Money Ball the movie

I'm conflicted with this. I'd like to watch it, but Jonah Hill has all the appeal of cleaning up after my dog when he pukes his breakfast up on the floor because he's grazed on grass in order to make himself sick.

 

I see it, too. I remember noticing it watching A River Runs Through It. Well, parts of that movie. I never could sit through the whole thing.

 

Nominate ten films, and it's harder to keep that kind of high-box-office tripe off the list.

Too bad.

 

It was lousy crap even for its intended audience.

 

Peter Travers in Rolling Stone this week gives it the lead space, above "Contagion" and the remake of "Straw Dogs," and, more importantly 3 1/2 stars.

"Moneyball is one of the best and most viscerally exciting films of the year. Yes, director Bennett Miller dials down the on-field action and goes stats to the max. But he laces his investigative fervor with emotional punch. Moneyball is a baseball movie like The Social Network is a Facebook movie, meaning it isn't."

Peter Travers can send the royalty check to me:

My guess?

Baseball fans aren't going to like it. Non-baseball fans are.

Travers even calls baseball "dull" in the first sentence of his review, and refers to "fantasy-baseball freaks droning on about stats."

 

Just bought my tickets for tomorrow night at 7:25 p.m.

92% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes right now.

 

Ebert: Four stars.

http://www.rogerebert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110921/REVIEWS/110929999/-1/RSS

 

SportsBusinessDaily:

 

Slate's Dana Stevens lets you know about five times that she doesn't like sports or sports movies, right up top. Lest she sacrifice her Slate-y street cred in giving "Moneyball" a good review:

http://www.slate.com/id/2304418/

 

Globe & Mail loved it

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/movies/smart-and-lively-moneyball-steps-up-to-the-plate/article2176427/

 

My parents, neither of whom watch baseball, went to go see it today. They loved it.

 

Just got back. I'm pretty impressed with how they put it together. I think some of Keith Law's criticisms were pretty unfair, in hindsight. For example, he killed the director for having Beane fly across the country to discuss a trade for Ricardo Rincon. But in the scene, they were talking about all sorts of trades. It was probably still somewhat contrived, and meant to basically find a way to bring him and DePodesta together, but I don't think it was as absurd as Law thought, at least from a casual viewer's point of view.

I think the depictions of behind the scenes in the clubhouse and offices were done extremely well. You can tell that the director and actors spent some time with players and front-office people. They talk like players and front office people and act like players and front-office people more than any baseball movie I've ever seen.

At first, I thought using the 20-game winning streak in 2002 as the climax was pretty contrived, but then they walked int back some after that, so it didn't get transformed into Roy Hobbs's home run, Part II.

There was an expository speech toward the end by a new character that I felt was a little on-the-nose for a movie that avoided that kind of hackery for the most part.

My wife loved it. She wasn't talking about sabermetrics, because the movie was very sparse on that. But she loved that the guy went against the conventional thinking to succeed, which is what the movie wanted you to understand and apparently succeeded at. She compared it to "The Social Network" on the drive home without even realizing Aaron Sorkin was the screen writer for both.

More thoughts as I assemble them. It's past my bedtime, and I need to catch up with what happened in real baseball tonight when I was in the theater.