New Baseball Card movie on YouTube

[BBCgalaxee]

Jack of all trades
Has anyone seen it yet?

https://youtu.be/qx03g9jc1uM


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[Austin]

I watched the trailer but haven't decided if I want to pay Youtube $4 for the movie.
It looks like it's as much of a family drama as it is a baseball card documentary.

 

[mouschi]

Yup! I know the guy - he just announced it is getting picked up on Netflix. It is a good flick

 

[Philip J. Fry]

Yup! I know the guy - he just announced it is getting picked up on Netflix. It is a good flick

Good, I already have Netflix

 

[EtherealSOC]

I bought it on iTunes. I applaud the effort, but ultimately it's trying to do two things at once and fails to do either of them really well. Stu Stone appears well-intentioned, but this film dwells so long on the "I thought I'd be rich on junk wax" messaging that it glosses over the fact that many people did get rich during the baseball card boom and the hobby is still alive and thriving in many environments. Stu reminisces about 1986 Donruss and how he busted 1000 packs and failed to pull a single Canseco rookie, but then reminds the audience over and over again that it isn't worth anything anyway. My response? What do you mean it's not worth anything? By your own admission baseball cards bring you back to the best times of your life, to the childhood and the family with whom you desperately wish to reconnect, and a booming family business. Stu spends the entire movie only recognizing value in terms of dollars and cents, and he misses the very point he was trying to make. A tender moment when he clearly uses baseball cards as catharsis and re-connection is relegated to a brief clip during the end credits, and the ****** briefly shows how the hobby brought people together - and still brings people together - before Stu destroys this point for the sake on an end scene with a sense of finality.

A movie about baseball cards and broken families could not be tailored closer to me unless I wrote and starred in it myself, and I'm glad I bought it on iTunes and supported a Canadian documentary film-maker and former baseball card enthusiast. That said, it was such a missed opportunity, since the hobby is the one thread running through so many of the closest relationships in Stu's life - his mother, his sister, and his best friends (who largely make up the film-making team) - but all he sees are his broken dreams of getting rich from the stacks of unopened boxes in his mother's condo. I feel bad for Stu in one sense, since I feel like he ignored how much he has to be grateful for, but I have no sympathy for collectors who stashed cases of junk wax, changing the hobby from a youth-driven novelty to investment-style business, only to find their hoards are barely worth the cardboard they are printed on. When you make it a business you accept the risk that comes with it. If the hobby was responsible for enriching the most important relationships in your life you'd think you could look beyond monetary value and I suspect Stu does have an appreciation for baseball cards that goes deeper than that, it just wasn't captured very well in his story. Jack of All Trades will seem like a must-see for any baseball card collector, but after you watch it you'll feel like you've been shorted a hit.

 

[bongo870]

I watched the trailer but haven't decided if I want to pay Youtube $4 for the movie.
It looks like it's as much of a family drama as it is a baseball card documentary.

you have to pay? really? I never knew they did that

 

[Letch77]

I bought it on iTunes. I applaud the effort, but ultimately it's trying to do two things at once and fails to do either of them really well. Stu Stone appears well-intentioned, but this film dwells so long on the "I thought I'd be rich on junk wax" messaging that it glosses over the fact that many people did get rich during the baseball card boom and the hobby is still alive and thriving in many environments. Stu reminisces about 1986 Donruss and how he busted 1000 packs and failed to pull a single Canseco rookie, but then reminds the audience over and over again that it isn't worth anything anyway. My response? What do you mean it's not worth anything? By your own admission baseball cards bring you back to the best times of your life, to the childhood and the family with whom you desperately wish to reconnect, and a booming family business. Stu spends the entire movie only recognizing value in terms of dollars and cents, and he misses the very point he was trying to make. A tender moment when he clearly uses baseball cards as catharsis and re-connection is relegated to a brief clip during the end credits, and the ****** briefly shows how the hobby brought people together - and still brings people together - before Stu destroys this point for the sake on an end scene with a sense of finality.

A movie about baseball cards and broken families could not be tailored closer to me unless I wrote and starred in it myself, and I'm glad I bought it on iTunes and supported a Canadian documentary film-maker and former baseball card enthusiast. That said, it was such a missed opportunity, since the hobby is the one thread running through so many of the closest relationships in Stu's life - his mother, his sister, and his best friends (who largely make up the film-making team) - but all he sees are his broken dreams of getting rich from the stacks of unopened boxes in his mother's condo. I feel bad for Stu in one sense, since I feel like he ignored how much he has to be grateful for, but I have no sympathy for collectors who stashed cases of junk wax, changing the hobby from a youth-driven novelty to investment-style business, only to find their hoards are barely worth the cardboard they are printed on. When you make it a business you accept the risk that comes with it. If the hobby was responsible for enriching the most important relationships in your life you'd think you could look beyond monetary value and I suspect Stu does have an appreciation for baseball cards that goes deeper than that, it just wasn't captured very well in his story. Jack of All Trades will seem like a must-see for any baseball card collector, but after you watch it you'll feel like you've been shorted a hit.

