Moneyball (2011)

[Edgy MD]

Not a lot of films released this year have featured fictionalized versions of current and former Mets personnel. This one is a notable exception. What did you think?

[Willets Point]

Heh-heh, Monkeyballs.

Haven't seen the movie

[Edgy MD]

Me neither, but Sage --- who was in fact championing this film years ago --- has.

[Willets Point]

So has met fairy. I noted on her Facebook review the irony of having a highly-talented actor portray a lousy manager.

[Vic Sage]

A quiet, contemplative, deliberately paced movie with much to say, that avoids most (if not all) sports movie cliches.
I liked it alot. And Pitt's perf as aging jock seemed pitch-perfect, working well off of goofball gone straight Jonah Hill. Just enough baseball to keep it a baseball movie and not a business movie. and it makes a folk hero out of Scott Hatteberg.

[Vic Sage]

Edgy DC wrote: Me neither, but Sage --- who was in fact championing this film years ago --- has.

Sage has what?

[Ceetar]

Didn't make it this weekend, pondering seeing it in San Diego next weekend.

[Edgy MD]

Vic Sage wrote: A quiet, contemplative, deliberately paced movie with much to say, that avoids most (if not all) sports movie cliches. I liked it alot. And Pitt's perf as aging jock seemed pitch-perfect, working well off of goofball gone straight Jonah Hill. Just enough baseball to keep it a baseball movie and not a business movie. and it makes a folk hero out of Scott Hatteberg.

If I recall correctly, I thought it would die in development because sports movies need a Last Second Victory Against Improbable Odds. Vic insisted the story had enough to sail by anyhow. Looking forward to it.

[Guest themetfairy]

Aaron Sorkin never lets the facts get in the way of a good story.

The Moneyball principles were being used way before the 2002 season. And how can you tell the story of that season without acknowledging that the team had the 2000 Cy Young runner-up (Hudson), the 2001 Cy Young runner-up (Mulder), the 2002 Cy Young Award winner (Zito) and the 2002 MVP (Tejada)?

That said, it was an entertaining film.

[Frayed Knot]

Vic Sage wrote: A quiet, contemplative, deliberately paced movie with much to say, that avoids most (if not all) sports movie cliches. I liked it alot. And Pitt's perf as aging jock seemed pitch-perfect, working well off of goofball gone straight Jonah Hill. Just enough baseball to keep it a baseball movie and not a business movie. and it makes a folk hero out of Scott Hatteberg.

Yeah, pretty much this.

It's not the book, which is OK because I didn't go in expecting it to be. Beane's relationship with his daughter, barely mentioned in the book, is played up as a sizable part of the story to bring the human element into things. Other parts from the book are left out (the amateur draft portion) and naturally timelines are skewed, simplified, or condensed from actual happenings. And what that all means is that those who misinterpreted what 'Moneyball' means because they misread or never read the thing it in the first place (Joe Morgan, Mike Francesa) are going to have a whole new set of reasons misunderstand it.

Particularly well done are the virtually seem-less transitions back and forth between actual footage of 2002 baseball scenes and shot footage, sometimes to the point where it's tough to tell which is which.



Met connections/sightings:
Beane of course. Not just as A's GM but also in flashback scenes to his signing and his NYM career (wearing #35 with shots of Straw in the background)
Art Howe. Played by Philip Hoffman as much more grouchy than the sunny if bland Art we all knew and ... tolerated.
Chad Bradford. One of the few players with significant speaking parts.
Paper NYM David Justice. A prominent player/actor in the flick.
Izzy. Often mentioned but never shown.

[Vic Sage]

themetfairy wrote: Aaron Sorkin never lets the facts get in the way of a good story. The Moneyball principles were being used way before the 2002 season. And how can you tell the story of that season without acknowledging that the team had the 2000 Cy Young runner-up (Hudson), the 2001 Cy Young runner-up (Mulder), the 2002 Cy Young Award winner (Zito) and the 2002 MVP (Tejada)? That said, it was an entertaining film.

first of all, Sorkin was the third writer brought in on the project, and really was brought in to punch up the dialogue more than structure the story. so the crack about sorkin is just factually incorrect.

secondly, as Michael Lewis himself pointed out in an interview with Costas, the drafting of Hudson and Zito was as much due to a "moneyball" analysis as anything else in the story... they were hardly "can't miss" scouting wet dreams. But in any event, the story was about the players Beane decided to bring in that season and why. they weren't making a "Bull Durham" sports comedy about all the guys on the team. they were telling a story about an idea, a philosophy. which is a hard thing to do; they would've had a much easier time doing it almost any other way.

so good on them.

