Nick Offerman REALLY doesn't like 'Field of Dreams'
Nick Offerman is your father's definition of a "man's man." He builds canoes and likes scotch. He has a beard, and when he doesn't, he has a mustache. In other words, he's exactly the kind of guy you might expect would like a movie about a Iowa farmer with some serious daddy issues and a thing for baseball. Thankfully, it turns out that Nick Offerman is just as reasonable and levelheaded as the characters he plays on TV, joining Joe Posnanski's podcast, PosCast, this week to tear Field of Dreams—an objectively terrible film, according to some Loop staffers—limb from proverbial limb. Here, have a listen (everything kicks off around the 35-minute mark):
If you lost your headphones (AGAIN), here's the transcript, per For The Win:
I made a quick list of just absolutely ridiculous things about this film. First of all, Kevin Costner is ostensibly an Iowa farmer. He wears no belt. There are so many glaring reality and continuity issues here.
The first time he hears the voice, he’s out wandering in a shoulder-high cornfield, in the middle of the field, with a shovel — just wandering through the field with a shovel, which makes absolutely no sense. Then he goes to the seed store, where he asks some of the older farmers if they had heard voices in the cornfield. They look at him like he’s crazy, and he just buys one bag of corn seed at harvest time. I’ll let you do the math on that.
Then, Shoeless Joe shows up out on the ballfield, and Kevin Coster runs out. Fortunately, a dozen — at least — baseball bats and a huge bag of baseballs are sitting out by the unprotected backstop, so that if it were to be a dewy evening, let alone if, God forbid, it rained, all of the equipment would be ruined. Shoeless Joe asks him to pitch to him, he’s got enough bats and balls to field two college teams, yet he takes the mound with no mitt. No mitt? You put in lights in your cornfield and you have no mitt?…
Finally, the whole plot is predicated on the fact that this crazy farmer had this vision, plowed under a bunch of his corn to build a baseball field in his cornfield. And everybody says, “you’re crazy, you’re hearing voices, what’s the matter with you? You’re plowing under your cash crop? You’re going to lose your farm.”
I based my math on the dimensions of Wrigley Field, and determined — being generous to the filmmakers — the baseball diamond would encompass two acres. The average size of an Iowa corn farm is 345 acres. It’s absolutely ridiculous that it would have any impact on his profits to the point where they’d lose the farm.
RELATED: The actual "Field of Dreams" in Iowa was vandalized and welp, what is wrong with the world?
OK, so Offerman's critiques of the film are more centered around it's unrealistic depiction of running a working farm than, say, Kevin Costner being a top-five most-punchable movie star of all time, but since it's Offerman, that feels both on-brand and probably accurate. Now you may like Field of Dreams. Hell, you may even love it. And that is totally, 100% fine. Really, it is. But it's also totally, 100% wrong and we finally have proof: Because Ron Swanson said so.
