From my 9.24.18 Variety review: “The real-life
misadventures of central figures in the 2013 Major League Baseball doping
scandal play like outrageous twists and turns in the seriocomic crime fiction
of Carl Hiassen or Elmore Leonard throughout Screwball, an impudently entertaining documentary that suggests
what might result if the Monty Python troupe were given carte blanche to produce
an investigative report for 60 Minutes.
“It comes to us from Billy Corben, a filmmaker whose previous
chronicles of illicit activity and entrepreneurial drug traders in and around
Miami (Cocaine Cowboys, Square Grouper: The Godfathers of Ganja)
might now be viewed as warm-up pitches for his latest effort. This time on the
mound, he throws heat and scores impressively with help from a lineup that
includes baseball All-Stars, mob-connected lowlifes, tanning and bodybuilding
enthusiasts, free-spending MLB investigators, and an unlicensed anti-aging
expert whose lack of bona fide medical credentials scarcely hindered his
ability to provide, one way or the other, performance-enhancing drugs for his
clients. The latter shady character, Anthony Bosch, emerges early on as
Corben’s most valuable player, in that his astonishingly unfiltered (albeit
chronically self-justifying) account of his starring role in the doping scandal
makes him the indisputable standout among the movie’s cast of colorful
interviewees.”
BTW: Immediately after I saw Screwball at the 2018 Toronto Film Festival, I went to a
sports-themed bar-restaurant near my rented condo for dinner. At one point, I
looked up from my table, glanced at one of the establishment’s many TV screens
and saw one of the film’s “stars” — Alex Rodriguez — offering commentary on ESPN.
No, seriously.
Screwball is now available for
streaming on Netflix. You can read the rest of my Variety review here.
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