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Movie Review: Moneyball (2011)

As a numbers guy, to me the beauty of Moneyball doesn’t reside solely in its statistical and analysis cradle that makes it compelling to watch (and would put others to sleep), but rather the handicapped ideology it shows to the viewers before completely lopping its head off. Imagine doing the same job function for decades and coming to a hard realization that everything you know about it, is wrong. Completely and flat out wrong. How do you justify continuing in the same course?

Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane dares to answer that question as the Oakland Athletics General Manager at odds with his owner, his manager, his scouts, and the rest of the league as his team is being parted out for its best hands; grabbed up by organizations with bottomless pockets. Falling into lockstep with Beane is Jonah Hill’s Peter Brand, who feels that there are incredibly undervalued players within anyone’s budget to be snapped up but go unnoticed due to baseball’s long standing scouting traditions based almost solely on good looks and home run averages.

Watching Beane put together a solid team based on the numbers seems like poetic justice. As a young man, Beane forsook a full-scholarship to Standford to sign with the New York Mets by having his head filled with the undulating praise of older and wiser gentlemen who described him as the game’s “perfect five-tool player.” But after a disastrous career in the majors, Beane segues into a job as a scout. Several years later, as his team put together by sabermetrics accomplishes one of its colossal goals of 20-straight wins in the American League, a mix of satisfaction and disbelief engulfs Beane as he watches from an empty clubhouse weight room.

Here, in essence, is the power of this film. No one cares that the Oakland A’s are the superhero underdog team at the center of a two-hour attention span. What really matters, is giving meaning to something that matters to you. This is a story about a man in love with baseball. Who endures getting abused by the sweet nothings of higher ups as a youth and his own lack of developing talent as an adult; yet refuses to tell the girl goodnight because he loves her more than anything in the world.

The movie, tempered with its sole function of producing a team, that well, needs to produce, is its heart.  Pitt’s Beane shines as an unflappable and adamant believer in his work, even when he doubts it.  His relationship with his daughter, despite being divorced from her mother, is as strong as ever and provides him with the extra encouragement he needs to wake up everyday.  There’s even a rather touching sentiment towards the end of the film where Brand explains to Beane that the importance of what you do accomplish infinitely outweighs what you don’t.

As you would expect, the film takes liberties with real facts, such as leaving out that Beane had continued the sabermetric work with the A’s by former General Manager Sandy Alderson. But that’s neither here nor there. Real life isn’t as nearly as entertaining as the movies, which is specifically why we go. In the end, one must realize that the screenwriters took what is essentially a math book, narrated by a habitual loser of baseball games and turned it into a spectacular biopic of a man who defied the uncontested rules and accepted “logic” of what makes a good ballplayer great.

Sports fans take a lot of flak for being portrayed as mindless slack-jawed morons who don’t understand anything other than a win and a loss, seeking constant justification for their obsession. This film destroys that notion. Because a true sports fan already knows you don’t have justify or explain yourself to people that don’t understand. And neither does this movie.

Rating:

Moneyball.  Directed by Bennett Miller.  With Brad Pitt (Billy Beane), Jonah Hill (Peter Brand), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Art Howe), Chris Pratt (Scott Hatteberg), Robin Wright (Sharon), Kerris Dorsey (Casey Beane) and Stephen Bishop (David Justice).  Released September 23, 2011 by Columbia Pictures.

Movie Review: Megamind (2010)

There’s only really so much you can do with a character like Superman, who, as the overbearing, overpowering and ultimately alien avatar of truth, justice and the American way, hasn’t really evolved much since his debut in 1938. Superman has been part of the American cultural lexicon for a long time now—I know something like five people who, as children, owned copies of Action Comics #1—but little about him fascinates the imagination anymore, and probably hasn’t since the 1978 film. What remains most interesting about the Man of Steel is his origin story. You don’t have to be a nerd to know that Superman was the last son of a dying planet, that he was shoved into a rocket with nothing more than a blanket and a CD-ROM of the accumulated knowledge of his planet. We know these things, have known them for some time, and know some tremendous stories with the premise that Superman didn’t land in a Kansas cornfield, never became Clark Kent. All of this is a long-winded way of saying that Megamind isn’t one of those tremendous stories, but it comes loaded with the accumulated knowledge of what makes Superman great, and happens to be a pretty good story in its own right.

