Moneyball stars Brad Pitt, who is still a totally lovable hunk, as the general manager of the 2002 Oakland As, who learned to use math to win baseball games. Jonah Hill (pre-21 Jump Street, so much plumper at the time) shows up as Brad’s stats wunderkind/new BFF. The film does a great job of tying together baseball footage with re-enactments, and most of the actors in the film (Chris Pratt SQUEEEE) really resemble the actual players. Phillip Seymour Hoffman doesn’t look like the coach he’s meant to represent (Art Howe), but he does look like a generic baseball coach, all rotund egg body with his defiantly crossed arms resting atop a firm dyspeptic gut.
But at its heart, Moneyball is about men sizing up other men. The team’s old-school scouts don’t care about on-base-percentage and instead often speak of young men looking “like a baseball player” or having “a good face.” Nothing homoerotic about that. When Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill want to assess players on anything other than gut feelings, they upend the entire system. Blame sabermetrics.
The best thing about Drive is Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn‘s ’80s Eurotrash version of L.A. The beginning of the film is actually very old-fashioned, with a slow-moving courtship between a damsel in distress (Carey Mulligan) and the strong silent and nameless type (Ryan Gosling). That makes the explicit violence in the last act all the more jarring.
Of course, I loves me some Ryan Gosling. In Drive, he gets to be all cool, with the scorpion silk jacket, little leather driving gloves, and well-fitting jeans. Gosling is an actor who keeps getting better and better, and here, as an understated character, he has to act with his eyes alone, which can look steely, focused, hurt, or dead inside by just a subtle shift in intensity and focus. If he doesn’t get an Oscar nomination of some sort this year, he wuz robbed. Dude put out three decent pictures in 2011, so let’s give him an award already.
For such a pretentiously titled film, The Ides of March is okay–assuredly better than 80 percent of most movies at your local cinemaplex, and guaranteed 99 percent handsomer–but you know that if it was really impeccable and had a chance at some Oscars, it would be coming out in December rather than right now.
The plot is fairly rote, nothing that you haven’t already seen in other terse political dramas and/or American politics IRL. Wait a minute, politics is corrupt and backstabby and full of self-serving assholes, especially in this media age? YOU DON’T SAY.
All the actors–starring George Clooney as Barack Obama the candidate, Ryan Gosling as the press secretary, Phillip Seymour Hoffman as his boss the campaign manager, Paul Giamatti as their Democratic rival’s PR guy, Geoffrey Wright as a cynical politician waiting for the best deal before giving his endorsement–are as good as you’d expect with that caliber of a cast, and they all get to do a lot of dick-swinging. Unfortunately, it’s all for naught, and the third act goes over like a lead balloon. Plus, there’s no hot Clooney-Gosling makeout, nor even a single shirtless scene.
