A waste of 90 minutes of my life

A Masterpiece!

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

This was a great movie. The story of the 1919 Black Sox Scandal as portrayed by John Sayles was truthful to the real events of that World Series. The cast gave such wonderful performances as players and owners that you can understand how this could happen. You feel bad for the players. When asked about their bonus and they only are given the champagne, you see the hurt in their faces, and it is painful to see. John Cusack and D.B. Sweeney were great as Buck Weaver and Joe Jackson. Their performances showed a great love for the game. The film also contains scenes showing how different groups of the conspiring gamblers were double-crossing one another as well as the players they were conspiring with. An interesting side element of which I had been previously unaware. The cast is absolutely top-drawer, including Charlie Sheen, D.B. Sweeney (both of whom were already good high school and college baseball players, respectively, in real life), John Cusack, Michael Lerner, David Strathairn, Christopher Lloyd, Clifton James, Michael Rooker, John Mahoney, Studs Terkel, and several other fine actors.The real moral compass of "Eight Men Out" is Buck Weaver, played by John Cusack, in what may have been the performance of his career. Sayles' Weaver is portrayed as the victim of the ultimate betrayal for not participating in the scheme. His teammates don't back him up. The courts do not defend him. The press lumps him together with the guilty. His only crime was not being a snitch. And for that, Weaver has basically been relegated to baseball history's limbo, in spite of an above-par career. Sayles does an admirable job in evoking a justified sympathy for Buck Weaver, and Cusack captures it beautifully.Overall rating: 8 out of 10.

I found this movie to be a major disappointment.Perhaps because it did a poor job of differentiating all the characters. I found it difficult to keep track of who was in on the take and who was not. Too many of the Sox looked too much alike to me.Perhaps because there were not sharply defined, clearly developed characters.It's a sad story, and this movie didn't do anything to make me feel for any of the characters who compromised themselves, even though some of them were played by very fine actors, such as Strathairn, who has shown in other movies - such as "Good Night and Good Luck" - what he can do with a well-written part. At two hours, it should have done more developing a few of the characters, and forgotten about some of the financial dealings.Keeping track of those financial transactions was also too complicated.Not a movie I would ever want to have to sit through again.

Eight Men Out is the real life story of the 1919 Chicago White Sox's team that threw the world series for a big pay day. In the early 20th century, baseball players were barely payed enough money to live on, so when organized crime stepped in and offered a big pay day for throwing the 1919 World Series, half the team said yes. The film Eight Men Out is based on the book by Eliot Asinof, the first to officially tell the story of what happened. Until this book, people knew the outcome, but not the particulars. While the book goes into great detail, the movie does not. The film gives us the basics in a very simplistic form, in order to make it more dramatic, and that's the one part of this film I didn't really care for. The things I really wanted to know more about never seemed to materialize and a lot of what we saw in return was the Hollywood exaggeration effect. Don't get me wrong though, the film was very entertaining as it showed a lot of the action on the field and touched on some aspects of the scandal. The acting was stellar and it was really fun to see Charlie Sheen and John Cusack right as they were first starting out. As for the ending, well that was expected, but I still really enjoyed the sports action, back stories, and even the over the top dramatics surrounding the story. It may not be very in depth or even historically accurate, but seeing it again all these years later, I can now appreciate and understand why it is considered one of the top ten sports films of all time.

My perspective on Eight Men Out is different than most...I was an extra, recognizably (if you knew me) visible in at least two scenes. In fact, so close in focus was I that the assistant director eventually told me that they couldn't use me any more, because I had been "seen", meaning, I guess, that people would notice me in several different scenes. Not only did I learn about the baseball history depicted, but I learned about movie making, too. I worked at several of the Indianapolis shooting locations, including the Scottish Rite Cathedral, and what was then "Victory Field", the home of the Triple A Indianapolis Indianapolis Indians. It was trippy filming there, as I had been there for many games over the years as an Indians fan. For some of the shots, they couldn't get enough extras to show up to make the crowd, so they had to put cardboard cut-outs (called "standees" now?) in the stadium seats. The first day I showed up, I met the extras casting director, Avy Kaufman...she said, "I like your face", and sent me to wardrobe to get my period suit, shoes and hat---I was in! Thus began what would be a string of very long---but rewarding---days, for the grand sum of $20 per day, cash, paid out of a box in the semi-darkened parking lot. One day we did a double shift---16 hours---and got paid $40. We were fed in the same room, but not at the same table, as the actors. It was really neat being just a few feet away from these actors, some of whom I had seen in sitcoms and movies...Mahoney from Cheers, Lloyd from Back to the Future, Anderson from, among others, a Twilight Zone episode, and, of course, Studa Turkel and John Sayles. And note one other young actor in the cast: Charlie Sheen---should have gotten his autograph while I had the chance! The man who played the jury foreman, Rich Komenich had, years before, dressed up in a costume for a popular areas pizza franchise, and I had partied with him thanks to a woman I date. I remember the frequent chemical odor from the "smoke" or "fog" machine,since they fogged most of the indoor shots, apparently to cover up certain set details. Then there were the crude antique flash units we "reporters" had to hold up when when they shot the press conference held by Clifton James' character, Commiskey, the laborious to lace up period shoes that were closer to boots,the molded plastic ice cubes in the cocktail glasses we used in Michael Lerner's Rothstein scene, and the infrequent mouthing of nonsense lines to fake conversation of the background extras. If I had been a smoker, I would have been standing right next to Lerner in that scene, but I couldn't fake proficiency at a habit I didn't have. Perhaps what was more surrealistic than anything else was the contrast between how some of the extras looked in their period costumes, and how they looked in their street clothes before or after we changed...everything from gym shorts and t-shirts to overalls. I got such a big kick out of watching myself when this movie premiered the next year...realizing my screen "performance" will outlive me. A great movie and a great experience....