[Guest themetfairy]

I'll disagree Vic. The implication of the script was that Beane adopted the "Moneyball" strategy as a direct reaction to the loss of the 2001 ALDS. The further implication was that the success of the 2002 team was the direct and immediate result of Beane's moves during that offseason.

It may make for a nice tale, but it's not the real story of that team.

[Ceetar]

Edgy DC wrote: Vic Sage wrote: A quiet, contemplative, deliberately paced movie with much to say, that avoids most (if not all) sports movie cliches. I liked it alot. And Pitt's perf as aging jock seemed pitch-perfect, working well off of goofball gone straight Jonah Hill. Just enough baseball to keep it a baseball movie and not a business movie. and it makes a folk hero out of Scott Hatteberg. If I recall correctly, I thought it would die in development because sports movies need a Last Second Victory Against Improbable Odds. Vic insisted the story had enough to sail by anyhow. Looking forward to it.

The book has one of these, and near the end if I recall, when the A's break the consecutive win streak record after falling behind in the game. That must have made the movie right?

[Frayed Knot]

Your details are a bit off but, yes, that moment is built into the movie although not as the big payoff/climax as would be the case in a typical sports flick.

[bmfc1]

I enjoyed it but didn't love it. There's no ending, just a possible moment of realization for Beane, and the parts with the daughter were superfluous and only served to make the movie a half-hour too long.

[Guest themetfairy]

bmfc1 wrote: I enjoyed it but didn't love it. There's no ending, just a possible moment of realization for Beane, and the parts with the daughter were superfluous and only served to make the movie a half-hour too long.

This

[Vic Sage]

not superfluous.

his relationship to his ex-wife and daughter humanizes him, and gives him more of a reason to stay in Oakland (near her, rather than east coast). The daughter's song provides a funny and touching coda, as he listens to her sing about what a "loser" he is.

[Vic Sage]

It may make for a nice tale, but it's not the real story of that team.

like all good storytellers, they lie the truth and don't let facts get in the way.

[Frayed Knot]

Both former Met Howe & current one DePodesta less than pleased with how they're portrayed.


Howe (to InsideBayArea.com): �I�m very disappointed, very disappointed, ... I look at it as character assassination. It wasn�t even close to my personality,� ... �They just went out of their way to degrade me.�
�I spent my whole career trying to build a good reputation and I think I did that but this movie certainly doesn�t help it," the mild-mannered Howe said on Sirius/XM Radio. "And it is definitely unfair and untrue. If you ask any player that ever played for me they would say that they never saw this side of me, ever.�



DePodesta: "I can't take it seriously and I certainly can't take it personally. We'll see when I actually see it, but I'm determined not to take it too seriously."
DePodesta had asked the producers not to use his name in the picture -- "I was asked and saw some different iterations of the script, and I realized the character that was in there wasn't even me. At that point I had to remind myself, 'It's a movie. It's fiction.' "

However, a Los Angeles columnist who covered DePodesta as Dodgers GM says actor Jonah Hill "nails DePodesta ... his shy mannerisms, his uncomfortable silences, his awkwardness in sharing his newfangled theories with old men spitting tobacco into cups, his fear in dealing with players."

[metirish]

Feel bad for Howe, is it true they used a prop to portray him?

[TransMonk]

[Edgy MD]

Six votes and a 3.83 average. Not bad.

[metirish]

Over at Rotten Tomatoes it has a 4.25 rating


http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/moneyball/

[Vic Sage]

based on what we saw of Howe in NY, i'd say Hoffman's portrayal of him is not the least unfair and probably accurate. It makes him out to be a quiet, calm, professional and unexceptional but competent manager who is doggedly determined not to buckle under to his GM's farfetched theories, since he's working on a 1-year deal and will need to find another organization to hire him some day. That he is, in the story's "moneyball" view, wrong-headed in his philosophy doesn't demean him, particularly, but mirrors can be so damned upsetting sometimes.

