Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

..........................................................from Pasto,Colombia...Via: L.A. CA., CALI, COLOMBIA....and ORLANDO, FL More often than not, baseball stories are focused on the guy who manages to get all the way to the Majors. Sometimes we can lose sight of the fact that for every spot filled on a major league roster, there are scores, if not hundreds, of players who get sidelined somewhere along the way in their quest to make it to the big leagues! You don't have to like Baseball to enjoy SUGAR, but if you do, you're likely to enjoy it all the more. You have to give HBO films credit....Gutsy move to make a baseball movie that...A) Is about 70% in Spanish B) Manages to make the viewer empathize with the isolation & culture clash experienced by someone who arrives here not speaking any English and....C) Morphs completely into a different movie genre! Algenis Perez Soto plays SUGAR. I'd venture a guess that more likely, he IS SUGAR! IMDb PRO lists this as his only acting gig, ever. Apparently, he is undecided as to whether or not to continue his career in acting.Amazingly, Mr. Perez's contact E-mail address also appears. Here it is: algenisperez@gmail.com (Hope that you find the address Helpful!) SUGAR also boasts some great Dominican Merengue music; new, exotic third-world locations; and an on-screen collision between Dominican and Mid-Western Iowan cultures...Quite fascinating to watch!9*...ENJOY/DISFRUTELA! Any comments, questions or observations, in English o en Español, are most welcome!

SUGAR, American, 2008, directed by Ryan Fleck/Anna Boden, USA; Viewed at CINEFEST, Miskolc, 2013. Dominican baseball star Miguel "Sugar" Santos is recruited to play in the U.S. minor- leagues but there's a lot more to this than baseball.This film treats Immigration, race relations, and, yes, baseball ~ after a fashion, with an xlnt non-professional black cast. These are Notes to an American friend on the most exotic film of the week seen with a surprisingly lengthy Q&A with the director that went on until near Midnight. The title is "SUGAR", the name of the hero, and this American indie qualifies as 'exotic' here on three grounds; (1) the subject is American baseball -- more exotic in Hungary than soccer or rugby is in the States, (2) not only baseball, but Minor League, Bush league baseball, and (3) the whole business seen through the eyes of black Spanish speaking players from the Dominican Republic!You'll probably never get to see it because it was released in 2008 as an HBO/American Film Showcase production and has not had any public circulation to speak of, but i'm just telling you about it because it was so off-the-wall weird -- especially turning up in a place called "Meesh-colts" in the Hungarian outback!The whole first half hour takes place in the Dominican Republic, which shares half of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (Columbus landed there) with Haiti, the poorest country in the world -- and the language spoken was a dialect of Spanish so thick I had to read the Hungarian subtitles to follow it. The main guy Miguel "Sugar" Santos is a young talented pitcher who is spotted by an American baseball scout and picked up by one of the low level Kansas City farm teams. From there it segues to a small baseball town in Iowa where Sugar is assigned to a very proper church going Grace-before-dinner religious white family who are baseball fans -- to live with them and learn English. They have a squeaky clean blonde daughter who will start making him forget his true black love back home, and it goes on from there to something very different from the success stories we are conditioned to expect from sports minded films of this kind.No time for details here but I can tell you that it ends up in Porto Rican New York with numerous unexpected twists and turns. Basically a Spanish language film inhabited mostly by black non-actors, which gives it a kind of semi-documentary authenticity you would never get with somebody like Denzil Washington in the lead.A real one-of-a-kinder that raised many questions from an intelligent Hungarian gathering - - far more than I thought it would. But no bull -- a black baseball flick in the backwoods of Hungary is almost an event in itself. I wouldn't say that I loved this film but it was certainly worth sitting through and sticking around afterward merely for its uniqueness if nothing else. A great baseball film it was not, but as a problematic Caribbean immigration film it works on multiple levels. And as a Black film all it needed would be a couple of songs by Lena Horne to make it an instant classic.

There are a plethora of Dominican baseball stars in the Major Leagues which have become all-stars such as Pedro Martinez, Hanley Ramirez, Sammy Sosa, Robinson Cano, and David "Big Papi" Ortiz; and that is just the microcosm of the Domincanos who have had major contributions to "la pelota". But for every one Hanley or Robinson or even Big Papi, there are tons of Sugars who are vying to find that ticket to the MLB show. "Sugar" is a noble and touching narrative of Miguel "Sugar" Santos, a young Dominican pelotero who heads to the states to play Single A minor league baseball. "Sugar" accentuates the taste buds of young Dominicanos who want to better their lives and support their families by succeeding in the sport they love the most. But "Sugar" is even more than that; it also focuses on the adjustment process that they go through in the United States especially within the language barrier hurdles. Santos is the archetype of that description and the story of "Sugar" effectively catches on to that. Santos is a bit of a curveball character with his diversified personality traits; he could be funny, sad, angry, immature, friendly, appreciative, selfish or loving. But overall Santos is more on the santo side of the character ball on how he fixates on succeeding at his craft to primarily send his mother money in order to raise funds to build her a new home and also build her a new table. "Santos" is surrounded by other screwball Dominican characters on the same minor league voyage as Sugar, which bring some relief to the sheer entertainment value of the film especially when it seemed that the movie was going to take a walk on the melodramatic side. The promising writer-director team of Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck, who also helmed the indie darling "Half Nelson", did run most of the bases of authentic film-making in pitching the "Sugar" story to audiences. However, I wished they would of have used the "cutter" more when it came to the creepy scenes of Sugar's admiration to the granddaughter of the Iowan family he was staying with. I am not going to sugarcoat this: Algenis Perez Soto's performance as Sugar was sporadically amateurish, but being his first acting performance I must state that he has mucho potential to make a mound of money in the thespian field. "Sugar" is set first in the Dominican Republic, then in Iowa, and lastly in New York. Even though the New York act plays a critical factor in the film's narrative climax, it felt a bit too stretched out. Nevertheless, I do recommend "Sugar" and do feel that you should not be "Sugar" free in your movie watching experience. **** Good

If you are looking for another "sports" film, this isn't it. Sure, it's about Dominican baseball players trying to make it in the United States, and get some money for their families, just as African-Americans use the NBA to get out of the ghetto, but it is so much more.Baseball isn't the story here. It is just a backdrop. The story is immigration.It was funny watching Miguel 'Sugar' Santos (Algenis Perez Soto) put up with an Iowa farm family when he went to play "A" ball. They didn't speak Spanish, and he didn't speak English. The daughter (Ellary Porterfield) seemed interested, but couldn't take the big step.He left for New York when he felt his game go. He managed to find a new life. Not completely without baseball, but without making it to the majors. Life is like that. It's what happens when you make other plans.