MOVIE REVIEWS
Three flavours
From baseball to Aung San Suu Kyi, by way of a mysterious island
Baseball geeks will revel in the chance to cheer along with the underdog that makes it, the league-stinker that stuns the big-spender, with the help of digital tinkering. But even if you're illiterate in the great American game, this sport drama has enough of a broad sweep to hook you along with Billy Beane, the real-life manager of Oakland Athletics who, in 2001, gambled with the then-unthinkable strategy of computer analysis and took his team on a 20-match winning streak. That Beane is played by Brad Pitt _ boyish, beaming and bright-eyed _ is, if not exactly a grand slam, a pretty swooping homerun.
Moneyball
Starring Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman. Directed by Bennett Miller. At SF cinemas.
Moneyball is actually about how a new way of thinking struggles to put itself into the environment that favours traditional wisdom. It's about the adaptation from the bricks-and-mortar America to the computer-age America; the film hardly leaves the confines of a baseball park, but it's hinting at the transformation that's taking place all around its own world. Beane is a manager whose back is against the wall, and he puts his faith in an eccentric model proposed by a podgy maths nerd called Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), who believes that a complex analysis of numbers and statistics is the new winning formula. That means Beane will choose to ignore a century-old skill of scouts, experienced backroom staff and gut feelings of old-timers at his team. Beane, like Mark Zuckerberg who would come later, pushes for a change that eventually stretches the limits of his profession.
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About the author
- Writer: Kong Rithdee
- Position: Deputy Editor
