Word: wussiest
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...colleague Richard Corliss once dismissed the film Field of Dreams in these pages as "the male weepie at its wussiest." I couldn't agree more, and yet I sobbed when I first saw Field of Dreams in a theater in 1989; I sobbed again when I recently saw it on videotape, especially during the final scene, when Kevin Costner finally gets to play catch with his long-dead father. Watching this, I felt like the subject of an Oliver Sacks case study: I wanted to laugh derisively, of course, but the film somehow circumvented the part of my brain that...
Despite a lovely cameo turn by Burt Lancaster, Field of Dreams is the male weepie at its wussiest. There is poetry in baseball, sure, but it is not shaggy doggerel of the Joyce Kilmer stripe: "I think that I shall ne'er remark/ A cornfield green as Fenway Park." It comes in the concrete poetry of a Bill James statistical analysis, or in the sprung rhythm of a Roger Angell paragraph. Or in the flight of a ball from the pitcher's hand toward the catcher's glove, with a million delicious options at stake...
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