Film: Mr Baseball (1992)

Tom Selleck stars as a washed up Baseball player for the Yankees who reluctantly gets transfered to a Japanese team.

Playing like a 90s more mainstream version of Lost in Translation Selleck wanders through Japan taking in all blinded westerners find surprising about modern Tokyo, a woman reading erotic manga on the train, torture game shows and TV commercials starring western celebrities, and also along the way breaking Japanese customs such as not washing before entering a bath and placing chopsticks erect in a bowl of rice.

Likewise with Lost in Translation a lot can be debated whether this film is offensive, a few cheap jokes are made about height and I personally think the reactions to Sellecks blunders are a bit over the top (he mistakenly doesn't take off his shoes before entering the changing rooms, does this rule really apply here?). However this is not enough to cause too much of a problem, the bigger stereotype I found was in fact Sellecks character, he is a obnoxious, arrogant and ignorant American who represents all Westerners misplaced perceptions of the rest of the world. Unwilling to adapt to the new surroundings he must as we expect find his way to doing so by the end of the film not only to succeed professionally but personally. It is a film about a foreigner in a foreign and so the focus is directly placed on the American and doesn't truly bring out the rest characters until towards the latter half, which is a shame as the film could of had a lot more depth then the simple cultural window.

As a comedy the film is not that funny, it does have a few moments placed near the end when most of the culture clash hurdles have passed.