MONEYBALL Pre-release Discussion

That's all pretty interesting. I tried my best to follow this project closely, and I never really saw how it would work without a visionary-level guy like Soderbergh at the helm.

Curious to also see what was cut after the fact, since this wasn't really co-written by Sorkin and Zallian as much as re-written back and forth. One approach was to make Beane a swinging single guy, and I guess they junked that because Beane is actually married with kids, but it doesn't sound like they went anywhere interesting with that. I did laugh that you wrote about DePodesta being changed "for legal reasons" to Peter Brand, since DePodesta probably said, "you have the other guy played by freakin' Brad Pitt and you cast JONAH HILL as me? FUCK YOU GUYS." The original casting choice of Demetri Martin was more accurate, for the record.

Also, regarding accuracy - bummed that Hoffman doesn't have much of a role, though that makes sense. Art Howe doesn't come across too well in the book, and in fact, it's a somewhat negative portrayal (which is good, because he was kind of an idiot). Surprised to find out Soderbergh was going to have Howe play himself. I imagine Hoffman is doing a favor, since Bennett Miller is the director who got him an Oscar for Capote.

You mention a pro-statistics stance, which is interesting, and I agree Soderbergh would have pursued this. The interesting thing about this movie is that even if you go pro-statistics, it doesn't necessarily mean it's the most efficient strategy, since there remains debate as to whether Moneyball works. Looks like they didn't do much with that either.

It's not necessarily my most anticipated of the fall, but it's something I've been deeply fascinated in seeing. Thanks for the heads up.

Still wrapping my head around it, but I did enjoy it a lot. Definitely a messier film with different agendas than one might expect.

I cannot believe I watched a major studio movie where characters spent close to five onscreen minutes discussing a trade for Ricardo Rincon. That blows my MIND.

I feel like there were commercial considerations getting in the way of what is a story of The Church Of Baseball. I loved so much of this, but they had to bring it back to family in such a disingenuous manner. Beane's relationship with his daughter was sweet, but it felt shoehorned, and did not inform the baseball story at all. They were trying to say, see, sabermetrics makes your heart grow bigger too! Kinda bullshit.

That being said, this isn't the best baseball movie ever (though I don't think there are many of those), but it's the most baseball-y one. I think if you love the sport, you're going to get the most out of this.

The problems mostly lied with Bennett Miller. Like The Social Network, the third act is an amorphous blob of non-conflict and anticlimax. Unlike Fincher, who shaped that into a watchable, compelling end to the story, this movie cherrypicks moments of the A's season and jams them together. There's one HUGE tonal shift after a big moment in the third act that turns a feeling of euphoria into a n ultimate bummer with almost NO buffer.

Also, the text at the end... total bullshit. Yeah, the Red Sox "adapted" the moneyball practices. Except they spent just as much as the Yankees in doing so.

I do think that there's something special in this movie for a specific sports fan. A small market fan, who is sick of not being able to afford players. Who is sick of downgrading expectations annually. And, most of all, who hates the fucking Yankees.

Also, from an audience perspective, I feel like this is going to be kind of a general audience downer. It's very slow, and there are lots of scenes (way too many) of Beane looking dejected, bummer and/or bored. Curious to see the reactions of some non-baseball fans who don't like the pace.

As a minor baseball fan (I like watching a game, I like listening to a game, I love a trip to the ballpark, I never keep track of stats), I loved the film. Went with a major baseball fan, and he was also in awe. I didn't know it was a Sorkin piece till the credits, but it felt like Sorkin. Nick's review hits on all the character actors in this film. When I saw the scouts' meeting, I kept thinking "Rescue Me, Sopranos, etc" almost to the point that I wondered if all scouts come from New Jersey and had a shinebox at the house. 

The tension of the blown 11 run lead was palpable in my packed theater. You could have heard a mouse pissing on cotton when the movie goes silent during that scene.  The family story did seem shoehorned in, but it makes the Beane character less of a moody asshole by softening him.  Plus, the "new" husband raised a number of laughs in my theater.  Did Jonah Hill gain wait for this film?  He seemed much, much heavier than I had ever seen him. It could have just been the contrast of skinny Hill and heavy Hill.

Overall, greatly enjoyed.

I think this was a good movie with a great movie inside of it waiting to get out. I love baseball and thought there was WAAAAAAY too much of it in the movie. Every time it switched to a baseball montage or scene, the movie lost its joy (in addition to succumbing to standard sports movie tropes). Not unexpectedly with a Sorkin script, this movie made its living when people were talking. Baseball is notorious for its lack of dialogue.

In Hoffman's first scene, I didn't recognize him. It wasn't until he put on the uniform. A combination of his hat covering his stubbled head and the sudden onset off PSH voice.

This is a weird one to digest. On the one hand, it feels like a really good movie with some interesting stuff to say about whether heart can exist in a system managed by calculation. And it does say those things, I suppose -- but at the same time, it fits pretty well into the mold of the formulaic sports picture. Perhaps it's the perfect sports movie. And yet maybe it is a terrible one. I honestly don't know.

