After writing rather gushingly about Avatar I felt I needed to give myself a Hollywood detox and so last night I went with my friend Maz to see Sugar at the arts centre where we live. The film focuses on a Dominican baseball player, Miguel ‘Sugar’ Santos (played by Perez Soto) and his journey to the US in search of that timeless cliché, the American Dream. I won’t tell you whether he finds it or not, but I will tell you that for the first hour I felt guilty for persuading Maz to give up an evening of her time to see the film with me – it was incredibly slow to get started. The last hour picked up pace a bit, and by the end we were almost teary-eyed and smiling.
A handful of the most memorable things about Sugar:
a) the beautiful Spanish version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah sung by Gepe
b) Sugar’s gradual but endearing grasp of English
c) the totally awesome merengue music
d) oh and the baseball. There’s baseball in it. It looks pretty brutal, and not much like rounders at all.
Rating: 
