I don’t always trust people to do the right thing. If people could make the right decisions, we wouldn’t know about Ty Pennington, Britney Spears or Fitness Made Simple” by John Basedow. I feel a heavy burden because this is one of those times where I know people won’t do the right thing. I can already see the evidence.
“Fever Pitch” will be a huge hit at the box office. We can’t let that happen.
Forget the fact that the movie focuses on the Boston Red Sox. Forget the presence of Jimmy Fallon, who is desperately trying to be Adam Sandler. Forget the fact that the movie focuses on the Boston Red Sox.
We all should be offended as moviegoers by the shameless way that Peter and Bobby Farrelly mailed this one in.
This is actually the second movie called “Fever Pitch.” The first was a British version where the obsessive main character was a soccer fan.
Both of these movies are – and I use the following phrase as loosely as possible – based on the memoir of the same name by Nick Hornby.
This isn’t me as a soccer fan getting up in arms because they adapted Hornby’s book to fit an American audience, substituting baseball for soccer.
This is me getting up in arms because the Farrelly brothers took Hornby’s title and the premise of an obsessed sports fan and made their own movie out of it.
Listen, if you’re going to do nothing other than steal the premise, at least come up with your own title. I generally condone all laziness, but that’s going too far.
The movie doesn’t look that bad, considering it focuses on the Boston Red Sox. But I read “Fever Pitch” every spring before soccer season starts and I can’t reconcile the book and this new movie.
The book takes a serious look at growing up in a broken home, how to handle depression and the socioeconomic conditions that led to such horrible violence in English soccer stadiums in the 1970s and 1980s.
The thought-provoking story of Hornby’s life just doesn’t reconcile with Fallon covering his ears and making noise in a restaurant because he doesn’t want to hear the result of a game he is taping to watch later.
I don’t want to give the impression that the book is a horrible downer. Hornby’s obsession with the London-based Arsenal is mixed with hilarious scenes of him browbeating a teenage student with trivia questions because the youngster acts like he knows more about the team than his teacher.
But this is a real life exposed. The stories in “Fever Pitch” are the events that formed the psyche of one of the best authors alive today.
That should count for something. Hornby didn’t object to the use of the title, but the Farrelly brothers should have had the common courtesy to come up with their own title, their own idea.
At the very least, they could have focused the story on someone other than the Boston Red Sox and kept Jimmy Fallon off the screen.
I expect too much, huh?