Given the draft of the script.
I’ll watch anything about baseball. Cartoons, documentaries, lousy films (Jackie Robinson was a great ballplayer, but a poor actor). But this draft of the aborted Brad Pitt vehicle would sorely try my patience (Groucho Marx: “Don’t mind if I do. You must try mine sometime.”).
Moneyball, the non-fiction neo-classic by Michael Lewis about Billy Beane, former failed-ballplayer turned general manager of the Oakland Athletics, was a great book but I never understood how anyone could possibly believe it could be turned into a feature film, regardless of star power.
The movie version, again judging solely from the script, is such a cliched story: Beane is an iconoclast who bucks the system to turn his team around, making them a contender for the American League pennant. He has a nebishy sidekick (supposedly to have been played by Dmitri Martin, a hot-comedian-du-jour), a computer geek and advocate of statistical guru Bill James (another system bucker). Together they battle conventional wisdom spouted by crew-cut wearing veteran baseball scouts and develop a new and unorthodox way of evaluating ballplayers, which, according to said scouts will never work. Along the way they pick up a broken down player on whom everyone else has pretty much given up; if he was a drunk he could be the Dennis Hopper character in Hoosiers.
This is a combination of Bad News Bears and Major League. According to the draft — and I don’t know if this was the final one; there was lots of speculation about problems with the script — there are lots of overdone effects, including voice overs, freeze frames, and slow motions included to drive the point home.
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