Moneyball (2011) How Can You Not Be Romantic About Baseball

Moneyball (2011) Columbia Pictures

To start this review I should mention that I am already biased toward the A's because they are my favorite baseball teams along with the Dodgers. 

My friends are not big fans of baseball because they think it's slow and boring. I can agree with that assessment when watching it on the television. The in-game experience is much better to give baseball their credit. They will need to figure out something in the future to increase the viewership on TV. 

Moneyball is the tale of what it's like for the smaller market teams to compete professionally with the bigger market teams. Baseball has been hard to watch over the years because of the salary rules. They have a salary tax system where the teams that spend over a certain amount of money have to pay a percentage of that salary extra. It hurts the smaller teams because the bigger teams can pay top dollar for players that would otherwise be paid much less by smaller market teams.

Its an unfair system and the film exploits the fact that these smaller teams have fan bases that are let down every time a good player leaves to a bigger market for more money. The difference is that one man named Billy Beane is trying to change the way he looks at the game. He highers Peter Brand who studied economics. He believes he can help Billy Beane find a team of guys that no one wants by finding value in their statistics. They project what numbers they need in order to make the playoffs so that they can get another shot at the title. 

The movie itself features great performances from Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill. The script writing for the film was phenomenal and it provided the perfect foreground for the story of how they compile the team and the reaction they get from the fans and media.

I guess the film does what you expect, but the frustration was real and it was based on a real struggle as a general manager. Most films would not be able to transfer these types of feeling through film and you got a front row seat for greatness while seeing Brad Pitt.

Although the frustration continues for the A's, each year they are getting closer and closer to the championship based off the model that they started using in this film.

Baseball may not be the most entertaining sport, but this film highlights why baseball is still a great sport to be apart of as a fan. 

The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) I Wish It Was A Joke

You may notice that there are ads on my site. I decided to monetize it and I get paid per click on an ad, so you will now see those to the right and bottom of my posts.

The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) Universal

I decided that I wanted to see a comedy last night, but both my lady and I couldn’t decide on which one. She has never seen The Chronicles of Riddick, so I decided to watch this with her. It was just as funny as I remember it. The one-liners were cheesy and the graphics were mostly bad and visually outdated. When you compare this movie to the new one, it is hard to imagine that this could be better or worse, but it is both. It’s an odd compilation to have when the movies are the basis for each story and they are lacking in some things and good at others.    

If you ever stop to watch the Vin reaction shots you almost can’t help but laughing because many times they are out of place. It’s why I consider this movie a comedy. Some of the audio is not synced with the characters and you can tell it was just added in later without reshooting it. I can’t say that anyone would expect this film to be good, but it would’ve been easy for this to be transformed to be a well written screen play.

As movies go this one is partly action as it is mostly filled with ridiculous things that could never happen. The story has the semblance of being something greater but is never able to realize its potential. It also is never able to create its own distinction from other Sci-Fi endeavors and falls short constantly on acting, cohesion, and reasoning.

Throughout the entire story you continually ask yourself why Riddick is where he is. Earlier in the story instead of trying to escape a dying planet with his holy friend (and his family) he decides to go back to where the Lord Commander is in order to avenge his now dead friend. He does this easily and no one is afraid that he killed of the best Necromonger fighters. The Lord Commander basically allows Riddick to escape the armada with little to no effort to entrap him. Another instance of this is right after this scene. After deciding to not save Helion Prime he decides to get caught by the mercenaries that were trying to kill him earlier so he could find his old friend Jack in the most difficult prison to break out of in the system. Knowing that the Necromongers would surely be following him to this location, he plans are altered and he tries to get both himself and jack to safety while trying to help some others from the prison (even though he cares for no one). After just abandoning an entire planet to death and destruction, he goes to a prison and helps people escape with him. It makes no sense. After this ridiculous effort, he decides to go back to the armada to attempt to kill the Lord Commander for the genocide on Furya. Without any thought of getting out of there alive, he decides to go for the assassination attempt (which is not his usual MO).  He fails and is given another chance to join the Necromongers (again).

It’s hard to say that this is a well thought out film. In fact, I am not sure that there was any though given to some of it. I am not sure how movies like this get made, but it was funny to watch. I wish I could liken it to Starship Troopers (1997) which was only made as a joke.

All in all this movie is great for watching bad acting, poor plots, and stupidly fun one-liners. 

Man of Steel (2013) Better Than Expected

Man of Steel (2013) Warner Bros

I have heard a lot of mixed reviews about this film. When I first saw it I could tell that there was something I didn't like about it, but couldn't identify what it was. The second go around there was only one thing that bothered me throughout the movie... it was Louis Lane.

