Moneyball (Thursday, October 6, 2011) (85)

Ever since the Michael Lewis book The Blind Side became a box office behemoth, Hollywood has decided to moviefy each of his nonfiction books. This movie is the result of the second effort down this path, an adaptation of the book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. The film tells the story of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) who was the Oakland A's general manager in the early aughts, where he built an LCS-competing team with a very small budget by using sabermeterics, a mathematical approach to statistics that puts value on non-traditional elements of the game. In other words, this is a move version of a boring baseball story that happened a few years ago. The film is almost totally without any characters of interest and gives us almost no view into who these people are. It's about as exciting and interesting as a history text book would be about this topic. To make matters even more strange, Beane doesn't really succeed in what he was trying to accomplish (his teams never got to a World Series), so his experiment never proves to be a winner. If you care about baseball you might care about this movie, but as a movie, there's really nothing very interesting in it. The story is boring, director Bennett Miller seems to not be interested in looking into the minds of his characters and the acting is generally pretty dull.

Stars: 1.5 of 4