ironSoap – Complete

from Paul Hamilton — January 30, 2012 at 10:16PM

rstevens:

The Beastie Boys, diagrammed.

Listen all y’all.

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from Like a Detuned Radio — January 30, 2012 at 05:52PM

@ironsoap — January 30, 2012 at 10:39AM

Game Of Thrones Season 2: “Shadow” Tease (by GameofThrones)

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from Like a Detuned Radio — January 30, 2012 at 08:42AM

carasdreaming:

My father used to say, ‘Let them see you and not the suit. That should be secondary.’

Cary Grant

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from Like a Detuned Radio — January 30, 2012 at 08:32AM

Rockabilly style; psychobilly love.

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from Like a Detuned Radio — January 29, 2012 at 12:34PM

Make music.

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from Like a Detuned Radio — January 29, 2012 at 09:04AM

Entertainment.

#vintage
movies

from Like a Detuned Radio — January 28, 2012 at 04:37PM

Moneyball

★★★★☆

Directed by: Bennett Miller

Written by: Steve Zaillan, Aaron Sorkin, and Stan Chervin

Based on the Book by: Michael Lewis

I don’t think it’s possible for me to review Moneyball without contrasting it with the book by Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.

I read Lewis’s book a couple of years after it came out, probably around 2005 or so. I’ve been a lifetime fan of the San Francisco Giants; though I don’t carry animosity for the over-the-bay American Leaguers, they have always been a sort of marginal curiosity in Bay Area sports for me. Other than the 1989 World Series, I generally wish the A’s luck. The book was recommended by a friend of mine who is a diehard A’s fan and it was, at first, a fun read about a team I knew a little about but not enough that the details in the book weren’t new and fascinating. Then slowly Lewis started doing something weird with all his digressions into baseball theory and statistical analysis and player valuation: I started to care more about the theme of the book than the team.

And that’s really the point, after all: The A’s were/are simply a team trying to do the best with a regrettable circumstance (low income) and it was their approach that attracted Lewis to the story. They could have been any team. But though General Manager Billy Beane and his sidekick Paul DePodesta are prominent characters in the book, they are vehicles to drive what matters most to Lewis: The subversive thinking that made a poor team ($41 million in team salary) competitive with much wealthier teams.

My concern was that a movie adaptation would skip all the interesting stuff about Bill James and his books or DePodesta’s sabermetrics, focusing instead on the character of Beane, perhaps becoming some kind of biopic. Interestingly, with the help of Sorkin’s drop-you-in-the-middle dialogue, the narrative flow of Moneyball (the film) contains plenty of the fascinating aspects of Lewis’s book without feeling like a powerpoint presentation. Due credit to the writers and director Bennett Miller for pulling off an impressive feat of filmmaking to take a fairly complex set of not just ideas but base assumptions as well (the heft of the techniques employed by Beane and company is only visible if you understand what the established practices were) and crafting something riveting from them.

Okay, sure, this is still a movie with characters and the interplay between Brad Pitt (playing Beane as a kind of odd hyperkinetic zen master) and Jonah Hill (who plays a composite character that is a lot DePodesta but also a lot not DePodesta) drives the soul of the narrative through the notional concepts to build a team that can’t compete on a salary level with markets like New York and Boston so must compete some other way. Put simply, it works very well for a story that is, more than anything else, about turning people into numbers. Pitt and Hill put together some memorable scenes and both turn in fine (though not, perhaps, exemplary) performances. If nothing else, Moneyball would be worth seeing just to watch the two of them riff off each other over the strength of the script’s dialogue.

Now, the 2002 A’s aren’t some Cinderella story: Spoiler alert, they don’t win the World Series. To establish a proper dramatically tense climax, Moneyball focuses on the team’s historic 20-win streak to provide the motivational hook and it works okay, though as with the book, the further past the events depicted you are the more the perception of the ideas within shifts from jaw-dropping to mildly fascinating. If this stuff were truly as revolutionary as it sounds on paper (or celluloid), the A’s would have a championship in the 21st century. They don’t, so there’s obviously a bit more to it than Lewis or Miller might lead you to believe. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily, because the temptation to turn this into Rudy-level schmaltz might be unbearable if this were really that much of a rags-to-riches story. By virtue of the facts, Moneyball manages to be an above-average sports story.

Moneyball isn’t a drop-everything-go-see-this kind of movie. Philip Seymour Hoffman is kind of wasted in his role as Art Howe, even though he does a great job with his few scenes he just isn’t a pivotal part. I was disappointed that there isn’t much in the way of scene-setting (i.e. there aren’t many exterior shots of the Bay Area which gives it a peculiar lack of atmosphere) and the film can’t seem to decide if it cares enough about Beane’s character to give him a full backstory (there are a handful of sequences between him and his ex-wife, and him and his daughter) or if it prefers to stick closer to the book. For what it’s worth I’d be happy either way, but the split difference seems to just pad the film’s fairly long running time without much real development. But don’t let the few sour grapes fool you, I may have loved the book but I wasn’t disappointed in this adaptation and for non-sports fans, who I feel would probably struggle with Lewis’s work, this is a great way to get them the Cliff’s Notes version while providing a solid two hours’ worth of entertainment to boot.

from No Thief Like a Bad Movie — January 28, 2012 at 03:47PM

@ironsoap — January 28, 2012 at 02:09PM