Skip to main contentThe Nose had a sucky week.
Everywhere around him, it seemed, the walls were collapsing.
Discouraged by matters as small as the newly discovered carpenter ants in his woodwork and as mundane as the unanticipated expense of new radial tires. Disheartened at a party where an evening of conversation had less intellectual wattage than a week of Live with Regis and Kelly. Despondent with the onset of a hay-fever season that has the dripping Nose reaching for his Allegra faster than Ozzy Osbourne shoos his dogs off the couch.
But it's not just personal problems that have the Nose bent out of shape. Instead, it's also the events of the world around him. Everywhere the Nose looked the view was bleak. In the Middle East, the Palestinians and Israelis are proving no religion has a monopoly on deadly stubbornness. In this country, it was the ongoing revelations of child sex abuse by Catholic priests. (The Nose is beginning to think that Oregon's reputation as one of the least church-attending states in the U.S. might be a selling point.) Closer to home, it was the obscene "bonuses" PGE executives made to themselves last year while they were sticking customers with rate increases. It also was the announcement that House Speaker Mark Simmons was pimping himself by signing on as the public-affairs director for an agricultural lobby--while he's still in office.
Even the good stuff was bad. Portlanders cheered the news that a wind turbine manufacturer is moving here, ignoring that the federal and local subsidies Vestas Wind Systems will receive may make it a casebook example of corporate welfare. And the annual beach cleanup, the one rite of spring guaranteed to be a good-news story, took a grisly turn when volunteers near Newport unearthed a dead baby wrapped in plastic.
By the end of last week, the Nose's nostrils were so flared that he went hunting through his medicine cabinet searching for some Prozac. And he doesn't even use Prozac.
So Sunday evening, the Nose went in search of non-medicinal encouragement. Something to restore his faith in the human condition. Something, to put it bluntly, inspiring.
He went and saw The Rookie, the new film by screenwriter Mike Rich, the Portland radio newshound who had already penned Finding Forrester. The Rookie is the true story of Jim Morris, a baseball pitcher who gives up the game due to an injury, becomes a west Texas high-school teacher and coach, and, on a lark, tries out for and returns to Major League Baseball a decade later.
Sure the film is saccharine-sweet. True, the acting of Dennis Quaid seems to have been stolen from the Harrison Ford school of looking puzzled throughout much of a movie. And who is the Nose to argue with WW's own film critic, who was also pleasantly surprised but only gave it a half a cup in her review?
Still, the film was so unrelentingly decent that the Nose couldn't help himself. He felt good. He felt cleansed. He felt refreshed. And he wasn't alone. According to exit polls, nearly 90 percent of who've seen The Rookie give it a "highly favorable" rating, compared to about 60 percent for most films.
Will the film bring the Arafats and Sharons of the world to their senses? No, but it has an underlying message that they might want to think about: Sometimes
people are so busy running away from their nightmares that they forget to chase their dreams.
WWeek 2015