Moneyball

Posted on September 22, 2011 at 6:02 pm

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Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some strong language
Profanity:	Some strong language (much less than the book)
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Chewing tobacco, alcohol
Violence/ Scariness:	Tense family situations, sad references to injuries and letting players go
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	September 23, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	January 9, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0060ZJ7BC

Brad Pitt is underrated as an actor. But he is the best there is when it comes to calibrating the deployment of his onscreen star power, which he uses as expertly as Meryl Streep does accents. Pitt can dial it down to one when he wants to play character actor and make it work. But here he dials it back up to eleven, giving the role of Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane a shot of pure movie magic in this real-life story about the man who turned baseball upside down by using computer formulas to select “undervalued” players.

The Oakland A’s feel like “a farm team for the New York Yankees.” They make players great and then lose them to the teams with budgets more than three times as large. All that money makes the playing field anything but level. “We’re a small market team and you’re a small market GM. I’m asking you to be okay spending the money we have,” the owner tells Beane. “There are rich teams and there are poor teams and then 50 feet of crap, and then there’s us,” is Beane’s frank appraisal.

The A’s cultivate and train players who leave for the teams that can pay the most. A game that is supposed to be about skill and drive seems to be just about money. And then Beane, in the midst of a negotiation with another team that is not going well, notices a nerdy-looking guy in the corner who seems to have some influence. After the meeting, that nerdy guy becomes Beane’s first draft pick.

He is Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a shy wonk who comes to work for Beane and together they pursue a different direction. Instead of the century-old system of watching players hit, catch, throw, and run and try to figure out if that means they will be able to perform in the big leagues — a system that failed badly when Beane himself was recruited right out of high school — they will look at computer algorithms about what produces wins. Brand and Beane develop a roster like Warren Buffett puts together a stock portfolio. They look at fundamentals to figure out unrecognized value. Sort of a grown-up Bad News Bears. Or, as Brand puts it, an Island of Misfit Toys.

The script from two of the best screenwriters in history, Aaron Sorkin (“The Social Network”) and Steven Zallain (“Schindler’s List”) is well-structured and filled with smart talk. The scenes of Beane’s own pro career are too long and too distracting. But scenes with Beane visiting his ex-wife (Robin Wright) and her new husband and especially those with Beane and his daughter add warmth and urgency to the story. But it is Pitt who is in every way the heart of the movie, his natural confidence and grace a lovely balance to the formulas with Greek letters and the endless statistics. It is nice to see baseball, that most number-centric game, get upended by numbers. And yet it succeeds because it is that most cherished of traditions, the come-from-behind underdog story.

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Fall Movies 2011 — Miss Piggy, Double Clooneys, Spaceys, and Lautners, the First Silent Film in 80 Years, and Brad Pitt Plays Ball

Posted on September 3, 2011 at 8:00 am

Summer is time for superheroes, remakes, raunchy comedies, and sequels. As the leaves begin to fall, movies get a little more ambitious, a little edgier, a little weightier, with less CGI and a bit more depth. But that doesn’t mean they forget how to be fun. Here are some of the movies I am most excited about between now and Thanksgiving:

1. “Moneyball” — based on the book of that title by Michael Lewis, the guy who wrote “The Blind Side” and “Liar’s Poker.” Brad Pitt stars as the real-life Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane, who revolutionized the way players are selected by applying an intense statistical analysis to determine which players were undervalued by traditional scouts. Two of my favorite screenwriters, Aaron Sorkin (“The Social Network,” “The West Wing”) and Steve Zallian (“Schindler’s List,” “Searching for Bobby Fischer”) and the director of “Capote” are behind this film and I think Pitt is going to remind us that he can act.

2. “The Ides of March” — from “Farragut North” (the name of a DC Metro stop), a play by a guy who knows electoral politics from the inside — he worked on the Howard Dean campaign. George Clooney directed and stars in this story of an ambitious campaign worker (Ryan Gosling).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McCt-_yYLpo

3. “The Skin I Live In” — Antonio Banderas is back with the man who gave him his start, Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, in this story about a plastic surgeon who holds a woman captive for an artificial skin experiment. Almodovar movies are always filled with electrifying melodrama and this one reportedly has a plot twist no one will see coming.

