Is “Deadball” the Best or Just the Greatest Movie Ever?

Your friend, my friend, and friend of NotGraphs Max Taylor points out there is in fact possibly the finest baseball film ever and, no surprises here, it comes from the home of the no-nonsense film industry in Japan. It’s called Deadball and this is its trailer:

Some highlights:

• Everything explodes at least twice.
• There are Nazis and, I’m not sure, some sort of Kim-Jong Il facsimile?
• Some of this.
• Obviously a touch of this.
• And then around 0:27 we get a guy clearly pretending to throw in slow motion, the directors apparently deciding against splurging on actual slow-motion footage.
• Some sort of scantily-clad women’s assassin baseball team because sexism.
• Wait, was that a boomerang baseball?
• Some of this:

Clearly this movie is more than just the same old film about some cliched super athlete who accidentally commits patricide with his amazing fastball and then goes on a quest to solve his brother’s baseball-related murder (*yawn* we’ve all seen this movie before, right?). But this movie is even more than that, one can assume from the trailer. This clearly has multiple layers of literary and social critics and explosions too.

So who’s up for a movie night?