Not your typical baseball movie. Still very good. Pitt will probably win some awards.

Not very many in the theatre to see it.

Saw it tonight and LOVED it. The part about the 20 game winning streak... that 5 minutes was worth the entire price of admission. And that basically wasn't even a movie, it was just a recap of a good sports story, and what can I say, I'm a sports fan and I love stuff like that. That part encompassed everything that's great about sports.

As a huge sports fan myself who also happens to be a stats/numbers guy, this movie was right up my alley. As a movie fan, I also enjoyed it. Good movie, good topic, and again, I happen to love sports and love stats and love montages, so I loved the movie.

Did not like this movie. I'm not sure what it really thrived at.

I read the book and loved it.

I'm a huge baseball fan.

I don't only like movies with explosions made by Michael Bay.

But this movie wasn't especially good at anything...drama, story, comedy, suspense, or really even emotion. It wasn't good as a baseball movie or as a drama or as an homage to all the stat nerd stuff that was in the book . They forced the "daughter" element onto us to make us feel more attached to Billy Beane. The book made him more interesting by going further in depth about his playing career and what he went through there, maybe in a way that you wouldn't have time for in a movie.

Anyway, I was surprised at how bored I was throughout. I was also surprised at how interested I was in Sorkin's previous work, "The Social Network" as I don't even own a Facebook account, so it's not like I don't approve of his style or movies.

Don't know what I was missing. Maybe it wasn't the book and that was my problem. I also read that the script was rewritten from its original version which included interviews with the actual players. That premise alone for this subject matter seems more interesting to me.

Good movie. Thought Pitt did a great Job. The theater was packed. Gives you a good idea of why some of these teams have these fire sales. Maybe this is Ed Wades approach with the current Astros??

Lance, I can see how some would think it's boring. Kind of an oddly put together movie.

I thought it was a great movie. I may go watch it again.

I enjoyed it, but felt it was about 15 minutes too long.

I saw it early this afternoon.

Congrats?

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I saw it early this afternoon.

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Congrats?

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This made me laugh.

I saw it Saturday night. At 8:10 PM. And loved it.

In all seriousness, I thought it was the best movie of the year so far.

[This message has been edited by TCTTS (edited 9/28/2011 12:48a).]

Just saw it. I thought it was a solid, not great, movie. It dragged a bit at the end.

I am not a fan of Brad Pitt and he did nothing to change my mind. Someone else might have improved the movie. The girl who plays his daughter certainly sings well. The scene in which Billy, his ex, and the new husband sit around is well done, very realistic, well-acted, especially by the new husband, who clearly does not know anything about baseball or what Billy does but is trying to be supportive of him, yet still comes off as an outsider in a private moment.

Jonah Hill did a very fine job, as did Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Three stars out of four.

Thought it was excellent, as a fan of the book and a former collegiate ballplayer, when I heard they were making this all I could think was "Well that's gonna be stupid." Also, I am someone who used to love baseball quite a lot but the last few years I've found myself more and more disconnected from the sport. I just find it really boring now and have lost the passion for it. This movie reminded me again why it's a great game.

This film and the acting was very well done, and does a great job of capturing the feeling and stress that Beane probably felt during the season.

I think Brad Pitt is underrated. He is always really, really good (except Troy) but no one seems to ever take him seriously as a best actor contender (has he even ever been nominated?) Anyways, I don't know if he will win but he should at least get a nomination for this one. Sorkin will undoubtedly get best adapted screenplay or whatever category this falls under.

Maybe they should get Sorkin to adapt World War Z...

Saw it last night. I had no real desire to see it, but went ahead anyway. I actually really liked it, and I'm not a huge baseball fan. I knew nothing about the story. I didn't even know who Billy Beane was.

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In all seriousness, I thought it was the best movie of the year so far.

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Agreed.

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Maybe they should get Sorkin to adapt World War Z...

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I wouldn't be opposed to Sorkin writing every script ever.

huge baseball fan.

Didn't live up to the hype for me. Good, not great.

though I don't agree with everything here, this brought up a bit of how i felt.

http://filmdrunk.uproxx.com/2011/09/how-moneyball-the-movie-became-the-opposite-of-moneyball-the-concept#more-52471

I realize they had to "hollywood" it up, but I found myself kind of annoyed at times.

I think Pitt did a really good job, and it was entertaining enough, but I'm not doing back-flips over this one. I can, however, see why many people are raving over it.

no way it was the best movie of the year. would take Warrior over it, wasn't even the best movie of the month.

i agree with oldarmy71 on everything except pitt. i thought he did a fine job, considering he was pretty much written exactly that way.

Saw it last night, great movie. Jonah Hill was surprisingly good in a dramatic role.

BTW, did anyone notice that was Smalls from the sandlot as the Red Sox owner?

My wife watched it the other night...actually went to see Courageous but the theater was oversold and had no place to sit. We are both huge baseball fans and enjoy Pitt but for whatever reason, neither one of us really cared to see this.

