"Pinstripes are slimming"

So last night, it was late and I was flipping through channels and watched "Summer Catch" with Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jessica Biel. I was never in a hurry to see it, as I don't watch a lot of romantic-comedies, but now that I have sat through it, I have to share the joy.

It was so cliched and predictable that I barely noticed the familiar faces in the supporting cast: Marc Blucas (Buffy), Christian Kane (Angel, Leverage), Brittany Murphy (Clueless) and Jason Geddrick (Iron Eagle). Then again, it's not as if any of these characters were developed during the movie. I also think that I either blanked out during the (sexist) post-practice bar scenes and/or MTV may have cut some of them because some are in the trailer that I don't remember seeing in the film.

Anyone, there was something I couldn't block out: Jessica Biel as love interest Tenley Parrish.

I remember her as the athletic oldest daughter on Seventh Heaven who's leaving left the show in shambles. So, I definitely expected her to pull off a sports movie.

Oh how wrong I was. Or at least, how wrong the writers were to write such an awful character for Biel.

At the beginning of the movie, it is made clear that Tenley does not know anything about baseball. She's daddy's little princess, so somehow she has missed the fact that baseball is the center of the summers in Chatham. She even has a scene where she rambles about the uniforms, saying things like "pinstripes are slimming."

OK, some women don't know about sports. But she spends the movie falling in love with a baseball player who's only dream is to pitch in the Majors.

At the end of the movie, she stops by the ballpark and is told that her man is pitching a no hitter. Her response: "What's a no-hitter?"

What? It's a pretty basic, self-explanatory term, and she is in love with a pitcher! How could she not know? Can women not know anything about sports unless they are the tomboyish-ten-year-old team mascots?

So, as many of you probably already know about this Hollywood-old movie, it failed.