- baseball love comedy
- love comedy
- drew arrymore, jimmy fallon
According to Red Sox super-fan Ben Wrightman (Jimmy Fallon), finding romance is about as likely as his beloved team winning the World Series. But when Ben scores a beautiful new girlfriend (Drew Barrymore), suddenly anything is possible. Now the two passions in his life have a chance to go all the way... if he doesn't strike out first.The Farrelly brothers continue their good-natured winning streak with
Fever Pitch, a romantic comedy charmed by fate and last-minute improvisation. The movie was originally written with a bittersweet ending, but something unexpected happened (kismet, or perhaps divine intervention?) when the Boston Red Sox scored miraculous victories in the 2004 playoffs and World Series, and Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon were there, in character, to celebrate love and baseball as a pair of ami! able lovers who learn to share their lives while accommodating Fallon's life-long passion for the Red Sox. You really have to love baseball to forgive the formulaic romance by veteran Hollywood screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel (who also wrote
A League of Their Own, and could write this stuff in their sleep), but the codirecting Farrellys make it work, along with the easygoing chemistry of Barrymore and Fallon. The movie bears little resemblance to Nick Hornby's source novel (which was more faithfully adapted as a 1997 British comedy starring Colin Firth), but anyone who enjoyed
High Fidelity or
About a Boy will recognize Hornby's keen understanding of men and women, and the hazards we all endure when playing the game of love.
--Jeff ShannonThis is a book about identity, belonging, obsession; about afternoons in the driving rain and bitter cold and glorious, unforgettable goals; getting your head read in Hampstead and punched at Highbu! ry; the dazzling skills of the gods of football and leaving yo! ur girlf riend lying fainted on the terraces because Arsenal are about to score. It's about the moments of ecstasy in one man's life. And his pain. And it's about the only true question there is: Which comes first, Football or Life?In the States, Nick Hornby is best know as the author of
High Fidelity and
About a Boy, two wickedly funny novels about being thirtysomething and going nowhere fast. In Britain he is revered for his status as a fanatical football writer (sorry, fanatical soccer writer), owing to
Fever Pitch--which is both an autobiography and a footballing Bible rolled into one. Hornby pinpoints 1968 as his formative year--the year he turned 11, the year his parents separated, and the year his father first took him to watch Arsenal play. The author quickly moved "way beyond fandom" into an extreme obsession that has dominated his life, loves, and relationships. His father had initially hoped that Saturday afternoon matches would draw the two c! loser together, but instead Hornby became completely besotted with the game at the expense of any conversation: "Football may have provided us with a new medium through which we could communicate, but that was not to say that we used it, or what we chose to say was necessarily positive." Girlfriends also played second fiddle to one ball and 11 men. He fantasizes that even if a girlfriend "went into labor at an impossible moment" he would not be able to help out until after the final whistle.
Fever Pitch is not a typical memoir--there are no chapters, just a series of match reports falling into three time frames (childhood, young adulthood, manhood). While watching the May 2, 1972, Reading v. Arsenal match, it became embarrassingly obvious to the then 15-year-old that his white, suburban, middle-class roots made him a wimp with no sense of identity: "Yorkshire men, Lancastrians, Scots, the Irish, blacks, the rich, the poor, even Americans and Austr! alians have something they can sit in pubs and bars and weep ! about." But a boy from Maidenhead could only dream of coming from a place with "its own tube station and West Indian community and terrible, insoluble social problems."
Fever Pitch reveals the very special intricacies of British football, which readers new to the game will find astonishing, and which Hornby presents with remarkable humor and honesty--the "unique" chants sung at matches, the cold rain-soaked terraces, giant cans of warm beer, the trains known as football specials carrying fans to and from matches in prisonlike conditions, bottles smashing on the tracks, thousands of policemen waiting in anticipation for the cargo of hooligans. The sport and one team in particular have crept into every aspect of Hornby's life--making him see the world through Arsenal-tinted spectacles. --Naomi GesingerAccording to Red Sox super-fan Ben Wrightman (Jimmy Fallon), finding romance is about as likely as his beloved team winning the World Series. But when Ben! scores a beautiful new girlfriend (Drew Barrymore), suddenly anything is possible. Now the two passions in his life have a chance to go all the way... if he doesn't strike out first.The Farrelly brothers continue their good-natured winning streak with Fever Pitch, a romantic comedy charmed by fate and last-minute improvisation. The movie was originally written with a bittersweet ending, but something unexpected happened (kismet, or perhaps divine intervention?) when the Boston Red Sox scored miraculous victories in the 2004 playoffs and World Series, and Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon were there, in character, to celebrate love and baseball as a pair of amiable lovers who learn to share their lives while accommodating Fallon's life-long passion for the Red Sox. You really have to love baseball to forgive the formulaic romance by veteran Hollywood screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel (who also wrote A League of Their Own, and could write this stuff in! their sleep), but the codirecting Farrellys make it work, alo! ng with the easygoing chemistry of Barrymore and Fallon. The movie bears little resemblance to Nick Hornby's source novel (which was more faithfully adapted as a 1997 British comedy starring Colin Firth), but anyone who enjoyed High Fidelity or About a Boy will recognize Hornby's keen understanding of men and women, and the hazards we all endure when playing the game of love. --Jeff Shannon
