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EW review: 'Fever Pitch' a winner

Understated comedy is perfect addition to Farrelly gallery

By Owen Gleiberman
Entertainment Weekly


Drew Barrymore, Jimmy Fallon
Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon star in "Fever Pitch."
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Drew Barrymore
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(Entertainment Weekly) -- "Fever Pitch," a fable that pits true love against baseball love, is one of the most ingratiating romantic comedies in quite some time, yet the fact that it was directed by Peter and Bobby Farrelly almost works against it.

The Farrelly name, to the extent that it remains a brand, sets up expectations -- of a raucous sports satire, of laughter on steroids -- that this winningly low-volume and humane little movie can't satisfy.

In comedy, we've all been conditioned to seek out the brash and the obvious: the fractious situational mix-ups, the Adam Sandler baby-men, the goo in the hair (thanks, Peter and Bobby). Performers are rewarded for their winking hipster absurdism, and so you might assume that Jimmy Fallon, a former "Saturday Night Live" star now trying to break into the Sandler/Ferrell stratosphere, would be packaged as another wild-eyed postmodern misfit -- a goof-meister in italics.

In "Fever Pitch," though, Fallon gets a chance to be that rarest of creatures, a comic actor who plays it straight. As Ben Wrightman, who teaches honors geometry to ninth graders, Fallon doesn't overdo the stammering dorkiness; he's nervous and sincere in a way that makes him a sweetly infectious Everyguy.

A movie star can't just be pretty. His features have to knead together in an interesting way, and Fallon, with those felt-tip-marker eyebrows, that chiseled nose and smile that make him look like Pinocchio the moment after he was transformed into a real boy, has an off-kilter cuteness. His anxious mental agility and eagerness to please make you root for him, because they come from a childlike place that can't be faked.

The film is clever about setting up Ben's romance with Lindsey Meeks (Drew Barrymore), a yuppie with a flirty grin and a vaguely defined high-powered job whom he meets when he takes a handful of students on a tour of her office.

According to Lindsey's 21st-century rule book, the fact that Ben teaches high school should make her run the other way (she must earn multiples of what he does). Yet he's handsome and, in his scruffy and tentative fashion, rather witty, and we're asked to enjoy his successful courtship as a symbolic victory for squarely dressed earnest geeks everywhere. That, however, is a mere prelude to Ben's big secret, which is that he has already given his heart away. He's married to the Boston Red Sox.

Based on an essay memoir by Nick Hornby ("High Fidelity"), "Fever Pitch" was adapted by the veteran screenwriting team of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel ("Splash"), who have transplanted Hornby's tale of love, soccer and suburban England into a tale of love, baseball and Boston proper.

This is the rare Farrelly film the brothers didn't generate themselves, yet it's a perfect addition to their gallery of men who haven't grown up and the women they must remake their infantile souls for.

Lindsey is more than happy to meet Ben's Red Sox fixation halfway, as she joins him in the stands with his ''family'' of fellow fans. She graciously endures his Red Sox pillowcases, his outbreaks of freakish behavior like yelling in a restaurant lest he hear the results of an away game that he has yet to view on tape.

It turns out, though, that there is no halfway. Ben won't part with the Sox, not even for an amorous weekend in Paris. When Lindsey gets struck on the head by a foul ball, his reaction -- he high-fives the guy who nabs the ball -- is not what is meant by love being blind.

"Fever Pitch" provokes tender chuckles rather than guffaws, yet you can feel the Farrelly touch in their eye for detail: Ben and his friends smelling the package of season tickets, the ingenious way that the 2004 season has been woven into the story.

The biggest surprise is that the film is understated rather than exaggerated. Fallon brings off the neat trick of making Ben not a laughable sportsaholic but a lyrical young romantic with his wires crossed.

