A brilliant film that helped define a genre

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Director Alex Gibney is a Boston Red Sox fan and recounts Bill Buckner in 1986. He sees similarity to scapegoating Steve Bartman. The Cubs are supposedly cursed since the Billy Goat in 1945. They haven't won the World Series since 1908 or been in one since 1945. It's October 14, 2003 Wrigley Field in Chicago. In the 8th inning of Game 6 of the NLCS, the Cubs are ahead 3–0 and up 3 games to 2. With 1 out, Steve Bartman reaches out for a foul ball deflecting it from outfielder Moisés Alou. It is a compelling sports story and a legendary scapegoat. It is crowd psychology and human nature. It's got great behind-the-scenes footage dissecting the incident from every angle. The main missing ingredient is Bartman himself. It is perfectly understandable but that would have make it the definitive word.

'Catching Hell' is a tough one for me to review. It is about a subject very near and dear to my heart. I have a passion for Cubs baseball that is insatiable. My heart was broken when the Cubs lost the NLCS in 2003. If a lynch mob were formed right then and there to get Bartman and crucify him, I'm not proud to admit it but I'd probably say go for it. It takes a little more than a masochistic edge to be a Cub fan. There's a lot of misery and heartache that has to be endured but there is a promise of a just reward. I am convinced that when the Cubs win the World Series it will be one of the most cathartic and joyous occasions in the history of sports. Make no mistake catharsis is a huge part of being a Cub fan. In 2003 we were robbed of our catharsis and we needed an external scapegoat. Unfortunately for Steve Bartman it became him. This isn't a documentary about baseball. It's a documentary about being human. There is a brilliant moment in the beginning of the documentary where Director Alex Gibney describes the aspects of being a fan better than I have ever heard before. Being a fan is putting yourself as the 26th man on your baseball team on an emotional and almost spiritual level. Baseball is an escape from the drudgery's of life and when your team wins you win with it. When you lose however you take the scars with the team. The weight though of the scars weighing down on Cubs and Red Sox fans is enormous. This is the culture the media fed Bartman to. I think the media above anyone else becomes the real villain in this fable. Was it right for Cubs fans to blame Bartman? I don't' know if we ever really did. He became a face to the pains and frustrations and inadequacies of what the Cubs culture meant. Do I understand the anger? Yes. I feel angry myself. I don't think the Bartman wound will ever heal as long as the Cubs continue their title drought. There's a moment at the end where Gibney simulates Alou making that fateful catch. It was like him reopening the 2003 wound in this Cubs fans chest. It isn't' rational but it exists.

I have watched a few of the ESPN documentaries recently because a couple of good ones made me watch more and this one looked like it had potential. Sports is always filled with great stories and even though I am not a baseball fan I was aware of the two stories here. Funnily enough I was only aware of Buckner because of his recent role on Curb Your Enthusiasm, but I was aware of Steve Bartman by deed rather than name, since the one-line summary of what he did essentially went around the western world as one of those "and finally" stories they like to close the news out with before chuckling and saying good night. That the film was written and directed by Gibney just made me more keen to see it because he had done very good work with Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side, so he is a guy who can make documentaries.Sadly Catching Hell is not as good a documentary as it should have been because of how it sets out its stall but really fails to achieve its goal. The actual telling of the two sporting moments is well done; even those very familiar with both will find the retelling interesting because it is well structured and interesting. The focus on the Buckner incident is a good starting point and sets the theme of the scapegoat well before we go into the Bartman incident. The casual viewer will find much of interest here and indeed my girlfriend started watching this at one point without any knowledge of it and was quite held by the telling. However, where the film is weak is because it doesn't do anything beyond this telling, even though it is structured to do so and constantly sets itself up to do so.The film is set-up with Gibney asking questions about why we always seem to have these scapegoats and what causes one specific moment to be blamed more than any other – after all, none of the games we look at here (or the many others you'll think of) are lost in just that one moment, so why? He looks briefly at the history of superstition around each club and he then moves on to look at each incident in terms of how it was handled by the media, the other professionals and the fans. However in none of these do we seem to go beyond just looking and in that we never go beyond the surface really. The questions Gibney asked at the start as his frame seem to be mostly absent from the rest of the film and it is a lesser beast for it. The role of the media in overdoing the talking points would have been a focal point I'd like to have seen chased, since this is where both incidents appear to have gone from frustration into hatred and being a focus for anger. Sadly, although Gibney gets some comments out of those speaking for the media, he really doesn't push it.In the end what we are left with is a film that captures the two incidents and makes for an interesting sports film in that regard but really doesn't stand out as a good documentary simply because it doesn't question and probe in the way I felt it should have done. It captures events really well but it just doesn't explore them in a way that would have made for a better film.

I am not exactly the sort of guy to watch a documentary from ESPN. I am not a sports fan any more--and a bit of it relates to the subject of this film. The notion of scapegoating folks for losses in the World Series has always baffled me. While I noticed that the film only focused on recent scapegoats, I was very interested in seeing how the film dealt with Bill Buckner and Steve Bartman--two guys who took a lot of heat from unreasonable fans who got angrier at these guys than the average American felt towards Hitler during WWII!! Talk about needing to get a little perspective! As far as the film goes, it's about as good as any you can find on the topic. And, once again, it makes you feel terrible for these guys. In the case of Buckner, a couple bad games seemed to have undone an excellent major league career. And with Bartman, it was amazing how folks literally talked of killing a guy just because he reached out to grab a foul ball! Well worth seeing--and hopefully films like this will get folks to stop and think a bit.