Word: bat
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...more than usually asexual in this movie. So much cleansing to do, so little time to do it. Girls (or, for that matter, boys) are a distraction he can't afford. Whenever Katie Holmes, unwisely loving him, appears, he starts doing his Penguin imitation, perhaps understandably. There's the Bat Cave to tidy up, the Bat gear to invent (wry Morgan Freeman is helpful in that regard) and a bustling array of master and minor criminals to bring to justice...
...literary recycling bin into which unwritable novels go. As a writer Hornby is one of the great welterweights-lots of comic flair, good with the voices and the pop culture, always ready with a dash of bittersweet pathos-but he's not generally thought of as swinging a heavy bat, intellectually speaking. There's a reason his books get turned into movies starring John Cusack (High Fidelity) and Hugh Grant (About a Boy) and not Sean Penn and Russell Crowe...
...caricature. For example, alone in his dark room after hearing the news, Nick fantasizes about getting sympathy hugs from the cute girl with braces against a setting sun, complete with puppy dog at their side. The book culminates in a true-life sports cliche as Nick goes up to bat for the team down by one in the bottom of the ninth with bases loaded and two outs in the championship game. Unlike fiction, the outcome makes little difference as Nick's father dies anyway, leaving Nick feeling deeply angry. In the book's preface, Nick Jeffrey wonders if this...
Mann, the power-hitting Crimson catcher, woke up his teammates with a rocket shot into the stands just beyond the home dugout to lead off the second. In the same at-bat, he bounded Harvard’s first hit of the day through the infield and, following a Steffan Wilson groundout, scored the Crimson’s first run of the NCAA Tournament...
...wasn’t all good news. In the last at-bat of Mann’s career—runners waited on second and third in the bottom of the ninth with a two-out, 14-6 deficit to overcome—the captain struck out to end the game. The final pitch: a called strike on a 3-2 fastball that looked inside. Gracefully, Mann bowed out and shook hands with the opposing team...