Just in time for Father's Day

Our old pal Sheila has a "ginormous" post about Field of Dreams, examining the role of Ray's wife Annie, played by the scrumptious Amy Madigan.

Field of Dreams is one of the movies I'll admit to crying while watching. Damn that scene where he's playing catch with his dad's ghost!

Sheila goes on with another post looking back at Ebert's review of it: I'll say this about the movie that it's in that rare group where the movie is actually better than the book. Now, the book is actually a collection of short stories with a common narrative line, and the movie does away with Ray's twin brother and some other confusing elements. But nothing can really top it's opening line:

My father said he saw him years later playing in a tenth-rate commerical league in a textile town in Carolina, wearing shoes and an assumed name.

Tarnation, that's one crisp line!

"He'd put on fifty pounds and the spring was gone from his step in the outfield, but he could still hit. Oh, how that man could hit. No one has ever been able to hit like Shoeless Joe."

Three years ago at dusk on a spring evening, when the sky was robbin's-egg blue and the wind as soft as a day-old chick, I was sitting on the verendah of my farm home in eastern Iowa when a voice very clearly said to me, "If you build it, he will come."

I think the only way to really top that would be with something that begins "Sing in me, muse..."