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"  It&amp;#039;s that time of year again: pennant chases, gridiron prognosticating, rabid (or at least bloody) fans of the other football ratcheting up the talk-radio chatter to its end-of-summer fever pitch. But, honestly, when was the last time things looked this bad for professional sports? From baseball&amp;#039;s interminable steroids controversy to the NFL&amp;#039;s dog-fighting and pistol-packing malcontents to even the outlandish cheating scandal afflicting British rugby, we true believers have seen better days. And that&amp;#039;s to say nothing of our individual agonies; September may be a holy month for ESPN, but it&amp;#039;s typically when I begin to come to terms with the (97-year) reality that my beloved San Francisco Giants and New Orleans Saints will go yet another season without winning a damn thing. I liken it to the preparation a stuntman undergoes to protect himself before racing around a room with his skin on fire if you do it right, it looks more painful than it really is.  But it still burns, because when it comes to sports, popular culture offers no quarter for losers. We can&amp;#039;t all be Yankees or Lakers devotees, and neither Madison Avenue nor Hollywood are in the business of selling futility. The average fan for whom &amp;quot;maybe next year&amp;quot; is as common a midseason mantra as &amp;quot;let&amp;#039;s go, team&amp;quot; is instead bludgeoned with aspirational copywriting and underdog fables. Trouble is, these message have absolutely nothing to do with the real sports world, which, except for a handful of teams and athletes every year, are all about negotiating the dynamics of failure. It&amp;#039;s time we started showing the losers a little love. Call it ironic, call it despairing, call it cynical and misanthropic. I don&amp;#039;t really care what we label the new sports-culture paradigm as long as it&amp;#039;s more relatable than, well, Fever Pitch. Because, at some point or another, we&amp;#039;re all losers if we&amp;#039;re sports fans, and nobody needs Jimmy Fallon and the Red Sox rubbing it in anymore.  As if called by a Plaxico Burress gunshot, however, the film Big Fan opens this week in limited release. Patton Oswalt stars as Paul Aufiero, a slavish, emotionally arrested New York Giants fan who lives with his mother and spends his spare time crafting subliterate testimonials for a nightly sports-talk radio show. &amp;quot;Going to the game&amp;quot; with his buddy consists of listening to a broadcast in the Giants Stadium parking lot. When he stalks his favorite Giants player, following him all the way from Staten Island to a Manhattan nightclub, Paul makes a well-meaning introduction. Disclosures, awkwardness, and ugliness ensue, threatening both Paul&amp;#039;s simple, anonymous life and the Giants&amp;#039; entire season. Don&amp;#039;t let the involvement of the comic Oswalt or writer-director (and former Onion editor-in-chief) Robert Siegel fool you: Big Fan is not funny, and as Oswalt told me last week, it was never intended to be. Rather, it bluntly addresses how fans perceive themselves in relation to their favorite teams. In the NFL, those franchises amount to objects of lust all carefully packaged, managed, and marketed for maximum emotional (and economic) impact. No other professional sports league does it better; featuring seventeen weeks of gladiatorial combat en route to a kill-or-be-killed postseason, it&amp;#039;s practically designed to be the stuff of tragedy.  And Paul&amp;#039;s tale, while extreme, is legitimately cautionary in 2009. At least it is if we glance toward Burress, the real-life Giants star now facing prison time for illegally carrying a gun into you guessed it a Manhattan nightclub. He promptly shot himself in the leg, and the defending Super Bowl-champion Giants never fully recovered from the distraction, sending their fans reeling into an off-season with tormented dreams of what might have been. Just like that, owing to both Siegel&amp;#039;s prescience and Burress&amp;#039;s stupidity, Big Fan became cinema&amp;#039;s first postmodern sports film a sincere reaction to the existential crisis of contemporary fandom.  A few other sports films earlier this year sort of had the right idea, candidly exploring the perils of instant stardom (Rudo y Cursi) and immigrant culture shock (Sugar) through the prisms of soccer and baseball. But they functioned as message movies in the end a little too bruisingly on-the-nose, implicating the fan as a culprit in the soul-crushing cycle of pro sports. Sorry, but we can&amp;#039;t all be victims here, especially when the basic function of the fan is to underwrite his team&amp;#039;s gospel, from the sanctuary of the stadium to the high priests on the field. Sure, it might be harder on a pitcher to give up a World Series-winning hit than it is for a fan to watch it on TV, but whereas HBO&amp;#039;s Eastbound and Down explored the loser&amp;#039;s curse of the former earlier this year, a fan&amp;#039;s faith is at a much more arbitrary mercy that seems sadistic at best.  Studio executives refuse to recognize the drama in that reality with equal (if consistent) sadism. Just look at Moneyball, a stalled adaptation of the book chronicling how Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane built a perennial playoff contender on a microbudget. Steven Soderbergh was set to shoot this summer with Brad Pitt starring, no less when Sony cited discomfort with his docu-drama approach and balked. (Another theory suggested that Major League Baseball wouldn&amp;#039;t license its teams&amp;#039; likeness in something so briny and candid.) Thus the second postmodern sports film was smothered in its crib or at least put on Icy Hot until Aaron Sorkin (the project&amp;#039;s third screenwriter after Steven Zaillian and Soderbergh himself) can deduce the most conventionally satisfying way to tell a story in which the central team never actually wins anything. It&amp;#039;s as though Sony boss Amy Pascal lost her nerve in the larger cultural competition, where defying genre convention is perceived as the biggest choke of all. In any case, considering how its source&amp;#039;s accessibility helped make it a bestseller, here&amp;#039;s hoping I&amp;#039;m wrong about the Moneyball movie. After all, Hollywood hinted this week that it might be coming around: Shortly after coach Rick Pitino&amp;#039;s sex-and-extortion scandal at Louisville, FX announced it would collaborate with Don Cheadle on a new series about the disillusioned coach of a corrupt college-basketball program. That&amp;#039;s more like it. Now if we could only get a horror guru like Rob Zombie to option that ghastly rugby controversy for the screen, we might be getting somewhere. Let the games the real games begin. S.T. VanAirsdale is a senior editor at Movieline.com. His film criticism and industry analysis have appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, New York, the Huffington Post, Defamer, and The Reeler, which he founded. RELATED LINKS:  A GOOD NEW SPORTS MOVIE: Because It&amp;#039;s a Documentary  FAN ETIQUETTE: How to Behave in a Sports Bar   THE NEW HOLLYWOOD: S.T. VanAirsdale&amp;#039;s Column Every Wednesday   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a6272/new-sports-movies-082609/>