Moneyball

PCMR Verdict: A solid, blue-chip Hollywood product, that somehow never quite reaches the sum of its parts.

PCMR Rating: 6.5/10

Police procedurals are a well-trodden path for movie writers, with some of PCMR's favourite movies unashamedly in the genre. The French Connection, Fargo, L.A. Confidential and Zodiac all earn credibility from their portrayal of policemen at work, and all would be seriously diminished without it. But procedural dramas aren't limited to the cops and the detectives, oh my no. Audiences like watching lawyers too, and politicians and the military, especially once they're played by Hollywood actors with craggy faces and zippy lines, or their veneers and their boobs and their sexy uniforms.. (Steady! - Ed)

Aaron Sorkin is a grand-master of the sexy procedural drama, essentially getting under the covers of a profession for a story, populating it with attractive characters, and penning fizzy, dialogue-driven scenes between them, generally involving dense professional discussions loaded with innuendo and doublespeak. 'The West Wing' should need no introduction (sexy politicians), but also on his CV is 'A Few Good Men' (sexy lawyers, sexy military), the ill-fated-but-very-good 'Studio 60' (sexy TV producers) and most recently 'The Social Network' (sexy, er, programmers?).

As Mark Kermode put it in his typically succinct terms, 'The Social Network' was about as entertaining as a movie about a bunch of men in offices arguing about copyright could be. Harsh perhaps, as the Social Network was a very good movie, but Kermode nailed the fact that when he took on 'The Social Network', Sorkin took the procedural drama to precarious places, and wrote a Business Procedural. He came out the other side of that unscathed, but the question with 'Moneyball' is: can Sorkin make the world of baseball interesting and sexy, and resist falling into cliché?

Well, no book is unfilmable, but Moneyball must have been a real challenge, even for Sorkon. Adapted from the Michael Lewis's book, it tells the story of Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics baseball franchise, and how they introduced statistical analysis to baseball in 2002, in order to better evaluate players... and Brad Pitt's in it! (Phew, nearly lost me there! - Ed)

The interest in a story like this lies in the fact that Beane achieved amazing success against the odds on a shoestring, and radically changed the sport he loved in the space of a single season, by taking a big chance on using these statistical techniques pioneered by Yale graduate Peter Brand (Jonah Hill). You don't necessarily need to love baseball - or statistics - to enjoy watching this story unfold, in what is an extremely solid package of a movie.

On the package: director Bennett Miller is formerly responsible for Capote, Stephen Zaillian also worked on the script with Sorkin, and his last gig was American Gangster. Brad Pitt - looking more like Robert Redford every day - is good in the lead, ably supported by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright and Jonah Hill, and the Cinematography is by a certain Wally Pfister. Now this last detail might not seem that important, but let me tell you: this movie looks beautiful, and Pfister takes a lot of the credit for that, just as he did for much of the look of Chris Nolan's Batman movies.

Unfortunately, despite the presence of all these heavyweights, Moneyball never really enters the stratosphere for me. It's entertaining, sure, and the story is great. Pitt is very solid in the lead, and delivers his acres of dialogue capably enough, as we know he can. In particular his scenes with his young daughter, and with the unrecognisable team manager Hoffman, are good, but Jonah Hill was a little wooden for me. The story is the real star, but the movie also looks just amazing, so it is never a chore to watch.

At just over two hours, it's quite long, but the time never really drags. It would be harsh to describe it as 'about as entertaining as a movie about men introducing statistics to baseball can be', but I'm afraid some element of that is true. To its credit, it never lags into lazy sporting cliché, but does suffer from being a little, well, dull.

If you're a fan of baseball, or lived through the story and watched it happen, you'll probably love Moneyball. If on the other hand, like me, you're a fan of sport, or management, you'll probably just like it, maybe even a lot. If this had been a similar story, but set against the backdrop of the football world cup of 2002 for example ('Saipan - The Movie!' Yes! - Ed), I might have been a bit more invested, but it just didn't grab me. Dunphy would say "no, Bill, no, it's a good movie, not a great one."

Charlie Wilson's War

The verdict: Polished Hollywood fare. Hoffman steals the show and Hanks is great, but the movie, although diverting enough, isn't brilliant.

