Usually even if I see a movie like this I wouldn’t review it. Because you know, light-hearted romantic comedy is not my area of expertise. But if a movie critic is a bear then FEVER PITCH is a big pile of fish slathered in a barrel of honey, and I think you know why. Because it’s easy as shit to write baseball puns and metaphors. It’s fuckin tee-ball for the hack headline writers of the world. Sometimes they wonder how the fuck they gonna come up with a pun for a movie headline, but with a baseball movie you hit control-A for “strikes out,” control-B for “swings for the fences.”
Actually I don’t think either of those is true, FEVER PITCH is more like a double or a triple or maybe a real good double play. They never use defensive plays in metaphors but double plays are obviously important, also triple plays but those don’t happen enough to be a common phrase. I don’t think there is such a thing as a quadruple play but it would be cool though. Anyway this is a cute romantic comedy deal but what makes it worth mentioning is (read the rest of this shit…)

DONALD WESTLAKE DOUBLE FEATURE:
Here’s a small time crime picture for you, never got much attention as a child but grew up to be a pretty good movie. It starts out with Timothy Hutton stealing a car (very believable hotwire scene here with actual hammering of the dashboard, not just pulling some wires out) then going to pick up his partner for a job. They eventually get together their crew for a jewel heist, it consists of Timothy Hutton, his older brother Roy Egan (Harvey Keitel), Jorge (some guy I thought I recognized, but turns out he was only in a handful of movies before he died) and an obnoxious hotshot jackass named Skip, sort of a Stephen Dorff type (Stephen Dorff).
There’s alot of comic strip books turned into movies but usually they Hollywood em up alot. They change the story and the super hero clothes and turn brits into americans and alot of the fans are fundamentalists so they get pretty upset. Batman doesn’t have nipples because bats don’t have nipples, Super-man isn’t supposed to wear that shade of blue it is actually a different shade of blue, that kind of thing.
WHITE DOG is the story of a racist German sheperd. Fuckin Germans. (Just kidding.) The story here is about Julie (Kristy McNicol) a small time actress who runs over a white German sheperd in the Hollywood Hills one night. She brings the dog (who never gets a name, so we’ll call him White Dog) to the vet and pays for his treatment, then takes him in while she tries to find the owner.
Here’s one of those small time, low budget independent movies you never really heard of, because it never really caught on. This one’s not even on DVD, and I think it’s out of print on VHS. Made in 1999 and with no recognizable faces except the star, Patrick Warburton, that big deep-voiced goofball I guess was on Seinfeld.
starring Bruce Willis
Legend has it that the times we’re in create the movies we watch. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes subconsciously. I mean who the fuck knows how it happens but the fears and the turbulence and the shittiness of troubled times somehow soaks into the celluloid and poisons the screen. So Vietnam and racial unrest soaked into the PLANET OF THE APES pictures, for example. The atomic age bred giant crabs, Hiroshima gave birth to Godzilla, Ronald Reagan caused
Hey folks, Harry here… I should rename Vern, Gunga Din, cuz with what he watches and writes about… he’s a braver man than I am. Case in point. WILD THINGS 3. Behold…
What this one is about is robots. It’s a movie about robots, so they called it ROBOTS. You see how that works? Movie is about robots = title is ROBOTS. That is the level of imagination and innovation we are working with here in America circa 2005. Ain’t life beautiful.

