There's nothing macho in Ben's worship of the Sox. His late uncle left him lifetime tickets just behind the dugout, and he has the starry-eyed excitement of a true believer. What he loves about the players, the contests, the mood of Fenway Park is that they represent a perfect world. Even the curse of the Bambino, the fabled myth of why Boston (until last year, of course) hadn't won a championship since 1918, is a secret source of comfort: It testifies to the purity of his obsession -- the ultimate in sports loyalty.

In "Fever Pitch," Ben's baseball ardor becomes a funny, moving metaphor for the arrested male's inability to surrender himself entirely to love. "High Fidelity" featured the same setup, with rock fervor instead of baseball, only this is a far more urgent variation.

The two actors are wonderfully matched. Barrymore has never lost her honey-glazed cuddliness, but there's a hint of melancholy to her now, and it roots her big go-for-broke scene at Fenway Park, a moment of the deepest cornball perfection. It's been a while since a movie made the game of love this winning.

EW Grade: A

'Eros'

Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum

The subject of "Eros" isn't so much eros as what the same word means to three distinctive filmmakers: Wong Kar Wai, Steven Soderbergh and Michelangelo Antonioni.

Well, not so much what the word means personally, either, but what the third filmmaker means to the other two, given that Antonioni's groundbreaking, influential work, including "L'Avventura" and "Blow-Up," defined the modern European cinema of alienated eros in the 1960s and '70s.

Judging from "The Dangerous Thread of Things," the honoree's own wispy contribution to the trilogy, the ailing 93-year-old still has emptiness, carnal ennui and the indecipherable pouts of untamable women on his mind. He also retains a taste for the trappings of an affluent, sullen loneliness -- towers, beaches, long stretches of empty road. Very '70s -- and yet very Sundance, this period piece.

What Antonionian eros means to Wong and Soderbergh, meanwhile, remains a muddle, as anthology movie projects so often do: For the invited filmmaker, the opportunity to make a statement is surely a thrill, but for the viewer -- who can't pause indefinitely, as with a book, between stories -- the focus-shifting is a demand. (Caetano Veloso coos brief musical interludes between films.)

In "The Hand," Wong whips up a ripe fable of lifelong obsession predicated on one moment of bliss manually bestowed years ago by an alluring courtesan (the ever-creamy Gong Li) on a dazed tailor's apprentice ("Crouching Tiger's" Chang Chen). The literally sweaty settings (a steam-clouded tailor's shop, a sex-damp hotel room, rainy streets of desire familiar from "In the Mood for Love") and voluptuous sadness are pure Wong, but the intention -- a hand job as homage! -- is sweetly nuts.

As for Soderbergh, the inveterate game-player strives for puckishness by choosing a jokey, peekaboo approach to the subject: "Equilibrium" is set in the repressed 1950s, where Robert Downey Jr. plays a New York adman tormented by a recurring dream, who takes his unreliable subconscious to a psychiatrist played by Alan Arkin. Even the setup and casting are built to jest: This is homage by way of after-dinner skit.

EW Grade: C+

'Kung Fu Hustle'

Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman

It's been a long time -- you might have to go back to the Bruce Lee era -- since a martial-arts film busted through the limits of physical freedom as wildly, and promiscuously, as "Kung Fu Hustle," Stephen Chow's insanely entertaining smash-fantasy burlesque.

Chow, perhaps the first action star and filmmaker to be as influenced by classic cartoons as by the karate-chop balletics of human movement, directs like a gonzo fusion of Quentin Tarantino and Tex Avery.

You know where every punch and kick is coming from, but it's far less clear what will happen after they land. Bodies go flying into space, and faces get pummeled until they end up somewhere beneath the ground.

At one point, two men conduct a battle by strumming notes on a stringed instrument: Each note sends forth a quasi-visible gust of air, which crests into a wave of force so sharp that it reveals itself on screen as a shower of knives. The scene creates its own nutty physics, and all of "Kung Fu Hustle" is like that: You don't just watch it, you ride with it, laughing all the way.