[Vic Sage]

There's a moment i love toward the end.

the movie keeps its focus on the core story: the resistance to the team's construction, their early failures, and their turnaround, the run for the record before coming up short, and Beane's coming to terms with his own past. So it doesn't dramatize one of the great scenes in the book, where they prepare for the minor league draft. It would have stopped the story dead in in its tracks. Also, it would have repeated the earlier scene with the scouts, as they are arguing over what free agents to pursue, serving an identical function in the narrative. So i agree that it was not a scene the movie needed, or could even reasonably include. But they still found a way to reference it, while giving the movie a touching denoument.

Beane is upset because they lost in the playoffs again, and so Brand/DePodesta shows him a clip of their fat catching prospect, Jeremy Brown (the one the book spent much time on, as the focus of the draft debate), as he plays a game in the minors. He gets a hit but is such a bad base runner, he falls down rounding first. What he didn't realize was he had hit a homerun. so he gets up, dusts himself off and rounds the bases. This is Brand/DePodesta's message to Beane: Billy, you fell down rounding first but what you don't realize is, you hit a home run. Boston offered to make you the highest paid GM in sports, other franchises will emulate what we've done here, we've changed the game.

It reminds me of the end of CAMELOT, where Arthur is in despair about having to go to war against his best friend Lancelot, while the woman he loved has confined herself to a nunnery after betraying him. And there, on the eve of battle, he comes across a boy who wants to be a knight, inspired only by the stories he's heard about the nobility and principles of Arthur's roundtable. This boy, he realizes, is his real victory. And so he tells the boy to stay safe behind the lines, and grow up to retell the tales to his own children for, as long as that fair time is remembered, it may come again. The power of myth. It gets me every time.

And so here, the knight thinks he has failed not realizing that, in lighting the darkness, he has already succeeded.

"oh, but that's not what REALLY happened!"

oh shut up.

[Willets Point]

And the boy who appears at the end of Camelot is Thomas Malory, author of the Arthurian tales collected in Le Morte D'Arthur. I've always liked that touch.

[Guest LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr]

Vic Sage wrote: There's a moment i love toward the end. the movie keeps its focus on the core story: the resistance to the team's construction, their early failures, and their turnaround, the run for the record before coming up short, and Beane's coming to terms with his own past. So it doesn't dramatize one of the great scenes in the book, where they prepare for the minor league draft. It would have stopped the story dead in in its tracks. Also, it would have repeated the earlier scene with the scouts, as they are arguing over what free agents to pursue, serving an identical function in the narrative. So i agree that it was not a scene the movie needed, or could even reasonably include. But they still found a way to reference it, while giving the movie a touching denoument.

They also fold as much of the good stuff from the draft scenes-- "good face," "ugly girlfriend," "Who's Fabio?"-- into the scouts' discussion. A composite scene, if you will.

[A Boy Named Seo]

I loved the movie. Spoiler here, but the only bit I wasn't into was all the attention paid to the 20-game win streak. Plus you did have the the "Last Second Victory Against Improbable Odds" when Hatteburg smacks the dramatic homer in the 20th game. It felt kinda like movie pandering to the lowest common denominator baseball fan and it didn't seem all that relevant to the point of the story.

But then the next scene is Pitt saying it doesn't mean shit if you don't win the last game of the series, and it only serves to sell some tickets and hot dogs in the meantime, and he really could've been talking about the team or the movie at that point and I loved it. It was like they put that scene in the movie to try and let you think it was important and then took it back and said, 'No it's not. At all.'

Pitt, PS Hoffman, Hill, & the kid who played Pitt's daughter were all great. And I don't know if those dudes who played scouts were real scouts, but they had me. And Robin Wright is still a sexy mama.

Great flick.

[Vic Sage]

It was like they put that scene in the movie to try and let you think it was important and then took it back and said, 'No it's not. At all.'

exactly. it was like "sports movie" revisionism. loved that.

[Edgy MD]

Frayed Knot wrote: Met connections/sightings: Beane of course. Not just as A's GM but also in flashback scenes to his signing and his NYM career (wearing #35 with shots of Straw in the background) Art Howe. Played by Philip Hoffman as much more grouchy than the sunny if bland Art we all knew and ... tolerated. Chad Bradford. One of the few players with significant speaking parts. Paper NYM David Justice. A prominent player/actor in the flick. Izzy. Often mentioned but never shown.

We also got some brief but sexy Jeff Tam action. Not sure if I saw Mike Fyhrie.

I was rooting for Beane the moment I saw his ex-wife's house.

I don't know what went down behind closed doors, but my impression was that Art Howe deserved better. On the other hand, he was dumped after 205 wins in two years, so they certainly weren't much enamored with him.