Thursday, September 22, 2011
Moneyball review from Poz
I already have a Moneyball review thread, but Poz deserves the limelight. He’s the sportswriting equivalent of Roger Ebert, and I love Ebert far more than any other movie reviewer around. And to see Poz in Ebert’s field is exciting for me.
And this, I think, was the great challenge of Moneyball—perhaps even the unwinnable challenge. They were making a movie largely about baseball statistics, for crying out loud, but they were making it with a star-studded Hollywood cast (Pitt, Jonah Hill, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Chris Pratt and Robin Wright, who is in the movie for about 48 seconds and got considerably less screen time than the Rincon deal), a terrific director (Bennett Miller, who did Capote), and an incredible writing team (Aaron Sorkin wrote “The Social Network” and Steven Zaillian wrote “Schindler’s List” among others). They were making a Brad Pitt movie without a love interest, a baseball movie without a climactic home run, a buddy movie about on-base percentage and a big Hollywood movie about a general manager who has never led his team to the World Series.
It’s no wonder that Michael Lewis himself never thought that Moneyball the movie could be made*. “With “The Blind Side,” he says about his last book-to-movie, “it was a no-brainer. I would say to the Hollywood people: ‘What took you so long?’ … But I really never thought they could find a way to turn Moneyball into a movie.”
They did.
The whole thing is fantastic. We have Ebert in our midst in the form of Poz. If you haven’t written your Moneyball movie review, wait at least a month, because the bar has been set.
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