It escapes some people that the first draft of Superman had him as a villain, a poor man plucked from a breadline and experimented on by a mad scientist. Under the influence of the scientist’s telepathy potion, the superman grows a giant head and has designs on world domination. Megamind (Will Ferrell), looks a bit like the original superman and has similar plans, though his chosen place of dominance is Metro City, which is protected by a scene-stealing, baby kissing hero by the name of Metro Man (Brad Pitt). Megamind and Metro Man have what Megamind calls “a glorious rivalry,” though “glorious” isn’t exactly the adjective most would lavish on the villain’s never-ending string of defeats. That changes, however, when Megamind discovers Metro Man’s weakness and kills him in broad daylight.

No longer a C-level villain mired in a hopeless quest to defeat his nemesis, Megamind does what any good bad guy would do and ransacks the city. But, without the promise of another battle with Metro Man, life for Megamind is rather boring. He mopes around his lair, lusting for the glory days. Purposelessness isn’t exactly Megamind’s bag, so, rather than drift aimlessly, he develops a potion that will turn a regular man into a Metro Man. He accidentally juices up Hal (Jonah Hill), the cameraman for Roxanne (Tina Fey), the newswoman he has a horrible, horrible crush on. Hal becomes Titan, and once it becomes obvious to him that superpowers aren’t what turns Roxanne on, Titan goes rogue, destroying the city at a clip that a poor sap like Megamind could never hope to match.

But…wait. Titan was supposed to be the good guy in all this, smashing Megamind’s nefarious plots with a bare minimum effort, snapping photos with tourists and attending ribbon cutting ceremonies for new stores that open in the rubble of old stores destroyed by Titan vs. Megamind superbrawls. Yeah, well, life doesn’t always work out that way. The funny thing about destiny is that the only people who know theirs in advance are in books or on the screen. Megamind probably never figured on killing Metro Man, but he does. Megamind probably never figured he’d date a woman like Roxanne, but he does. Megamind probably never figured on a lot of things, and his superman going crazy on them is certainly one of them, but like many an animated hero before him, he finds that destiny isn’t pre-ordained by circumstance.

While Megamind does a good job of riffing on its influences, it is at times maddeningly hamstrung by its desire to be cheered and by its potential to become a franchise rife with easily repeated jokes. Megamind’s biggest misstep is its music. Nothing happens in this movie if it isn’t set to some ancient, easily predicted rock anthem. It’s possible that I’m nitpicking, but believe me, in any other film, were the bad guy to strut through a devastated town to AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell,” I’d feel patronized to the point that my gag reflex would kick in. The old maxim in storytelling is “Show, don’t tell,” meaning that you want your reader or viewer to feel the point of what you’re doing without having to lead them to that feeling by the hand. Megamind, like most Dreamworks animated features, grabs a megaphone and screams at its audience, like so:

  • “Bad to the Bone” by George Thurgood and the Destroyers: HE’S A BAD DUDE! BAD, I TELLS YA!
  • “Highway to Hell” by AC/DC: THE HERO HAS BEEN BEATEN AND THE BAD GUY IS WALKING TRIUMPHANTLY AND THAT’S BAD, REAL BAD.
  • “Lovin’ You” by Minnie Riperton: IT’S FUNNY THAT SUCH ARCHETYPICALLY STRAIGHT CHARACTERS ARE LISTENING TO SUCH AN ARCHETYPICALLY GAY SONG. HAW HAW HAW.
  • “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns ‘n Roses: OBVIOUSLY A HUGE FIGHT IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN. BE PREPARED FOR AMAZEMENT.

And so on. The Hans Zimmer score is there just to be a Hans Zimmer score. At no point in time does anything approach the level of, say, The Incredibles or Superman or even Zimmer’s The Dark Knight, superhero film scores that underline what’s going on without coming across as lazy. Obviously, that comes with a disclaimer. Maybe I’m too old to appreciate the humor in using songs like “Kung-Fu Fighting” in a movie where a panda uses kung-fu, or maybe I’ve been spoiled by Pixar. But these little things continue irk me in just about every Dreamworks film I see, and when I’m irked by the little things, the bigger flaws really stand out. Megamind shows that the studio knows what it’s doing—now it just needs to find enough confidence to do it without relying on the same old pratfalls.

Rating:

Megamind. Directed by Tom McGrath. With Will Ferrell (Megamind), Tina Fey (Roxanne), Jonah Hill (Hal/Titan), David Cross (Minion), and Brad Pitt (Metro Man). Released November 5, 2010, by Paramount Pictures.

