Review of Moneyball (2011) by Nou Chee H — 12 Dec 2013

I'm not a lover of sports films, at all. But I loved this, and I loved it because it's not about some championship winning team, it's about changing the way a sport is approached, because said sport has been made unfair to some by money.

This is the true story of Billie Beane, a former Baseball player who was the General Manager of the Oakland A's back in the early 2000's. His team has little money, and cannot compete with the big guns, who dominate the sport. Frustrated by this, Beane - played superbly by Brad Pitt, in one of his finest acting performances, in my opinion - stumbles upon young Peter Brand, who has radical ideas about using mathematics and statistics to build a better team, rather than relying on the traditional methods. His ideas are generally laughed at. Jonah Hill plays Brand beautifully, and he is subsequently employed by Beane to effectively help him 'stick it to the Man' and change the sport forever. And they succeed. Their methods were ultimately adopted by other teams, and used to completely re-vamp Baseball.

You don't need to know anything about Baseball to love this, you find yourself rooting for Pitt and Hill, and there's also a touching backstory of Billie Beane's relationship with his daughter, which actually acts as a kind of metaphor for his decisions. Great, great stuff, I highly recommend.