Now in the past I have generally disliked the women characters in superhero films because they have the personality of a potato and never add anything good to the film. They are always a side character that is put in an unlikely situation and should end up dying if it weren't for the superhero. They cant save themselves, they usually don't have any business being where they are, and they have off-putting relationships with the superhero because it materializes out of thin air. These types of characters hold back the development of the story and become a nuisance to watch.

Man of Steel is the opposite of what most movies are because the story is better than the characters in the film. Usually stories are character based and show how they develop overtime. Superman changes a little, but its mostly showing why he feels the way he does. For one, he has two great families. Both of them teach him the value of life and show him the impact of his actions. Both fathers are portrayed by great father figures (in the movies) and they did a wonderful job. You would think that the movie was about the character of Superman, but in all honesty his story is not nearly as interesting as the galactic one being told. The race of alien beings on the planet of Krypton have more substantial interests than some red-headed reporter ever did.

The struggle for resources and political power for dominance of the galaxy far outweigh a skirmish on planet Earth. I was more interested about Krypton and their race of people than Earth. I think this is because Superman is one of the only superheros that didn't gain his powers through radioactive experiments. He wasn't a lab rat, he was born with his powers. His alter ego of Clark Kent is really a critique of the human race. Clark Kent is clumsy, mistake prone, and hesitant to accomplish anything. It really makes you feel small as a human if an alien species were to ever come to down to Earth and live among us.

The characters of the film are captivating because they have actual values, while most of the human side-characters have no impact on anything because they are too weak or realize the impact of their own insignificance. Either way, humans were as worthless in this film as Amy Adams.

Writing of Amy Adams and Characters:

I know that Amy Adams is being nominated for an Acadamy Award for her performance in American Hustle, but that being said she is an annoyance in the majority of the films she's starred in. I don't mind the quirky, intelligent, and straight to the point girl but she's just not great at doing it. She's mildly attractive but she doesn't deliver dialogue well. She has a nonsensical relationship with Superman and it was substantiated in over 3 conversations they had together. If that were real life it would only work with someone that looked like Henry Cavill and it would be as meaningless as this relationship was. It made me angry to think that Superman was unsure of himself and what to do when he had been preparing for it his whole life. Some girl comes by and tells him that she believes in him and suddenly hes superman again. No. Superman is already super as I have already mentioned. He was born differently than the rest of us. He was already a great person with a sense of protecting others. Why did he need anyone to tell him that he was just that? It doesn't make any sense. Why trivialize a man who has worked hard to be the man he was supposed to be and who even sacrificed his own father to do so?

General Zod is an interesting character. He is unable to take over his own planet with a surprise attack, gets his ass kicked by Supermans father (who was a scientist), and is banished by the people he claimed to be too weak to rule. On his way to banishment (instead of death even though they are low on resources already) he claims that Jor-El (the man he just killed) was right and he agreed that the death of the planet was caused by the council of leaders. He is a loser by definition but it allows him to use his hate and animosity to fuel his mission. Throughout the film you find it to be hard for him to be arrogant but he somehow he manages it. You also wonder about his motives because his devious plot is to destroy earth and to save his people who were far more technologically advanced in and revolutionized in ideals. A plot point some of you may have missed, is that he believes his race to be far superior than that of humans (they were in every way). He says to Jor-El that it would be hard for them to struggle to adapt to the foreign conditions of Earth and claiming that for this reason he needed to change it to be more like Krypton. I know that Zod is supposedly intelligent and also a warrior that can rule over his own senses, but he was able to adapt in less than a few hours on Earth and it made him almost a God among humans comparatively. Hard to see a downside to co-existing at this point. 

Jor-El was one of the most believable characters that Russell Crowe has played in years. The character itself is so noble that he chose his own death because of the failures of his own race. In other words, he fell on his own sword. It was noble even though these characteristics are hard for most to understand because it's a foreign concept. He wasn't going to try and redeem his people because they already failed. Sure he could have tried to reunite with his son but he already gave him everything he could. Jor-El is a great lesson to us all and shows that you can give someone a meaningful existence through your actions even if you are not always there. He tells Zod that he was a better man once and that he would honor that man even though they were fighting to save their own race through different means.

Jonathan Kent was also a good character with high moral standing in his community and the film. He is as much a father to Clark as Jor-El and taught him great understanding of his powers. He was the only human in the film I didn't entirely hate. 

I wont mention any more about the characters, but I will say that most of them made sense and made for a great story. Like I said the whole movie would've been better if it wasn't so focused on the character of Lois Lane. I wish she wasn't in the film or an innocent bystander until introduced properly as a real woman that has a real relationship with Clark Kent. Man of Steel was the best Superman film yet and a solid film. I hope they do more in the future.