Movie Review: Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Inglourious Basterds is a fairy tale, and says so from the opening title card. “Once Upon a Time, in Nazi-occupied France,” there was this group of eight Jewish-American soldiers deep behind enemy lines whose only mission was to make themselves known to the enemy by killing, scalping, and carving swastikas into enemy foreheads. But that’s neither here nor there. While the movie was (and still is) sold on the basis of Brad Pitt’s performance as Lt. Aldo “The Apache” Raine, there’s a second, much more interesting feature playing at the same time, one that is connected to the movie’s narrative hook by an incredibly narrow strand: One character who happens to put the events of both narratives in motion.

That first feature is where the movie begins, on a dairy farm in rural France. A family is doing its chores when they are visited by an S.S. squad headed by Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), who has been given the nickname “Jew Hunter” for his exploits. The scene that plays out between the Nazi and the head of the household is maybe the most engrossing sequence in any movie this year, and it’s just two men talking and smoking their pipes. Of course, when it’s revealed that there are Jews hiding beneath the floorboards, the S.S. storms in and shoots the place up, but the gunfire only serves to transition the viewer from one scene to another—from the rural France where a few hiding Jews are casually slaughtered to the rural France where, years later, the Basterds casually slaughter Nazis.

Of course, by 1944, the war in Europe was starting to turn on Hitler, who spent much of his time trying to persuade himself and the citizens of Germany that their setbacks were only temporary, that they’d strike a crushing blow. The Hitler in Inglourious Basterds is frantic and child-like, demanding that his soldiers stop referring to one of the Basterds as the Bear Jew, then enjoying himself at the premiere of “Nation’s Pride,” a new propaganda film starring war hero Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), one of the few Nazi bright spots in a rather bleak year.

Zoller, as it turns out, is a cinephile. He adores the cinema belonging to Emmanuelle Mimieux, otherwise known as Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), who was the lone Jew to escape Landa in the opening scene. Zoller wants to have “Nation’s Pride” shown at Shosanna’s cinema. More than that, he wants to be with Shosanna, but he is a Nazi and she is a Jew and she doesn’t seem like the kind of woman who’d very much be interested in a uniformed man anyhow. After being interviewed by Joseph Goebbels and screened by Landa himself, the premiere is moved from a much larger theatre to Shosanna’s venue.

Of course, the Allies know this. On the verge of D-Day, they send British film-critic-turned-soldier Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) to meet with the Basterds and rendezvous with Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), a German actress-turned-double-agent. It is her job to get Hicox and the Basterds into the premiere of “Nation’s Pride” wearing bombs on their legs, as the whole German high command is scheduled to be in attendance, including Hitler. Meanwhile, Shosanna plans her own revenge, plotting to burn down the theatre with all the Nazis inside. She has a bunch of nitrate film, the means to burn it, and is willing to die to see the job through.

However, there are complications. The rendezvous with von Hammersmark is in a basement. The basement is full of drunken Nazis who are enthralled by the fact that they’re drinking with a famous actress. Zoller will not stop in his pursuit of Shosanna, regardless of how many times she insists that she is uninterested. Beyond that, Hans Landa may be the craftiest Nazi in the room. While he might let Shoshanna slip through his fingers, there’s no way he wouldn’t spot one of the infamous Basterds, were they in the same room.

The film is told in five chapters, and is framed around three of them. The opening twenty minutes, our introduction to Hans Landa, is chief among these scenes, and is one of the best I’ve seen this year and this decade. The scene with the Basterds, the Brit, von Hammersmark, and the Nazis in the basement is similarly fantastic, as is all of chapter five, “Revenge of the Giant Face,” where all of the plot points converge into one spectacular mess that leaves us with few survivors.

The movie took Tarrantino ten years to write, and looks every minute to be a labor of love. His dialog is as sharp as ever, and the action—macaroni combat that’s more frenzied than macaroni combat—comes in enough to satisfy anybody who was disappointed by the long wait between the car crashes in Death Proof. Hans Landa and Shosanna Dreyfus are among his very best characters, and Christoph Waltz and Mélanie Laurent are perfect as them. Waltz should walk away with any award he’s nominated for, and Laurent is being unfairly snubbed, though Diane Kruger is up for a Golden Globe for what is easily her best performance to date. This is a big movie, the kind that warrants multiple viewings. There’s so much going on here. Inglourious Basterds kills Hitler, and that’s not even the best part.

