prettier sister, the sister with more baseball talent, and she doesn't want to admit her own competitive spirit until she is given a chance to exercise it, and then that competitiveness somewhat scares her. Tom Hanks is brilliant as Jimmy Dugan, a washed up ball player who drank away the five best years of his career and is recruited to coach the Rockford Peaches. At first he doesn't take this job seriously, but time, a few verbal bouts with Dottie, and a growing attachment to the girls change that. Towards the end of the film he delivers one of the best monologues that I have ever heard about talent, opportunities lost, and the fact that certain moments never come again. I know somebody else wrote these lines, but he delivered them with heart. One line should be emblazoned on everybody's mind - "If it wasn't hard everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great." Don't run away from anything because it is hard.Madonna and Rosie O'Donnell provide great comic relief - they actually had a pretty good off-screen friendship - so their back and forth comes across naturally. Even if you don't like these two individually, I think you'll like them here. It's funny how much women playing ball just offends American society's sensibilities about what is proper for a woman so much that a big part of the girls' training is basically a charm school, and that as players the women actually have curfews and places like bars that are off limits to them due to publicity, as though they were minors or gentle flowers that need protection.And now let me talk about Oregonian sisters Dottie and Kit, specifically Kit. Kit has talent. Kit has beauty. She just doesn't have as much as her sister. She definitely shows the audience how to be both a bad winner and a bad loser and just how much jealousy can make anybody ugly inside and out. And now the debate on the ending - that has been rehashed endlessly. I'll just say what I THINK happened makes me furious, because if I'm right then one person let an entire team down just to give another person who was green with envy a false victory in the hope that it would give them a lifetime of confidence. I know this is just a movie, but envy is a condition that is not cured by an external victory, earned or not. It can only be cured by a person changing their viewpoint, that THEY are responsible for their lives and actions. Give a jealous person one victory today and this time next year it will just be something else they feel is unfair and responsible for their misery.I highly recommend this one. It is almost perfect on every level, even the soundtrack!

Finally, after 20+ years, I recorded and watched what I thought was going to be a middling Tom Hanks comedy. Reason for that was the trailers I'd seen hundreds of times: "Crying. There's no crying in baseball!"What I saw was a movie that should have been allowed to give Unforgiven serious competition for Best Picture and Geena Davis an Oscar for Best Actress in a leading role. Apparently I wasn't the only one fooled by those trailers.Penny Marshall's movie is a brilliant, beautifully crafted homage to a little remembered period when, just as Rosie became a riveter, numbers of talented women filled in for their men as ball players. Proving, like Rosie, they were every bit as capable as the absent males.More than that, of course, is the broader theme of the individual refusing to buckle under to social conventions. A very common American theme with Marshall's contribution ranking with the best of its expositions. Pretty good as a Baseball pic, too.It is a long movie, over 2 hours, but, despite the simplicity of the story, it doesn't play like two hours. From the first scene you (or at least I) fall in love with the screen and time becomes meaningless.Two people, supported by a strong supporting cast, are responsible: Peggy Marshall and Geena Davis. Marshall and her editor crafted a truly remarkable piece of cinematography that may be perfect; not a clang or misstep anywhere.Such movies need glue to make it all hang together and that's where Davis comes in: though brilliantly supported, without Davis the whole house would have failed. League is very much Geena Davis' movie, she's the one who puts flesh to the bones of Penny Marshall's vision.As Americans we love and should love movies like this, these celebrations of the best of our values, of how hundreds of women kept a league of their own alive for ten years.That achievement was quickly forgotten, buried in the reactionary conservatism of the '50s, which should anger us, but that anger can easily be tempered by Marshall's rediscovery and loving treatment of their story.For all of that seriousness, League is a successful comedy and fun to watch while, also successfully, demonstrating both how far we've come and how far yet to go.A large part of that 'yet to go' are those trailers that made me think that League was a Tom Hanks movie. It isn't; Hanks is almost a tertiary figure. Davis and the supporting cast, all women, are the Stars. Hanks character, Jimmy Dugan, is important and, especially at the last, honored but, as the movie unfolds, more comic relief than mover. Very much a second fiddle; to his credit, Hanks plays that fiddle masterfully.However, the fact that the distributors felt the need to exaggerate his presence to the point of ridiculousness speaks volumes about how, even in 1992, we weren't ready to embrace a movie by women about women. The Oscar's Nominating Committee's failure to recognize League as the masterpiece it is stamps paid to that point.As a movie, judged by objective cinematic standards, League should rank with the best of the best.