whazza whoozzit? Yeah, I’m still alive. Yeah, I just finished a 44 city tour. Yeah, I’ve only seen one movie in the past two mos. Yeah, it’s wildly not topical. Yea, I don’t care. 

1. For better or worse, the filmmakers of Moneyball chose to make this a movie about Billy Beane caring. For all the targets they could have focused on in Michael Lewis’s wonderful book about sabermetrics invading Major League Baseball’s front offices via the 2002 Oakland Athletics, the romanticism of baseball, and more specifically, the act of caring and investing yourself into the things that you love, even as much as they’ve hurt you before, makes Moneyball (the film) more palatable to audiences who could care less about on base percentage and statistics. In the end, the movie is still an enjoyable and valuable perspective, but it loses a certain amount of savant-like specificity, a certain charm in the in-depth developments of guys like Nick Swisher, Chad Bradford, Scott Hatteberg. It loses a certain amount of personability to make Beane the focus, and while it still works to a large degree, we lose something in its translation, which leaves me with the cliched, obvious statement that indeed, the book is much better.

2. Can Pitt “phone in” a role, even when he’s doing a wonderful job? With his resume, you almost feel like Brad Pitt simply being Brad Pitt within the role of a character is inherently lazy, as watchable and captivating as it may be. There’s no question that Beane is a complex and impassioned individual, and Pitt does a great job at showing his highs and lows, but it lacks a certain focus. In the book, Beane was almost an avatar, a blank slate through which we saw the numbers and players. With the film’s new focus, he plays Beane in the same way, leaving me wishing he would’ve picked something more to do with Beane.

3. I’m sounding a bit negative, so it’s worth saying that this is the most fun, involved, and awesome movie about watching a team walk and hit singles that I could ever have possibly imagined. It may help that I love baseball and baseball statistics, so take it for what it’s worth. But man, I loved this movie.

4. Spike Jonze. LOL.

5. Too tired to write more. This is how exhausted I am. May see Ides of March soon. Where am I?