Well, so I
lied. I warned you that my next four
Golden Oldies would be sport-related, but I also said that three of them would
star Kevin Costner. Well, that part is
wrong. The movie here is Moneyball, and it stars
somebody even better looking (and perhaps even richer) than Costner – Brad Pitt. It was released ten years ago and, wonder of
wonders, the critics liked it. It
relates the semi-factual story of Billy Bean, general manager of the Oakland A’s
baseball and his inspired efforts to take his chronically impoverished baseball
team to the top of the heap.
He did so by adopting a novel approach to assembling players, involving
statistics (baseball fans will recognize this as sabermetrics), rather than the
hunches of a bunch of good-old-boy scouts.
Billy hasn’t quite succeeded (“in winning the last game of the season”),
but he has made progress. I root for
him.
It’s funny
how baseball sagas so greatly dominate the category of sporting movies, considering how
slow and boring real baseball tends to be.
How many good football movies can you name (The Replacements, for one)?
Golf? Tennis? Maybe, because baseball is so slow and tends
to be dominated by arcane strategy, it lends itself to human-interest-type
drama. But anyway, you might find that Moneyball
is a reasonable good, and totally harmless, way to waste a little time. C+
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