I bought Puncture at an antique mall on my lunch break today. Haven't watched it yet, but I figure shirtless Chris Evans is worth the 5.50 I paid for it regardless of story quality.

I know jacksquat about baseball, but I really liked Moneyball. I haven't liked anything Brad Pitt has done this much in years. A quietly thrilling movie. And the ending kind of choked me up.

Matt, don't get me wrong, it was a good story. And Evans was delicious in his shirtless suspenders with his tats. But never have I watched a movie and thought "parking the car is taking too long" or "there's no energy in this scene" or "this is a wierd noninformative intro" or "that transition was weird". Really, the editor should've been fired. And I think a lot of the movie was driven on the promise of Grisham conspiracy, which was a great mood-setter, but ultimately false. Lots of the dashing about wasn't so much plot urgency as it was Mike Weiss' being a fucktard and late for shit because he was high.

And I keep telling myself that Downey Jr. got his shit together and he's a decade older than my brother, but I am just terribly sad and it f***ing wrecks me and I'm irrational and making no sense but Puncture hurts in a terrible way.

The director was... Dutch, I think?

Nicolas Winding Refn is Danish, but also worked in Britain for a few years before making Drive.

I know jacksquat about baseball, but I really liked Moneyball. I haven't liked anything Brad Pitt has done this much in years. A quietly thrilling movie. And the ending kind of choked me up.

Vonnie is me (except I like Brad Pitt in everything). I don't care about baseball at all, but I do like math, but even math isn't the point. What I loved about the movie was that it wasn't about baseball, it wasn't about math, it was about trying to change the game. It was about trying to introduce a revolutionary idea to a community that refuses to accept revolutionary ideas. It reminded me of all the books I've read about scientific progress and how basically every amazing breakthrough is immediately met with extreme skepticism and denial because no one wants to admit they could be wrong, no one wants to reevaluate Everything They Know to Be True.

It was a really thoughtful movie about an unusual topic. Props.

Well said, P-C.

Wow. This is possibly the least flattering picture of Michael Fassbender I've ever seen: [link]

Also, that article cracked me the hell up, because I am twelve.

Imagine if you could also see his penis in that picture, though.

Thanks P-C and Vonnie. That is the view I was hoping other people were getting of Moneyball. I just know I'm so deep in my A's love. I was at every home game of that streak, so I have a very visceral response to that part of the story.

I kind of wish it had delved a bit deeper into the classism issue at the heart of it all. I also wondered about the true impact it had, besides the bit about the Red Sox winning using sabermetrics (it's kind of sad that apparently it never worked out for Beane himself...once again, the team with more money prevails). Another thought I had is that if this way of thinking caught on, wouldn't the undervalued players suddenly be worth more financially and ruin the whole plan?