It feels intelligent sometimes, but at the same time shallow, like it's kind of jaunting around in the makeup of something deeper. The witty dialogue and really natural performances (except Pitt, whose talent I'm not sure of these days) help dress it up in those clothes, but I don't know if it ever really overcomes what is basically a bland story -- I think putting more of a focus on the Hill character would have been smart, as he feels like more of an audience identification character than the quirky, arrogant Pitt whose arc or backstory I was never all that intrigued with.

It's a good movie, though. A little long, with a weird staggering denouement after the climax. I too wish Soderbergh had really gotten his hands on this. Those themes of emotional coldness are right up his alley.

By the way, the cinema I saw it in was packed. I'm guessing a sell out in a decent sized house for an early evening show. I wasn't expecting that.

And not to perpetuate gender stereotypes, but there seemed to be a disproportionate number of women there for a baseball movie. Like more than half the house. Couples predominated, families were certainly present, but there were three or four LARGE groups of young women. I guess Jonah Hill can still draw.

And the crowd ate it up.

This was one fine piece of film. Really outstanding stuff here. Maybe my favorite of the year (yeah I said it). I'm not a huge Baseball nut but I loved it. The whole trade scene for Rincon sealed my love.

Not at all a baseball fan, but I really enjoyed this.   The only thing I found hard to swallow is that Robin Wright would settle for Spike Jonze after being married to Brad Pitt.   

El Oh El.

Well, shit, I went to college with fake-Brian Cashman.

Nothing like a bunch of men gathering to discuss baseball and Brad Pitt.

This was a solid watch. As noted, you don't have to give much of a shit about baseball (Beane himself balks at the idea of watching the games) to enjoy. Punchy, efficient dialogue as you'd expect from Zallian and Sorkin, and a good easy pace.

I didn't mind that the stuff with Beane's family wasn't exactly fraught with drama. I'd have trimmed down some the kid stuff, as well as about 10 seconds off the final shot, as the film does tend to coast on Brad Pitt's more sentimental mannerisms. Okay, now that you're making me think about it, it kinda pisses me off.  But it's a minor gripe. In principle I like the idea that you just catch a glimpse of his spare personal life, even if it's an extended glimpse that flirts with schmaltz. Better than cramming that section with more drama and adding another twenty minutes. I don't know, maybe there could be a scene of him and his daughter working on a table saw together and she ends with her arm looking like Thing-Bennings's and they go to the ER and Brad Pitt gets covered in blood and cries.

DIdn't have much of a problem with the third act. It's not a straight blast toward a cinematic climax but a series subtle arcs rounding themselves out. (Hoffman was a classic stick-in-the-mud character to be won over late in the film, if at all). What the story lacked in structure was made up for by the performances and general consistency. There's just enough competently-rendered sport action to give that ground-level presence of the field and the athletes.

I enjoyed it most for the thematic angles: results-based thinking, the dismissal of old, ill-reasoned paradigms, all that topical shit I like. Yeah, it's spelled out pretty clearly in the Red Sox meeting, but it's something this country could stand have explicitly demonstrated to it more often.

no, I didn't edit this

To start with The Social Network, which is the obvious point of reference, that movie did two things really well.  First, it got us in the headspace of the lead character.  Second, it was able to amplify what would seemingly be mundane business and legal issues by finding the links to classic drama- jealousy, hubris, betrayal.

Moneyball does the first thing well, but not to the level of success TSN had with it, and I'm not quite sure it did the second thing at all.  What I was left with was a movie that didn't really seem to know what it wanted to be.

I like looking at movies based on real life in a vacuum; considering them on their own merits, as opposed to constantly comparing them to reality.  Maybe I wasn't able to do that here, but I just think that the movie struggled to find the drama in the real life events that aren't all that dramatic, and occasionally it even felt like it was cheating a bit with the baseball elements, or at least simplifying them too much.

In a movie like Major League, if a guy can't hit a curveball, it's as if he literally never hits a curveball; until he finally does, and that's the signal he has turned the corner completely.  In a movie like Moneyball, Art Howe pinch hitting Scott Hatteberg for a single triumphant home run doesn't play the same way.  Because wasn't Hatteberg playing all along after they traded Pena?  And wasn't his supposed value in the little things that would accumulate over the course of a season, as opposed to one big hit?  And wouldn't Howe have seen the value in what Beane was doing long before the drama of whether or not they would win their 20th in a row?  The point is, going to sports movie cliches just felt wrong.  It also bothered me that the whole Moneyball system seemed to be boiled down to drawing walks, as if OBP was the only consideration.  A movie trying to strike a less realistic tone can go for the shorthand.  It doesn't play as well here.

I think at its core the movie wanted to be dark, depressed, and fatalistic.  To be about shitty, rigged economic systems, and other Sisyphean pastimes.  But while I felt it was trying to get at that, I didn't think the movie was clearly about it, except when they put the themes of the piece directly into the dialogue.  The rest of the time it was muddled.

Anyway, now that I spent all that space talking about my issues with it, I still think there was a lot of good in it.  But that stuff had already been covered plenty.