Starring: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright

Directed by: Bennett Miller

Today, I decided to hit the mall and check out the movie, “Moneyball”. Before the movie, I did finally pick up the game, “Dead Island”, but I won’t play it right away ’cause I’m still playing, “Deus Ex: Human Revolution”. As soon as I finish “Deus Ex”, I’ll move right on to “Dead Island”. Looking forward to “Dead Island”, though, as I’m a huge fan of zombies myself as some of you can probably tell.

On with my review:

Plot/Synopsis: This film focuses on the real life story of Billy Beane, who is the General Manager and part owner of the MLB team, the Oakland Ahtletics. Billy is in a financial handicap with the Oakland A’s, due to their constant losing of games. It takes place in the year 2002, around that time the Oakland A’s suffered a low payroll budget. The Oakland A’s just lost three big players: Johnny Damon, Jason Giambi, and Jason Isringhausen so they must be replaced with better players.

Beane teams up with Peter Brand (who is played by Jonah Hill), because he was going to college at Yale for economics. Beane felt that Brand would help get the Oakland A’s out of the financial ruin. Beane wants his players to be more competitive and play better so they can win more games. Beane searches for players who are high on the on base percentage, baseball stats. 

Well, this film was very interesting. I like baseball, but I don’t watch a lot of it. I used to watch MLB all the time though. I’m more into football now. When I saw this movie, I realized that this movie wasn’t really about baseball, maybe a little bit. If you’re expecting to see a big baseball movie, where you can cheer on, you’re not going to see that in this movie.

In this movie, you’re going to learn all the secrets and behind the scene stuff that the staff at MLB don’t want you to know about. You always wondered what it would be like, behind the scenes of professional baseball? Well this film will give you an idea of it. This movie will show that working behind the scenes of professional baseball isn’t easy as it sounds. It’s a tough business. This movie is mostly about business and money. It’s about a team that is about to fall apart and you must bring it back together.

The performances in this movie was just amazing. Brad Pitt is always good, like usual, but I’m most impressed with Jonah Hill. Jonah has been doing a lot of silly slapstick comedies as of late, so he decides to take a break from comedy for once and try a serious drama role. I think Jonah is going to get an Oscar nod for “Best Supporting Actor” in this role this year. Jonah Hill first got recognition as an actor in the 2007 comedy film, “Superbad”, and he should get even more recognition with, “Moneyball”. This is Jonah’s best role.

I’ve been following Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s career for years and this was his best role as well. He really kills it.

Everything else about the movie was great. The writing was well written, the cinematography was well done, and the music in the movie was cool too. There were some baseball playing scenes but not much.

I thought this was an excellent film. You don’t need to be a baseball fan to watch this film.

Score for “Moneyball” = **** (4 stars as in”excellent”)

Kev

After a long break from the big screen, Brad Pitt is finally back with two new movies this year of 2011. “The Tree of Life” and now “Moneyball”. The “Moneyball” trailer dropped today and I was very impressed with it. The movie looks interesting to me.

I can understand why Brad is staying away from movies more ’cause he has a family to take care of with his superstar girlfriend, Angelina Jolie. When Angie has more than 5 adopted kids to take care of, that’s a lot of work.

Enjoy the trailer, here. I’m definitely seeing it in theater when it comes out, I think.

Kev