Rating:

Inglourious Basterds. Directed by Quentin Tarantino. With Brad Pitt (Lt. Aldo Raine), Mélanie Laurent (Shosanna Dreyfus), Christoph Waltz (Col. Hans Landa), Michael Fassbender (Lt. Archie Hicox), and Diane Kruger (Bridget von Hammersmark). Released August 21, 2009, by The Weinstein Company.

Movie Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

Presumably, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was nominated for Best Picture to serve as a lure. Remember Titanic? Big budget, big stars, big romance, record setting gross? Titanic‘s Best Picture nomination was something of a high water mark for the Academy Awards—viewership has been sliding downhill ever since. Benjamin Button features a big budget, has big stars, and involves big romance, yet it hasn’t made back its hefty $150 million budget, and will likely fail to pull in the audience the Academy is hoping for. The people who watch the Oscars to root for their favorite movies will, in all likelihood, not be rooting for Benjamin Button, and, its safe to say, many will be wondering what happened to nominations for The Dark Knight or Revolutionary Road—movies that have style and substance.

Benjamin Button has miles of style. That $150 million was put towards stars like Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, and Tilda Swinton; effects like Pitt’s journey from old age to youth and a battle in the Pacific Ocean; and an ad campaign that screamed Academy Award Nominee from early 2008. The movie is slick. Very slick. Director David Fincher has no problem with slick, having directed movies like Se7en and Fight Club, but his movie is one without a heart.

It’s not for lack of trying. There are scenes of genuine emotion between Benjamin and his mother (Taraji P. Henson), a woman he meets as a crew-member on a tugboat in Russia (Swinton), and Daisy (Blanchett), the love of his life, but writer Eric Roth wraps these moments in a story that is as unbelievable as it is schmaltzy. Roth, who wrote Forrest Gump, has been accused by some of repeating that movie, from the main character’s circumstances determining his life to his ability to coin phrases of sage wisdom in any situation. There’s even a bit where Tilda Swinton’s character swims the English Channel after her affair with Benjamin, having failed to do so years ago. After all, how many countless people were profoundly affected by their seemingly trivial interactions with Forrest?

The chief difference between the two films is this: Forrest Gump was an allegorical remembrance of America (its degree of accuracy/relevancy is dependent on the viewer) while Benjamin Button is a fairy tale that does not stray from its characters. Forrest Gump is the more personal of the two despite it’s all-encompassing theme, perhaps because it is a movie unencumbered by the fantastic, perhaps because Gump himself is the kind everyman character that somehow attracts attention to even the most insignificant person following him on his cross-country trek. Forrest Gump does not find himself to be any great shakes—he and everybody he interacts with are thus a microcosm of America; left, right, and center. Benjamin Button is convinced that everybody is special—the events of the movie left me unconvinced.

The plot: Benjamin Button is born to his mother and father with all the frailties of old age. His mom dies in child birth, his dad abandons him on the steps of a nursing home. Benjamin is a boy in an old man’s skin—we are asked not to be freaked out when he falls in love with 12 year old Daisy. Benjamin grows younger while everybody else grows old, he goes to Russia, loses contract with Daisy, comes back to America after fighting in World War II, and spends the rest of his life trying to be with Daisy, until it is too late. Daisy the older woman has sex with Benjamin the younger man. Daisy gets pregnant and has a child. Benjamin decides it’d be best if he left—it wouldn’t be fair to their daughter if she had to take care of her old mother and raise her toddler father.

Oddly enough, I haven’t given anything away. The twists and turns of Benjamin Button are obvious from the minute Daisy, lying on her death bed with Hurricane Katrina on the way, asks her daughter to read Benjamin’s journals. The best moments of the movie, Benjamin’s relationship with the woman in Russia, lie somewhere beyond the plot, which takes forever to go nowhere

Benjamin Button is a finely made movie that most people will refuse to see more than once. As far as Academy Award nominees go, that’s telling a lot—movies like Milk and the snubbed Dark Knight will be revisited time and time again following the Academy Awards. Benjamin Button, by contrast, will likely be a regular feature on the $10 DVD rack at Target. The Academy Awards are an opportunity to celebrate a film’s greatness. Great work went into Benjamin Button (I suspect it will win Best Special Effects), but this movie is far from great. A rare movie where the whole is of lesser merit than its parts.

