Jimmy Fallon Must Die
The blight otherwise known as Jimmy Fallon has joined forces with the hated Drew Barrymore to create an abomination of abominable proportions! Years before he became famous in the United States, Nick Hornby wrote a memoir titled Fever Pitch, chronicling his life through the lens of his devotion to Arsenal, the Premiereship soccer club. He lived and died at Highbury, Arsenal's home pitch (the English call a soccer field a "pitch," thus the title), often to the detriment of his personal life. The book is excellent, and I saw frightening shades of myself in it, though mercifully I have never known devotion as slavish as his to Arsenal.

There is a motion picture, soon to be released, starring Ms. Barrymore and Mr. Fallon and directed by the Farrelly bros., titled *shudder* Fever Pitch. The basic premise is that a Boston Red Sox fanatic (Fallon) must choose between the woman he loves (Barrymore) and the team he worships. Presumably, and here I am just guessing, he will realize that baseball is just a game and unimportant compared to one's relationhsips with actual people. The Internet Movie Database lists four pictures, this horror included, titled Fever Pitch (hyperlink). Sure, it's about a man overly devoted to a sports team, but perhaps that is a coincidence? They have pitching in baseball, right, thus explaining the title? Sadly, the truth takes a turn for the worse. The Fallon-Barrymore abomination is "based" on Hornby's Fever Pitch.

A bit of my faith in Mankind has abruptly expired, gone to the Great Beyond.

The relocation of High Fidelity from north London to Chicago is permissible because the protagonist Rob Gordon (in the novel, Rob Fleming) is a nearly unredeemable bastard and could not have been made sympathetic by any actor other than John Cusack, and I am dubious at the prospect of Mr. Cusack believably executing a British accent. The only way to translate the work to the screen was to shift the setting to America, and once here Chicago is preferable to either New York or Los Angeles. And yet for all the universality of his novels, Hornby is still a very British writer, and it was a triumph that the film version of About a Boy was set in its proper home, north London. Hugh Grant perfectly embodied playboy layabout Will Freeman.

And now? Now Fever Pitch, which is a memoir, not a novel, you rat finks, is to be about baseball? Not about mighty Arsenal, but rather the sad sack Red Sox? And directed by the infantile Farrelly bros.?! Blood will run. Make no mistake, I have by and large enjoyed the Farrellys' pictures, but Fever Pitch is a work of serious introspection and deserves better than to be butchered by men who titled a film about Siamese twins Stuck On You! And to gut the sports enthusiast's self-examination by making it a romantic comedy between *hurl* Jimmy Fallon and *retch* Drew Barrymore?! Truly, there is nothing sacred in this misbegotten world. I dearly hope Mr. Hornby is duly outraged.

As a side note, as little as I care about the Premiereship, the Gunners are my team, and were so long before I read Fever Pitch.