4. “The Artist” — one of the most talked-about films at Cannes this year is a black and white silent film about an actor in the silent era whose career collapses when talkies come in. John Goodman co-starred with French actors who spoke no English, but I guess it doesn’t matter because it has old-fashioned title cards.

5. “Hugo” — Martin Scorsese directs a film based on the Caldecott-award winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which was inspired by the man who invented special effects, George Méliès. Sir Ben Kingsley and Chloë Moretz star.

6. “The Muppet Movie” — Jason Segal, Amy Adams, Miss Piggy, Kermit, the Swedish Chef, Fozzie Bear, and my favorites, Statler and Waldorf. Guaranteed to be the family movie of the season.

7. “Immortals” — Tarsem Singh’s “The Fall” was one of the most visually sumptuous movies ever made. I can’t wait to see what he does with this story about a battle of the Greek gods. Bonus: the new Superman, Henry Cavill, stars as Theseus.

8. “Puss In Boots” — Banderas again, with his “Shrek” character on an adventure of his own, co-starring with “Hangover’s” Zach Galifinakis as Humpty Dumpty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eb7rR26ZqSw&ob=av3n

9. “The Descendants” — Clooney does not usually play a dad, but in this film from Alexander Payne (“Sideways,” “Election”), he is a father who discovers that his wife was cheating on him.

10. “Margin Call” — Who better to play a Wall Street guy trying to prevent a meltdown at an investment bank than Kevin Spacey? (He also stars in “Father of Invention” as a man hoping for a comeback.)

Could be guilty pleasures: “Real Steel,” “A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas 3D,” and “The Big Year”

Prestige movie that could be boring: Leonardo diCaprio in “J. Edgar”

Remakes I hope aren’t terrible: “Footloose” and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”

Taylor Lautner has two big releases: “Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1” and “Abduction”

I’m least looking forward to: Adam Sandler as boy and girl twins in “Jack and Jill”

Looks intriguingly twisted: “Take Shelter”

Seen them already and liked them: “Drive,” “Warrior,” “50/50”

Happy September!

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The Tree of Life

Posted on June 2, 2011 at 6:19 pm

On those dark nights of the soul, when we consider not just life but Life, and Meaning, and our place in the cosmos, our lives don’t play out in our minds in sequence. Images and snatches of words flicker back and forth in what can seem like random order or they can seem to come together like a pointillist painting, revealed at last only at the end. The famously reclusive, famously painstaking filmmaker Terrence Malick has made a film that projects such a meditation on screen, inviting us to bring to it or own search for meaning.Its non-linear, almost anti-linear style admits or rather welcomes many interpretations. Whole passages are impressionistic, almost abstract. Like the “Rite of Spring” section of “Fantasia” or the famous “Powers of Ten” short film popular with middle school science teachers, it explores the farthest reaches of time and space. The slightly more traditional “movie” sections alternate between the story of a family like Malick’s own in mid-century Waco, Texas and contemporary scenes of the now-adult son of the family (Sean Penn), who wanders almost wordless through settings of steel and glass.

Malick has only made five films in nearly 40 years. Each of them has had a meditative quality, a haunting voiceover, exquisite images, and themes centering on the loss of Eden. “The Tree of Life” begins with a quote from the Book of Job, but even though very sad events befall the O’Brien family this is not the story of good people whose faith is tested by a series of unbearable losses. It is an exploration of how we fit into the grandest possible scheme of things, how the patterns repeat in the division of cells to make complex systems, the development of mechanical formulas so singular that they merit a patent, the awakening of the first adult thoughts in a child, innocence and loss, harsh reality and ethereal imagination.

Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien are so archetypal they do not even have first names. They are just Father (never Dad) (Pitt) and Mother (pre-Raphaelite beauty Jessica Chastain). Pitt sheds his movie-star charisma for his Missouri roots, showing us a mid-century man from Middle America, every line of him as straight as the slide rule that like O’Brien himself is about to be out of date. He loves his three boys fiercely and fights down his own tenderness to teach them the lessons he thinks they must have to survive. He is all that is hard and logical and precise and mechanical. Mrs. O’Brien is gentle, almost silent, so in tune with nature she seems to float through it.

The movie’s near-miracle is the way it evokes the muddy, let’s-break-something boy world. Sending a frog up in a rocket, racing behind a truck spewing clouds of DDT, shoving against each other like puppies, holding in wonder a neighbor’s neglige, the heartless, heedless, long, long thoughts of a boy’s life are beautifully portrayed.

It is easy to understand why this film was both booed at Cannes and given its highest honor. I admired the film’s audacity but winced at its pretentiousness. There are some moments of stunning beauty and power. But other parts seemed overdone and empty.

(If you want to know what I think the ending means, send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com — and tell me what you think it means!)

Parents should know that this film includes an offscreen death of a child with devastating parental grief, children’s play results in death of an animal, a father is strict with children and his wife to the point of brutality, some dinosaur violence, some disturbing existential themes.

Family discussion: What is this movie about? How do the creation scenes relate to the story of the family? Why is there so little dialog? What is happening in the end on the beach?

If you like this, try: the short film “Powers of Ten” and the other films by Terrence Malick including “Days of Heaven” and “Badlands”

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Drama Family Issues Spiritual films

Megamind

Posted on February 22, 2011 at 8:00 am

Let’s get it out of the way first thing. “Megamind” would be a much more enjoyable experience if it wasn’t so close to one of this year’s brightest family pleasures, Despicable Me. Both are stories of the clash of two mega-villains that turn an anti-hero into a lovable guy. Both lead characters suffer because they were not loved and made to feel a source of pride as children. The sidekicks even have the same name. Megamind has to battle “Despicable Me’s” Gru for the affection of audiences.

It isn’t as good — and it owes a little bit to the incomparable “The Incredibles,” too. But on its own terms it is still a lot of fun and one of the best in a year of spectacular animated features.

Megamind (voice of Will Ferrell) came to earth as a little baby with a big, blue head sent here by rocket before his planet exploded. But at the same time, another set of parents was shooting off their baby towards earth. Megamind’s rocket landed in a prison and he had a childhood of abuse, bullying, and deprivation while his rival was the handsome, charming, popular kid in school who would grow up to be a superhero known as Metro Man (the very manly voice of Brad Pitt). Megamind decided that if he couldn’t be the best at being good, he’d be the best at being bad.

All goes pretty well until Metro Man is suddenly out of the picture. Without a worthy adversary, Megamind has something of an existential crisis. His brilliant solution is to create a new hero so he have someone to compete with. But that doesn’t go according to plan and Megamind finds himself having to save the day.

Those who are familiar with superhero lore will appreciate the tributes to the Superman origin story and Lois Lane-style intrepid female reporter. There are some references to Cyrano de Bergerac as well; it’s not a coincidence that the female lead is named Roxanne (voice of Tina Fey). It is clever without being snarky, and avoids over-doing the usual pop culture references and air quotes. I especially like the way that the emotions and reactions of the main characters, Megamind, Roxanne, and the new nemesis are very relatable for elementary school kids while giving them something to stretch for with references to Tesla coils and existential discussions and a plot with a couple of extra twists. And Roxanne is far from the usual damsel in distress. “Can someone stamp my frequent kidnapping card?” she asks dryly. “You of all people should know we discontinued that promotion,” Megamind replies. She likes him, not because he’s dangerous, but because she can see how much he really wants to be good. And when he’s bad, he’s very, very bad, but when he’s good, he’s even better.

Trailer: Megamind

Posted on June 11, 2010 at 3:59 pm

Here’s an early peek at “Megamind” an animated superhero (and super-villain) movie featuring the voices of Tina Fey, Will Ferrell, and Brad Pitt. It looks delightful!

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