Rating:

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Directed by David Fincher. With Brad Pitt (Benjamin Button), Cate Blanchett (Daisy), Taraji P. Henson (Queenie), and Tilda Swinton (Elizabeth Abbot). Released December 25, 2008, by Warner Bros.

Movie Review: Burn After Reading (2008)

Burn After Reading is the first of three movies being released this year to focus on the vain, treacherous creatures of Washington, D.C. but unlike the forthcoming films Frost/Nixon and W., the Coen Brothers’ new flick aims not at Presidents and power players, but the little people. Consider the cast of characters: Gym employees, a C.I.A. analyst of unknown clearance, his wife, and the Treasury agent with whom she is having an affair. He, in turn, is married to a authoress who really wants to go to Seattle, but that’s just the lead in to possibly the funniest twenty seconds of the Coen Brother filmography.

Being small, the characters don’t represent the sleaze associated with politics, nor do their lives revolve around the maelstrom that is Washington politics. Take the plight of the gym employees. Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) wants plastic surgery but her HMO won’t cover it. Ted Teffron (Richard Jenkins), the manager of the gym, wants to go out with Linda, but his obvious advances are ignored in favor of a flurry of online matchmaking. Then there is Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt). Chad, a personal trainer who is always, always bopping along to some nondescript song on his arm-mounted iPod, finds a disc containing personal information belonging to ex-C.I.A. analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich)—finances and a first draft of his memoir—personal information that Feldheimer thinks will be worth money…perhaps enough money to get Linda those surgeries she so desperately craves.

Cox has enough problems on his hands without the interference of the employees of Hardbodies Gym. He’s a misanthropic, happy hour alcoholic who quits his job in a fury after learning that he’s in line for a demotion. His wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), is screwing a treasury agent and is pursuing a divorce. Then Chad cold calls one morning, worrying about the security of his shit. Meanwhile, Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney)—Treasury agent, morning runner, hardwood floor connoisseur, and craftsman—racks up the women while his wife is away on a book signing tour. As if his relationship with Katie isn’t enough, he hooks up with Linda through an online service, becoming entangled somehow with the Hardbodies/Cox affair.

Chad and Linda begin to play spy games, planning to give the disc to Cox or the Russians, depending on who pays. Chad continues to dance to his iPod, Linda continues to search for love on the internet, and Osborne continues to watch the clock, waiting for his 5 p.m. drink to roll around. Mrs. Cox continues to consort with the Treasury agent, who continues to note the quality of the floors he steps on. The movie continues on, breaking free of its plot like a football team charging through a sheet of paper.

The Coens have created a movie that twists, turns, and overlaps so many times that the characters within it appear to be lost. “Get back to me when this makes sense,” the C.I.A. director says. Nobody’s thinking on the case becomes any clearer. Chad and Linda are clueless, Osborne pissed off, Katie Cox is cold and distant, Harry builds his fantastic machine, and poor Ted pines away for Linda.

The movie seems destined to become a cult affair, much like The Big Lebowski. The packed theater I saw this in was full of old people, drawn either by No Country for Old Men or George Clooney, and they were less than impressed. Every time I laughed, I expected to be shushed. The humor that the Coens throw at the audience is likely to go over many heads. This comedy is geared towards the screwball sect to which I belong.

Burn After Reading succeeds on the merits of its dialog and the actors delivering it. There’s not a single weak, boring moment, no opportunity for comedy lost. I laughed just as hard at a picture of Putin on the wall of the Russian Embassy as I did at Harry’s ultimate unraveling at the end. It’s been awhile since paranoia was conveyed so well in a movie, and Clooney is just fantastic as his character falls apart at the seams.

Also, J.K. Simmons is scene stealing as the C.I.A. director. Between his two scenes here and the Spider-Man movies, I’m begging for Marvel Films to go out on a limb and do a J. Jonah Jameson feature. A pilot, at the very least. More roles for J.K. Simmons? The world demands it.

Rating:

Burn After Reading. Directed by the Coen Brothers. With George Clooney (Harry Pfarrer), Frances McDormand (Linda Litzke), Brad Pitt (Chad Feldheimer), John Malkovich (Osbourne Cox), Tilda Swinton (Katie Cox), Richard Jenkins (Ted), and J.K. Simmons (CIA Superior). Released September 12, 2008, by Focus Features.