And while I can appreciate the good acting and interesting characters, I honestly have no idea what it's about.
Maybe it's living here in the Bay Area and being painfully aware that as much attention as the A's got in the early 2000's, they didn't win any championships. Maybe it's general disillusionment with the moneyball concept (or dilution--how well does it work when everyone does it). Perhaps it's the ham-fisted metaphor at the end that's supposed to show how even though Billy Beane never won he changed the game and can't even see how much of winner that makes him. Or perhaps it's the ridiculous postscript that the Red Sox won the World Series by adopting a lot of the moneyball principles. Hooray, moneyball allowed the team with the second highest payroll in baseball to beat the team with the highest payroll! (and if you don't know that's the Yankees, then just leave now).
But still, even if the central premise falls apart, it's an amusing movie with some interesting characters. And the contrast of "old baseball" (elderly scouts judging a player because his girlfriend is ugly, indicating lack of confidence) with the new guys using math and computer models to build a team around the most undervalued players is interesting. It's just that the drama happens to be hamstrung by reality. Which is kind of just as well, in all the movie the scenes that really slow it down are the actual baseball scenes. Leave it to baseball to make math and computer modeling look exciting.
Running Time: 133 minutes
My Total Minutes: 249,263
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