Moneyball

This weeks film was Moneyball.  I am not a baseball person so I'm doing this review based on someone who has no clue whatsoever about any of the teams, managers, or players.
  Overall, this film was good, I'd rank at 3.5/5 overall, but the director could have improved on several things.

  The absolute best part of this movie was the Pitt/Hill dynamic.  They worked together really really well in the parts they were assigned.  I know it doesn't seem like Jonah Hill could pull off something serious, but he does it extremely well.  Any humor in the felt scripted (in a good way).  There were no spontaneous jokes or humorous situations, all the jokes were more in the actions of the characters or in the way the dialogue between Pitt and Hill played out, not something improvised, but something planned. 

   However, it took too long to introduce the main character.  The film opens with a clip of the 2001 ALDS baseball single elimination rounds.  The Oakland Athletics lose to the New York Yankees.  Next scene is Brad Pitt stomping on a radio. We know Brad Pitt, so we know he's the main guy, but it takes another 4 minutes to introduce Pitt as Billy Beane, we know he's the GM of the Athletics before we know his name.  To me, this is a little distracting.  Why could they not have said who he was to begin with?

Another thing I didn't like was the flashbacks Beane would have.  He went straight from high school to the New York Mets, blowing off a scholarship, and he never made a name for himself because he was too green.  The only time I can see his background story helping is when he recruits Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill) to be his assistant manager.  Beane asks Brand if he would have drafted him first round.  Brand says "No.  I would have picked you in the ninth, and offered no signing bonus.  You would have passed it over for a scholarship."  After hearing this, Beane hires Brand. 
All the flashbacks following this feel like they are there to make the film last longer.  We got an overview of Beane's professional career, why do we need to keep going back to it?  I could understand if the flashbacks were of different events, but they are the same ones. Blah.


Finally, I didn't like the strange filming when they were developing the plan.  The camera would zoom into the computer screen so it would show individual pixels, or into a TV so it would show those three colored bars that make up the image, but they would keep the background image just in focus. It was a great way to add emphasis, and an interesting queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach...


As always, here's the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.  I don't like the reviews this time around, particularly because they are not so much about the movie as about the surprise at Brad Pitt's ability to act after he reached middle age.  They don't say anything about Jonah Hill's performance, which I found to be the best part of the movie.  Overall though, I don't have anything drastic to say against these reviews.  They are fairly accurate, except I don't understand the "anguish" Deneby mentions, since the film hit me as just another Miracle.

Despite the flaws I pointed out, this was a fun movie, and it's safe to bring your family to (they only drop the f bomb twice after all), and the way that Pitt and Hill work together makes the film worth seeing.