[HanCinema's Film Review] "Foulball"

The Goyang Wonders were an independent baseball team that operated in Korea from 2011 to 2014. What that means is that they were not affiliated with the official national leagues, either on the major or minor level. Their professional output consisted entirely of training baseball players who had either been undrafted or released from teams, and giving them an occasional friendly match with a league team in order to show off their skills to scouts for actual real teams. Hence the documentary's title- when you hit a "Foulball", you're not out. You still get another chance to hit.

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For those of you with no interest in baseball, that entire opening paragraph was probably enough to make you realize that "Foulball" is not a documentary with much wide appeal. The production team certainly tries its best- several individual players are given a spotlight focus, and they tell the usual sports underdog story. They just wanted a second chance to show what they're really capable of, and the Goyang Wonders gave them that chance.

And I do sympathize with these young folks. Really I do. It's great that they have a dream, and that some of them are even able to pull it off and make it into the professional leagues. It's just...try as it might most of the language in "Foulball" is extremely technical. If you're only familiar with baseball casually you probably don't have any idea what the structural foundations of drafting and recruiting new players even are. And the documentary only briefly touches off on these points.

In other words, while the language is specific enough to be engaging and interesting to those who already know the general underpinnings regarding professional baseball league development, the lack of clear exposition is such that anyone without the knowhow is probably just going to be really lost. That leaves the emotional story to carry the day- and on that front "Foulball" is hopelessly stuck making free associations with actual popular baseball narratives.

The classic comic book "Foreign Baseball Corporation" is referenced- and it's only a classic in Korea. You can tell mainly there's no way to translate it coherently into English. If you want to try the title is 외인구단- the second two syllables just mean "baseball corporation" (there's a dedicated word for that apparently), but the the first two could mean anything from foreign to alien to outcast. This is, for what it's worth, part of the comic's thematic point- it's about a bunch of ballplayers who for various reasons are unrecruitable by the major leagues even though they have the necessary inherent skills.

That's the kind of movie "Foulball" is. It's so steeped in cultural and technical language that just describing its pop culture references requires me to go into rather convoluted explanations about information that the target audience would immediately intrinsicially get. For what it's worth I honestly feel kind of bad about not liking this movie all that much. It's just that try as I might, I'm too much of a foreigner to this kind of culture to really get anything that's going on.

Review by William Schwartz

"Foulball" is directed by Cho Jung-rae and Kim Bo-kyeong-I and narrated by Cho Jin-woong.