Movies

Dodge this!

Slapstick sports comedy bounces onto screens

Photographs courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox

Did You Know : Ben Stiller has just finished filming the movie follow-up to Meet the Parents, titled Meet the Fockers.

Remember your childhood fears � perhaps born on your local playgrounds � of a red rubber ball hurtling towards your head? Or the sweet taste of revenge when you threw it right back at the class bully? No? Then you�ve never played dodgeball, the game where people hurl balls at each other for no real reason other than to hit or get hit.

Now dodgeball is becoming a cultural phenomenon. Adult leagues are springing up in major US cities, magazine Vanity Fair called the game the �It Sport� and the New York Times recently heralded the sport�s re-emergence.

So the time is right for the sport to make it onto the big screen in a movie that puts the pain and humiliation of having a ball slammed in your face into a raucous comedy setting. Sports fans and hapless losers unite: Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story has finally arrived.

FITNESS FACE-OFF

In Dodgeball, Peter LaFleur (Vince Vaughn) is a charismatic underachiever and proprietor of a rundown gym called Average Joe�s. Average Joe�s clientele is made up of a self-styled pirate, a scrawny nerd who dreams of impressing a cheerleader, an obsessive aficionado of obscure sports, a dim-witted young man and a cocky know-it-all who, of course, really knows nothing.

Peter�s gym catches the eye of White Goodman (Ben Stiller), the egomaniacal owner of Globo Gym, a gleaming fitness facility. White intends to take over Average Joe�s and Peter�s non-existent accounting is making it all too easy for him.

A bank has put lawyer Kate Veatch (Christine Taylor) inside Average Joe�s to finalise Globo�s takeover of the gym. But Peter�s boyish charms win her over and Kate joins his team of social rejects to beat the odds � and their own ineptitude � to try to save Average Joe�s. How? A showdown dodgeball competition against Globo Gym.

Will the band of misfits win through against the gleaming, athletically gifted Globo Gym sportsmen? Find out in theatres from November 4.

FROM SCRIPT TO SCREEN

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story nearly didn�t make it to the screen. �A dodgeball movie is uncharted film territory,� Rawson Marshall Thurber, the film�s writer/director, said. �But at the same time it inhabits the same tradition of great comedies that follow scrappy underdogs taking on the socially, financially or physically perfect and prevailing against all odds.�

Thurber�s screenplay, while well received by studio executives, initially failed to find a buyer. �I�d hear things like, �Wow, this is really funny � but we don�t want to make a dodgeball movie,� Thurber said. �Apparently there�s very little data on how dodgeball movies perform at the box office, mostly because there were no other films on the subject.�

Ultimately, Red Hour Films, a production company headed by Ben Stiller (There�s Something About Mary, Meet the Parents, Starsky and Hutch) snapped up the script after a receptionist read it and passed it on to a company executive. Finally, it landed on Ben Stiller�s desk and the rest is dodgeball history.

Vocabulary

hurtle (v): to move or make somebody/something move very fast in a particular direction
hurl (v): to throw something/somebody violently in a particular direction
league (n): a group of sports teams who all play each other to earn points and find which team is best
herald (v): to say in public that somebody/something is good or important
raucous (adj): sounding loud
charismatic (adj): having the powerful personal quality that some people have to attract and impress other people
clientele (n): all the customers or clients of a shop/store, restaurant, organisation, etc.
scrawny (adj): (of people or animals) very thin in a way that is not attractive
aficionado (n): a person who likes a particular sport, activity or subject very much and knows a lot about it
cocky (adj): too confident about yourself in a way that annoys other people
ineptitude (n): lack of skill
uncharted (adj): that has not been visited or investigated before; not familiar
prevail (v): in this use, to defeat an opponent, especially after a long struggle
snap up (phrasal v): to buy or obtain something quickly because it is cheap or you want it very much

Idiom

win (somebody) over: to make someone come onto your side, or like you