In the world according to Chow, fighting prowess is a form of magical slapstick Zen that can come from anybody and anywhere. Take the Land-lady (Yuen Qiu), a whiny harridan in curlers who dominates the working-class ghetto of Pig Sty Alley. She's the last character on earth you'd expect to be a martial-arts master, yet Chow works with such a screwy democratic spirit that she turns out to be just that.

The chief villains, or so it appears in the leaky madhouse of what I'll kindly call a plot, are the Axe Gang, a tribe of top-hatted brutes -- inspired by Bill the Butcher's crew in Gangs of New York -- who wreak bloody havoc on Pig Sty Alley.

It's fair to think that these whirligig cutthroats have set the standard for homicidal omnipotence, but they're pussycats next to the Beast (Leung Siu Lung), who emerges in his tacky hospital sandals, like a Dr. Lecter gone to seed, to prove that he can kill all comers.

It's up to Chow, as the poseur-turned-hero, to match him blow for mighty surreal blow. He does it in a climax of high-flying ultraviolence that will leave you gasping between giggles.

EW Grade: A-

'Face'

Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman

In Queens, New York, in the disco '70s, a young Chinese American (Bai Ling), as shy as she is beautiful, breaks character by having a one-night stand; the result is a baby (and marriage) she doesn't want and ends up running out on.

In Queens during the hip-hop present day, a young Chinese American (Kristy Wu), as arrogant as she is tomboyishly sexy, has an affair with a black DJ (Treach); the result is a romance her grandmother (Kieu Chinh), who raised her, won't accept.

If these mild tales of domestic scandal, which make up the movie "Face," sound familiar and even a bit cliche, they are just that, yet it's a testament to the bare-bones decency displayed by director Bertha Bay-Sa Pan that we're compelled by them anyway.

What makes the drama work is the connection: The rebel-brat from the second story is, in case you hadn't guessed, the grown-up daughter of that reluctant, torn, abandoning mother. When she returns after nearly 30 years, "Face" becomes a study of the immigrant embrace of freedom in America -- a bridge built over time and generations.

Ling, delicate and haunted, and Wu, a real spitfire, make their reconciliation sting as much as it soothes.

EW Grade: B

'Winter Solstice'

Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum

In "Winter Solstice," writer-director Josh Sternfeld takes the prefab indie-flick building blocks -- uncommunicative families, impacted grief and suburban stagnation -- and constructs something quite marvelous: a realistic drama that looks and feels as inevitably true and moving as a good documentary.

Understatement is Sternfeld's strength: Assembling muted vignettes about a bewildered New Jersey widower (Anthony LaPaglia), his two dammed-up teenage sons ("Tadpole's" Aaron Stanford and "Storytelling's" Mark Webber, both outstanding), and a neighbor (Allison Janney) who offers sunshine, the filmmaker is at his finest when he employs silence and inaction. What doesn't happen is more moving than what does.

EW Grade: A-

'Major Dundee'

Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman

If you want to see the missing link between John Wayne's squint and Clint Eastwood's sneer, look no further than Charlton Heston in "Major Dundee."

As the glowering antihero of Sam Peckinpah's 1965 cavalry epic, Heston acts with a caustic, contained fury -- honor teetering on the edge of obsession -- that bridges the square fervor of a classic Western with the nihilism of contempo, stare-down revenge.

Like virtually every movie in history that was drastically cut by its studio, "Major Dundee" has the reputation of being a butchered masterpiece. Now you can see for yourself: Sony is rereleasing the film with much of its original footage restored.

As Dundee, a disgraced Union officer, assembles a ragtag pickup army -- Confederate prisoners, black guards, a one-armed James Coburn -- to go after Apache aggressors, the movie sprawls like an inflated "Dirty Dozen." Major Dundee has its longueurs, yet at its best you can feel Peckinpah, at the twilight of the studio era, dreaming of a far wilder bunch.

EW Grade: B

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