Inside Movies

Art Howe, the former manager of the Oakland A’s, is portrayed in Moneyball by Philip Seymour Hoffman who is a little “on the heavy side,” says Howe. That’s only one of Howe’s complaints about the movie, which deals with the A’s 2002 season, when the general manager, played in the movie by Brad Pitt, used the team to try to reinvent the game of baseball.

Billy Beane, Pitt’s character, was losing his best players and his team did not have the money to replace them with highly coveted players. He used mathematical formulas to rebuild the team using players that no other team wanted.

In the movie, Howe stands in his way nearly every step of the way.

It is clear from this Houston Chronicle interview that Howe had issues with Beane, whom he says was nearly a constant presence in the field house, but Howe says he looks back on his time in Oakland as “a good experience.”

Howe, who now does the pre- and postgame shows for Fox Sports Houston, lives in Houston, where he once played for and managed the Astros.

Read our Moneyball review.

I love baseball about as much as I love mowing the grass. It’s safe to say that I am not the ideal audience for Moneyball, the more-or-less true story of how Billy Beane, the general manager of the cash-strapped Oakland As’s, reinvented his team in the early 2000s in an effort to change the sport to which he had dedicated his life.

Lovers of the sport, I’m sure, will experience this on a whole other level, bou don’t have to be a baseball fan to appreciate Moneyball.

The A’s had become a farm team for better franchises that were picking off its best players. Faced with rebuilding but lacking the money to buy the most coveted ballplayers, Beane instead hired as his assistant a Yale-educated business grad who used mathematical formulas to help Beane pick players no other team wanted but who possessed the skills necessary to help the A’s win games.

Brad Pitt plays Beane, bringing the sort of low-key Redfordesque charm that has become his trademark. He also invests the character with an emotional depth. We’ve seen him do equal work in films such as Babel and, earlier this year, The Tree of Life. This time, however, his work is front and center, the way it could never be films helmed by ambitious visionaries such as Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu or Terrence Malick.

Moneyball is directed in solid, workmanlike style by Bennett Miller, who made his feature film debut in 2005 with Capote.

Jonah Hill brings humor to his role of a buttoned-down, young assistant director. Philip Seymour Hoffman adds strong support as the strong-willed team manager who thinks Beane’s ideas and his draft picks are loony and who has no intention of playing by Beane’s playbook.

An interesting story about Beane in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine talks about how other teams subsequently adopted many of the innovations that Beane introduced to the game, “thus eliminating whatever stealth advantages he once enjoyed.”

“The Moneyball philosophy ultimately triumphed,” writes Adam Sternbergh, the author of the story, “but Billy Beane never quite did.”

Followers of the sport know that already, so this isn’t really a spoiler except to people like me, who may go to the movie expecting a traditional uplifting sports movie ending. But by the end such moviegoers will already have experienced a film that is anything but a traditional sports movie. It trades on different strengths.

It offers some of the expected sports-movie pleasures - the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, and all that - but the grassy diamond isn’t really where Moneyball excels. It’s chosen field of play is the back room, the sports offices, the strategizing and mind games that go on that outsiders never see and that know-it-all sports writers can only guess at.

This is inside baseball made accessible even to baseball doofuses like me.

Written by Steven Zallian and Aaron Sorkin (Sorkin wrote the wonderful Social Network), Moneyball places the focus squarely on character and on dialogue.

Beane, at 18, had been considered a sure thing, a star in waiting that baseball scouts were certain would excel. He passed up the chance to go to Stanford to play ball. And he failed at it.

The movie, based on a 2003 book by Michael Lewis, presents this as a reason for Beane’s distrust of conventional baseball thinking.

Baseball, and baseball movies, lend themselves to a certain amount of romanticization. Moneyball romanticizes not only the sport but also Beane. It portrays him as an idealist instead of simply a general manager trying to keep his job, a disadvantaged competitor trying to win.

I don’t buy the romance of the game hooey. But, then, I didn’t need to. Look at Moneyball as just a story about a likeable, resourceful guy resisting orthodoxy and fighting against the odds, and it’s still a good movie.

Based on a true story, Puncture stars Chris Evans as a Houston lawyer who also happens to be a drug addict. The movie is about what happens when he takes on a big case that pits his small firm against heavyweight lawyers and big pharmaceutical companies even as he battles his own personal demons.

This is Evans’ first release since starring in Captain America: The First Avenger.

Studio synopsis: Mike Weiss (Evans) is a talented young Houston lawyer and a functioning drug addict. Paul Danziger (Mark Kassen), his longtime friend and partner, is the straight-laced and responsible yin to Mike’s yang. Their mom-and-pop personal injury law firm is getting by, but things really get interesting when they decide to take on a case involving Vicky (Shaw), a local ER nurse, who is pricked by a contaminated needle on the job. As Weiss and Danziger dig deeper into the case, a health care and and pharmaceutical conspiracy teeters on exposure and heavyweight attorneys move in on the defense. Out of their league but invested in their own principles, the mounting pressure of the case pushes the two underdog lawyers and their business to the breaking point.

Daniel Radcliffe, wisely, is moving quickly on from Harry Potter, capitalizing on the role to get choice gigs while swiftly taking on other high-profile roles to shake off the boy wizard persona by which the world knows him.

Here is the trailer and first movie stills from The Woman in Black, a ghost story that opens in early 2012.

Radcliffe plays a young lawyer who travels to a remote village to sort out the papers of a recently deceased client.

While working alone in the remote house, he uncovers tragic secrets while getting glimpses of a mysterious woman clad in black.

I really like the low-key eerie quality of the trailer. I’m looking forward to seeing this.

In addition to Radcliffe, The Woman in Black stars Ciaran Hinds, Liza White and Janet McTeer. It’s directed by James Watkins.

Paramount Pictures announced yesterday that World War Z, it’s big Brad Pitt movie about the coming zombie apocalypse, will be released Dec. 21, 2012.

Paramount is calling the movie a “geo-political thriller,” which makes it sound like either they don’t want to make any money or else they feel a need to add an air of gravitas to what should be a big honking zombie movie. Maybe it’s just their way of making sure we know it’s got a big budget and some big names attaached.

Yeah, sure Brad Pitt has an Oscar nomination under his belt, he’s taken to pompously referring to himself a “citizen of the world” and he and Angelina Jolie have established a United Nations of adopted kids under their roof, but it’s a zombie movie, for crying out loud.

The film is based on the novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks.

In addition to Pitt, World War Z stars Mireille Enos (AMC’s The Killing), James Badge Dale (The Departed), Matthew Fox (Lost) and, in her feature film debut, Daniella Kertesz.

Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, Neverland, Quantum of Solace) directs.

Pitt plays a United Nations employee (natch) who “traverses the world in a race against time to stop the Zombie pandemic that is toppling armies and governments and threatening to decimate humanity itself,” according to the studio synopsis.