Coming soon to a theater near you: Trouble With The Curve

I don’t have high hopes for this one, but is is a baseball movie, so I’m sure I’ll see it (although I never got around to Moneyball while it was in general release).

But the reviews for TWTC are starting to come in and they’re mixed. Latinos Post describes it as “Generic Hollywood Fare Trying to Hide Behind Clint Eastwood,” while the New York Daily News says, “Baseball film doesn’t hit it out of the park, but Clint Eastwood’s still worth catching,” which is not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Some outlets don’t even give a hint as to whether it’s good or bad. The Chicago Tribune headlined its review “Trouble With the Curve about a scout who resists being benched.”

I guess if you like baseball, as I do, you’ll see just about anything. Same if you like a given actor. This film seems to be catering to different demographics: those who like Eastwood, those who like Justin Timberlake, etc. It’s got baseball, it’s got father-child drama, it’s got romance…the proverbial something for everyone. The Tribune reviewer, Michael Phillips, offers this video (and doesn’t seem extremely comfortable doing so, but that’s what journalists have to do these days: embrace new paradigms).

More reviews:

SFGate calls the film a “softball”
Roger Ebert gave it three stars (out of four)
The Rotten Tomato Meter gives the movie a 65 (although a poll of potential audience is high at 90 percent)
Metacritic, which collects reviews from various sources, is all over the place. It gives it a 62 out of 100, but of the 14 collected reviews, seven are deemed positive, six mixed, and one negative. Doesn’t that make it seem that it should have gotten more than a 62?
The “AV Club” gave the movie a B, although the “community” (whatever that is) have it a D+, ranking it right down there with Dredd.
The Hollywood Reporter doesn’t strike me as a very objective publication: “Clint Eastwood scores as an actor in his first film directed by someone other than himself in nearly two decades.”

Apropos to the story, The New York Times ran this profileof Aimee McDaniel, whose job it is to make sure the actors portraying athletes can pull off the role convincingly (remember Anthony Perkins in Fear Strikes Out? William Bendix in The Babe Ruth Story? Point made.). Judging by the photo of Scott Eastwood (Clint’s son) that accompanies the story, she didn’t do that well in this case:

But that’s the problem with sports photography. If you don’t take the picture at the right moment, you can make a Hall of Famer look like a total dork.