Excellent write-up and review!

 

[r2d2]

you have to pay? really? I never knew they did that

YouTube Premium, formerly know as YouTube Red.

 

[AnthonyCorona]

Does the main character trim cards and sell them through PWCC?


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[Austin]

It'll be on Netflix beginning July 16th in the US and November in Canada.

 

[hive17]

I'm watching this now.

Just a reminder that it's on Netflix now.

 

[finestkind]

I only watched part of it, before it got too lame. Stu had no clue. He didn't do any research on what the cards might be worth before wasting his time going to a show. Then his dysfunctional family doesn't make it much of a baseball card movie. His wife runs over the box of cards in the parking lot at the show. And his idiot brother brings up bad family history in front of Stu's wife and kids at the show. Lame

 

[Austin]

I was excited to see this, but within minutes, I was disappointed in this scripted and badly acted "documentary."

The film begins with a group of people having what looks like a baseball card picnic in a grassy field, opening boxes of '80s and '90s cards with the sun setting. The ending reveals what they’re really doing.

Then the guy is at the airport "surprising" his mom with a camera crew. The first thing she asks, of course, is when he'll get rid of his childhood boxes of stuff.

After he discovers his old collection, and despite showing he has decent cards like an '84 Donruss Mattingly and ‘90 Leaf Frank Thomas, he brings a box full of '90 Fleer and Score to a card show and acts shocked when dealers say they're worthless.

And this is after a ridiculous over-acted scene of the supposed aftermath of those cards being run over by his brother in law in the card show parking lot. Despite the cards supposedly being crushed by the car, only the big cardboard box is smashed, while all of the sets and wax boxes inside are miraculously unharmed seconds later when he has them inside the card show.

As he and his sister go to see where his dad's old sportscard store was at the strip mall, and as they happily reminisce through bad acting, his friend the director brings up that his dad cheated on his mom with a girl that he hired at the store. They fake argue for awhile, and hold a meeting with the crew and decide to change the film to be about his disfunctional family.

He goes to interview Jose Canseco, who tells him he knows a guy with the largest Canseco collection he's ever seen. I honestly thought Mouschi would appear, especially since Mouschi said in this thread he knows the guy in the film. But no, the world's biggest Canseco collector is a young guy with a couple hundred junk wax Canseco base cards. And the star acts amazed at how many cards he has.

The reunion with his dad and the interview were actually real, and it was interesting when he talked about the old card shop and personal stuff. But there was no emotional punch or payoff despite all of the buildup.

If the film was about the star’s genuine memories and the card boom, without the badly scripted acting and the obnoxiously random home videos of his bar mitzvah literally every few minutes, and instead expanded upon the too-short interviews with Don West and Burbank Sportscards and the Upper Deck employee and Canseco and the tour of Topps, it could have been a cool nostalgic film.

But it’s filled with phony acting and fake crew meetings and melodramatic family crap. And the ending in which he *spoiler* his entire childhood collection was stupid. Just a disjointed mess and wasted potential.

 

[smapdi]

The dad is a piece of work. Running through his life without a care for anyone else with his ridiculous alibi. I've known several people who were in the Holocaust and their children, and I never saw anyone use it as an excuse for being such an a-hole. Especially the children of the survivors. But everyone's different, I guess.

People may be going into this with the wrong mindset. It's not a documentary about baseball cards, though the 80s boom and 90s bust were covered just enough to allow non-collectors a little context. But it's a home video about a guy and his dad and family, and cards are just a part of his childhood, not a whole lot larger than anyone else's, because they represent his connection with his dad. Once his dad was no longer part of his life, neither were the cards. But I found it totally believable that the first thing his mom asked him about was getting his crap out of her place.

I did find it interesting the way they interviewed, however briefly, industry people and the only one who claimed to have no knowledge whatsoever of UD overprinting the Griffey rookie was the UD rep. His credibility was, let's say, strained, even in his non-denial denial.

On the whole, pretty average. The forced way the filmmaker provoked reactions from Stu were heavyhanded and cringeworthy. But once they got past that it moved along and you got to know the people and the hobby a bit.

 

[moxacaine]

It's not good. I made the mistake of paying money to watch it on Amazon awhile back.

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