Moneyball

Starring: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, & Philip Seymour Hoffman

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

If you're not a baseball fan, you're going to find Moneyball boring and a little bit confusing. I am an avid baseball fan and saw this film about the inner working of the front office to be extremely interesting and just plain awesome. The Oakland Athletics are a small market team and can't afford to put a hundred and fifty million dollar team of stars on the field every years, so how can they possibly compete? It's a problem faced by almost half the teams in Major League Baseball, while teams the Yankees and Red Sox win year after year, teams like Royals haven't made the playoffs in twenty-five years! In sports, if you can't win, you can't draw fans and make a profit, so when you can't afford a winning team, you were just screwed, until Moneyball. Based on the true story of Oakland Athletics General Manager, Billy Beane, the film follows his creation of a system to judge players on more than just the basic scouting and numbers that have been used for a hundred years. Using this system, Beane and others who followed, have been able to compete with much lower payrolls, changing the face of Baseball. Brad Pitt is terrific as Beane and most definitely earned his Oscar nominations, but where did Jonah Hill's come from? I love Jonah Hill, but his character was as generic and boring as they come. In Moneyball, Hill plays Brad Pitt's sidekick, and is nothing more than a boring statistician, I've seen B-Movie performances that upstaged his in this film! If you love sports and want to know more about the behind the scenes aspect of it, Moneyball is a terrific film to use, but if you're not much of a fan and don't really care about sports, that you will just find this film boring. It's geared to a very specific type of moviegoer and if you're not into sports, you won't be into Moneyball.