Movie Review: Money Ball

            I wouldn’t pay any more of my hard-earned cash-$ to see Money Ball in theaters again. I wouldn’t go out of my way to Net Flix, On Demand, or Red Box it. But I also wouldn’t necessarily fight it off were it to show up on the old Buub-Tube. Money Ball isn't bad, it’s actually pretty good (I mean, Aaron Sorkin did co-write it).

Brad Pitt, compelling as Billy Beane, basically plays a more introspective version of his character from the Cohen brother’s Burn After Reading--you know, that guy (always eating...):

Jonah Hill proves yet again that he’s just very easy to watch on screen, even in a baseball movie (“I know nothing about sports. I don't even know what a sport is. I have to confess that I'm a little afraid of birds. I am...whatever”).

Wait, was Philip Seymour Hoffman even in Money Ball? He so convincingly and totally just disappears into the character of Oakland A’s manager Art Howe that I had to pay super-close attention to the credits (“He was in the movie!”).

The story revolves around questions I love to see addressed on/in film-- questions of class (New York Yankees: haves; A’s: have-lesses), resentment (Brad Pitt/Billy Beane’s resentment of the scouts that scouted him, back in the day), and, one of my personal faves, the “Should I stay or should I go now? Bow-now-now-now-now-now-now...” question.

             And yet, at the end of it all, Money Ball just seemed like less than the sum of its parts. Yours truly thinks this was probably a function of what seemed to be the story’s interest-in/need-to see Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane as a kind of Game-Changer and Good-Man (the sh*t with his daughter, I mean, come on!?!), the latter part of which was almost entirely absent in another recent quasi-biopic, Sorkin’s far, far superior The Social Network.