Moneyball

skipped the best one:

http://4.media.sportspickle.cvcdn.com/61/50/dd0d448499e6ef71e40a07c843c9545d.jpg

so many Yankee fans

That part about the Carlos Pena trade is pathetic.

What, that they reduced it from a 3-team trade to make the scene simpler? Movies do that shit all the time (no one cares), and that's the least of this one's problems.

seeing this for review next Tuesday. (They like to give the online writers a good 24-36 hours to crank something out.)

― incredibly middlebrow (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, September 13, 2011 10:16 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark

The Fog of WAR by Dr Morbius

Keep in mind that this was written for civilian readers. But I did work in E.M. Forster.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/moneyball/5768

^^Nice review. I saw this last night, with a director talk afterward. I thought it was entertaining, at times meandering, and at times needlessly cheesy. I don't know enough about the book or baseball to be particularly offended by any of it. The best part was probabaly the Sorkin dialogue stuff, along with Brad Pitt's mugging for the camera. A few dudes in the audience were in full A's regalia.

great review morbs

I rather hate Sorkin. The John Henry-Beane scene in Fenway is an example of what he can do quite well. The quasi-screwball banter (Hatteberg and Justice on H's graeatest fear, the Hill/Pitt comedy act) I have little use for.

As a Mets fan, of course, I'm fine with Art Howe being portrayed as a mulish boob.

nice, thanks for posting

Good review. Also: 133 minutes?!

Civilian readers? Are there any other kind?

a total absence of romance, plentiful industry-specific jargon, and worst of all, math.

Reminds me of what I hated about A Beautiful Mind (having read the book)--they took out all the excellent math and replaced it with silly CIA agents and other figments of Nash's imagination.

Costas-Beane-Pitt roundtable on MLB Network this weekend, I think.

Here the nuances are replaced with the little Beane tween asking Dad if he's gonna get fired. And flashbacks to young Billy striking out.

Robin Wright Penn (sic) is also wasted as Beane’s ex-wife who is apparently married to a closeted gay man.

Well, KLaw, it is California.

WmC, that Redford-Levinson travesty of The Natural was 134 minutes. And where ya been, all films that aspire to OSCAR must be over 2 hours long, it's in the Academy bylaws.

Posnanski blog post on the Chuck Yeager of Moneyball: http://joeposnanski.blogspot.com/2011/09/ballad-of-bill-james.html

I didn't realize Moneyball had any Oscar aspirations! Adapting that book to film never seemed like a good idea to me, so I've let most of the hype go past unnoticed.

the screenplay is credited to the guys who wrote Schindler's List & The Social Network *HINT*

btw I considered opening my piece w/ "There are two good baseball movies, and this isn't one of them."

Bull Durham and Pride of the Yankees?

Sugar and Eight Men Out?

Major League and Major League II?

Two good baseball movies is probably two more than any other sport I can think of (assuming you aren't counting docs in this.)

Sugar and The Bad News Bears ('76)!

(Bull Durham's good, but it's about sex. And Babe Ruth and Teresa Wright are about all I like in TPotY. "Is it three strikes, Doc?")

ML1

if the movie does well, i'm sure a musical won't be far behind; as is the trend these days.

actually, even if the movie bombs it's a distinct possibility.

You don't like 8MO, Morbs? It's not as good as the book, I guess.

I think it's one of Sayles' more lugubrious films.

Sayles has non-lugubrious films?

:p Lone Star, Passion Fish

Baseball movies, damn it, BASEBALL MOVIES!

damn yankees!

Hometown paper gives a weak rave, replete with typos (Paul Podesta!):

http://www.mercurynews.com/movies-dvd/ci_18947085?nclick_check=1

Great review, Morbs. And the movie version of 8MO pales in comparison to the book. Maybe it depends on which you saw/read first (I read the book first).

Good review, Morbs. I debated whether to spend two hours-plus watching this.

Small correction: Forster himself didn't use "Only connect..." in the text of Howards End; it's an epigraph.

!

http://www.online-literature.com/forster/howards_end/22/

He uses "Only connect," but it's not dialogue. Oh well, print the legend.

I had to get my distance-running, non-baseball fan ed to change the homepage headline from "Math Ruins Moneyball's Scorecard."

morbs, your charlie wilson's war review is really good! (it wz in the Related Articles links)

Well, thanks...

The critics really love Moneyball, so my I-hate-everything rep is again burnished.

whoa 87 on metacritic? wtf

would be in the 90s w/o you included

That not being a SABR member correlates with liking this film is obvious.

also any movie with a tech angle instantly = internet crit score inflation

burt Rex Reed loves it. I'm sure he has an assistant turn on his computer for him.

i thought this was pretty good? i dug the melancholy vibe (or at least that's the vibe i got). the sorta sad idea that the moments of "romanticism" are manufactured or meaningless. actually seems more relevant to "how we live now" than something like The Social Network.

I dont follow baseball too much, but I am a Rockets fan so I'm a little familiar with the "statistical revolution." Rockets GM Daryl Morey wrote an article for Grantland on all this: http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7001767/moneyball-houston-rockets

Yeah, apparently moneyball concepts are more transferable to basketball than football.

i didnt know the A's story too well, so i was surprised how it basically paralleled the Rockets for the last 5 years or so--winning a lot more regular season games than seemed possible, an improbable record breaking winning streak, and little to no postseason success.

just thinking out loud, i wonder if football is the most difficult because there's the most "moving parts" out there on the field. 11 versus 5 create an exponentially higher level of complexity. plus i think a single play in football has several different possible positive outcomes other than "score" or "deny scoring." baseball often seems to boil down to a 1-1 matchup.

1-1 matchup which may or may not lead within a fraction of a second to a different 1-1 matchup which may or may not lead within another second to a third 1-1 matchup, etc

I'm looking fwd to this week's BProspectus podcast based on this line in the contents rundown:

Pop Culture Moment: Is Moneyball fucking shit up again?

At a reported $47 million, it cost Sony more to make "Moneyball" than it cost the A's to field their entire 2002 roster.

That thought crossed my mind while watching... $47 M is actually low-budget for a studio film with a big star.