Fever Pitch (1997)

Summary: Paul Ashworth (Colin Firth) cares more about his favourite losing football team, Arsenal, than he does about the rest of his life. While he's an English teacher, he cares more for the school's football team that he coaches. He becomes involved with an uptight math teacher, Sarah Hughes (Ruth Gemmell), who does her best to keep up with it all until she discovers that she's preggers.

It has all the makings of what April looks for: Colin Firth and a screenplay based on a best selling Nick Hornby autobiographical novel. In fact, Hornby wrote the screenplay himself.

Too bad it's not interesting in anyway. I mostly thought about how it should be funnier and debated turning it off when I watched it months ago. Then I didn't want to write about it because I couldn't think of anything to say about it.

I mean that. It wasn't so bad that I could ridicule it because we all know that I find sweet delight in ridiculing bad movies. It's cathartic. It was so bad that I didn't care about what happened between Paul and Sarah.

Alright, so I wished Sarah would grow a spine a little. It's not that she didn't giver Paul a piece of her mind many times over, but Gemmell didn't do enough to make it seem like it was difficult to deal with Paul's obsession.

Firth was good enough, but I find that I have typecast him in my head. I expect him to be all upper class, stiff upper lip, randy in the bedroom, and he's really not here. He even worked for me in Girl with a Pearl Earring as one hell of a sexy artist. He didn't sell sports fanatic, though. He mostly sold dumbass.

I'm going to go ahead and blame both Hornby's screenplay (if you can imagine), and the plodding pace that director David Evans gave the piece. It's very hard to make a slow comedy work, and Evans' shouldn't have attempted it his first time around.

Also, there was no real need to juxtapose Paul's relationship with Sarah to young Paul's (Luke Aikman) relationship with his father (Neil Pearson). I like Pearson, and I'm all for him in more movies. Even so, showing Paul giving up his dad for football and potentially losing Sarah for that same reason is like writing "Durr!" across the screen for those who didn't see the similarities. I don't care how autobiographical it is, we get it - the man loves his football.

Actually, that was also how I felt about having Firth narrate Paul's feelings about Arsenal, and how everyone loving and supporting one team was like having a big, sweaty, violent, slightly crazed family. I realize that narration is now par for the course in Hornby books-cum-movies, but I believe I recently mentioned that it's starting to grate on my nerves. I think it should be done only if there is no other way to show that something is happening. I don't need to see a happy couple being happy and then be told by some condescending voice-over that they are falling in love - I get it.

I had no idea how annoyed I was with this one. Sorry about the attitude. Basically, I don't want movies to tell me the same thing eight times over and never once make it interesting. C-