Let’s See Two!

A baseball-themed double-header screens next in the UCSB Arts & Lectures free Summer Cinema series dubbed “Game On! Grit, Grace & Glory – Movies Under the Stars in Your Cars,” on Wednesday, July 29, at the West Wind Drive-In. At 8:30 pm, you can slide on down in your car’s front seat or folding chair to watch 42, the biopic about Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s racial barrier to become the first African-American Major League player in 1947. The film – titled after the star’s uniform number, which is the only one that has been retired across all teams – follows Robinson’s trials and tribulations as he joins the Brooklyn Dodgers under legendary team manager Branch Rickey, played by Harrison Ford. Race relations in the sport have come under fire again during the current post-George Floyd situation, making Robinson, portrayed here by Chadwick Boseman, an even more pivotal character.

Then, if your coping-with-COVID plans allow for late nights, stick around for the 10:45 pm screening of arguably the best baseball movie of all-time, the tear-evoking Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner as Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella, who builds a baseball field on his spread, drawing the ghosts of Shoeless Joe Jackson and the other seven Chicago White Sox players banned from the game for throwing the 1919 World Series. If you screen it, they will come.

The drive-in’s socially-distanced parking rules allow room to put chairs in front of your car, although filmgoers should wear masks and maintain a distance of six feet from others when outside of their own space.

The series comes to a close with Bethany Hamilton: Unstoppable, the doc about the then-13-year-old Bethany Hamilton, who lost her left arm to a 15-foot tiger shark but returned to the competitive circuit just a year later, which screens on August 5. Visit https://artsandlectures.ucsb.edu.