The Legoland Convention

I knew something was up; I was quite confused for a moment there. When Donkers told me he went to see Fever Pitch, I said, "Oh, that's the soccer movie, right?" He was quick to correct me: "No, baseball." And for a couple of days now, I've been trying (without looking into the issue, which would have been the smart idea) to reconcile my memory of a Nick Hornby novel/movie about soccer(well not really about soccer) and a new movie about baseball.

Well, apparently they are both the same movie. One is British and about soccer, the other is American and about baseball. Now, it's one thing to make, say, High Fidelity into an American movie; that's a choice they made to begin with. But to remake a movie only 7 years after originally released, it just seems like a hack (even though Hornby himself was onboard). It felt stupid enough when 'The Italian Job' (which doesn't take place in Italy) was Americanized, though it was decades later. Fine, okay, no one today has seen the original, so make a new one, and since we're American, let's make an American film. Fine. But 7 years! The other movie is still modern, it's still relatively new. We don't go around calling "Titanic" an old classic, do we?

Now I'm sure the new movie is good and all. The author is onboard for the project, so it can't be all that bad. I like baseball, and am neither here nor there on the actors. This is not a commentary on the new movie itself, but just the idea thousands upon thousands of people are going to sucked into a movie theatre to see a rehash of a recent movie. Maybe this is why sequels usually do so poorly (or at least aren't very good movies).


"I think I'll go home and mull this over
Before I cram it down my throat
At long last it's crashed, the colossal mass
Has broken up into bits in my moat."

"All these squawking birds won't quit.
Building nothing, laying bricks."