We both loved it! It's a very slow and deliberate pace...much like the game. I thought the baseball scenes were done nicely but really enjoyed the behind the scenes look at putting the team together.

My wife immediately picked up on the Sandlot reference. She leaned over and whispers "THE JET STEALS HOME!!!" I respond with a "huh??" and then look a little closer. Hilarious! Nice touch.

Shark that was not Smalls from the Sandlot. That guy is at least 20 years older than him.

sex panther, you have clearly not seen the sandlot enough times. now kindly gtfo.

Well when you reference Smalls from the Sandlot I assume you're talking about the kid who plays him for 98% of the movie and not the grown up version at the end. But good catch, work on your anger issues though.

i dont mess around when it comes to the sandlot

You bob for apples in the toilet... and you like it.

Wife and I saw it this. I thought it was very well done but understand why some baseball fans may not have liked it they way some football purists might not have liked "Rudy". I thought it was a good story of the underdog building a better mousetrap.

Now I want to get my geek on and read the book.

Thought it was a good movie.

However, am I the only one that had a problem with them not giving any mention to Zito (AL Cy Young) or Tejada (AL MVP) being on the team?

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However, am I the only one that had a problem with them not giving any mention to Zito (AL Cy Young) or Tejada (AL MVP) being on the team?

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i haven't seen the movie, but read the book.

if the focus of the movie is to talk about the A's "success", then yeah, you're not telling the whole story if you don't mention zito and tejada.

but if the point is to focus on how beane used statistical anaylsis to find value in players that others had overlooked, then i completely understand why zito and tejada aren't mentioned. zito was a top 10 pick and given $1.5mil to sign. not exactly a diamond in the rough. and tejada was drafted as a FA in '93 long before beane got there.

I thought the point of the movie was one man's struggle to change a system that had been in place since the beginning and the effort he had to go through to do it.

I agree. I just feel like you can't tell the complete story of that team (and the winning streak) without mentioning those two guys.

Just the sports fan in me outweighing the Hollywood fan in me.

Disclaimer that I haven't read the book yet and really enjoyed the movie, but I still thought this commentary from GQ raised some good points.

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Has any other sports book been as widely influential and as wildly misunderstood as Moneyball? Michael Lewis's 2003 best-seller has now been made into an Oscar-bait movie starring Brad Pitt, who does a passable imitation of an ex-ballplayer merely by shoving half the national tobacco crop into his lower lip. And yet after all this time, Moneyball still causes lots of people to sound like kids who didn't study for the exam.

Let's get this out of the way quickly: Moneyball was not a book about nerds and statistics and butterball catchers who do nothing but walk—not really. It was a book about the temporarily misperceived value of nerds and statistics and butterball catchers who do nothing but walk and, above all, about how to profit off that misperception. Which is to say that, at bottom, Moneyball was a book about a charismatic visionary (Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane) who achieved success by exploiting market inefficiencies. This is a conceit known as Every Business Book Ever. The guy sitting next to you on an airplane is reading a book like that. Malcolm Gladwell farts books like that. Moneyball told a simple story and told it wonderfully, but baseball being what it is—a game so thoroughly wrapped in its own bull*****that you'd need a grand jury to find its soul—the book was received as heresy.

And now we get this: a big movie featuring a high-priced mega-celebrity actor, a script polished by the closest thing the job has to a superstar (Aaron Sorkin), and a story arc built on such statistically aberrant phenomena as Oakland's twenty-game winning streak in 2002, which even Beane would say was lucky ***** Even the movie seems not to have read Moneyball.

Sure, Lewis's book encouraged us to find something sentimental in the underdog story of the A's, even though that's the sort of romanticism it also teaches us to avoid. It was only natural that Hollywood would seize on that thread—it's Rudy meets Microsoft Excel! But watch Pitt/Beane work the phones and tell me the movie isn't secretly aching to be Glengarry Glen Ross.

Maybe it's time to start thinking about the book in the same way: It's really a story about hustlers. It's about a cheap ball club that stays cheap because it gets a fat annual revenue-sharing check from teams that aren't, a team that wills itself back into baseball's primordial sludge, operating as if the 1970s—and free agency and all those good things that put more distance between a baseball club and the plantation—never happened. Moneyball consecrated the notion that it's noble to win inexpensively, and in that respect it was great PR for the owners. The league got to pretend that small-market teams aren't just soaking the Yankees on the back end, even if, well, they are. I think Moneyball is one of the greatest sports stories ever told, but I sometimes wonder if the plutocrats who own "small-market" teams get together in a grotto once a year and dance around a leather-bound edition. They're profiting madly off a misperception—and isn't that the most Moneyball thing of all?

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[This message has been edited by FREEDOM AINT FREE (edited 10/19/2011 8:02a).]

I wonder who Elko's Jonah Hill is. Picturing some nerd with an economics degree helping him sift through the portal. ****ing love Moneyball.