The rating: 6/10

Now, if Hollywood ever needed to put an Oscar-worthy 5-a-side team together, they need look no further than the cast and crew that was assembled to tell the story of Charlie Wilson's War. Team CWW already has a fair collection of golden paperweights between them…

But before we get into all that, here’s the skinny: Charlie Wilson was a Texas congressman who managed to – almost single-handedly – arm the Afghans in the late eighties, allowing them to successfully defend against a Soviet invading force. All this, using American money and weapons of Soviet origin, provided by a thoroughly unlikely alliance between Egypt and Israel.

The movie is scripted by Aaron Sorkin – he of 'West Wing' fame, and directed by a certain Mike Nichols (you may remember him from such movies as 'The Graduate' and 'Catch 22'), so our team of super-friends is off to a pretty good start already... As for the people in front of the camera, Tom Hanks plays the quick-witted, Texan congressman who likes to sip whisky at ten a.m., and is a celebrated lothario on Capitol Hill. Wilson is assisted in his political machinations by the thoroughly undiplomatic CIA man Gust Avrokatos, played with portly aplomb by Philip Seymour Hoffman. As if that wasn’t enough, Julia Roberts even pops up, and for a moment you'd be forgiven for thinking this was the next Danny Ocean flick..

Thankfully it's not as vacuous as the Ocean franchise, but the sum of the efforts of all these a-listers is unfortunately not as impressive as you might expect. Hanks is perfectly cast, and as likeable and vulnerable as ever in the lead role, but he shouldn’t win any Oscars with this performance. Unfortunately, Julia Roberts is miscast in my book, she's simply too glamorous for the role, which needed someone with a little, well.. older, like Michelle Pfeiffer perhaps. Our Joolz seems trapped in her Danny Ocean school of acting, where simply being there with the right hairdo is enough to keep the audience happy (she's capable of better than this). Unfortunately for Julia, her male co-stars are far from phoning it in, so she appears wooden in comparison.

The standout performance is Philip Seymour Hoffman's though, and right from his first moments in front of the camera, Sorkin’s sharp dialogue allows Capote-man to almost literally chew the scenery. His character rapidly becomes the liveliest and most interesting in the film, and he has the best chance of an Oscar of anyone in the CWW team.

The first hour of the movie is great, but towards the end, it devolves and almost fizzles out completely by the end, due to a montage! Yep, as Team America said, when you need to move things along, you need a montage. Unfortunately, after 75 minutes of CWW, there was still a fair chunk of story to tell, so this dirty device is employed. The montage sequence detracts from the impact of the movie, placed as it is less than ten minutes before the end.

That said, CWW is enjoyable, polished Hollywood entertainment, with enough quality to be watchable. Unfortunately, it doesn't ever reach the high standards that its cast and crew might lead you to expect.

Charlie Wilson's War is in cinemas now

Capote

The verdict:A great lead performance, but the movie lacks real depth overall. Ultimately unrewarding.

The rating: 6/10


Sometimes it's a wise to avoid the lascivious lure of movie marketing men, and simply sidestep the decision to view a 'big' film around the time it's released. PCMR would like to claim such wisdom in this case, but in reality, although my initial reaction to Capote's release might not have involved chomping at the bit, I just didn't get around to watching it 'til now! (Useless - Ed)

I should probably describe 'Capote' as 'big' under advisement, as it was essentially made independently, and executive produced by Hoffman himself, but it generated sufficient 'buzz' - that most ephemeral and sought-after of commodities in the movie industry – to garner multiple academy award nominations and universal recognition for Philip Seymour Hoffman in the titular lead role of Truman Capote.

However, the point I would make here is that buzz is often off the mark. Think 'Star Wars Episode I', 'Snakes on a Plane', the much vaunted '300', and now also possibly even Tarantino's 'Grindhouse'? (Wow, getting on to dodgy ground there! – Ed).

In the case of a biopic such as this, there is a well-trodden path towards Oscar-worthiness, and as long as there is technical expertise on show, you can bet your barnet that the biopic will be in the running for gongs come Oscar night. True to form, Capote was nominated for four, including best picture. Catherine Keener deserved her nod for a great supporting turn as Harper Lee, and Hoffman undoubtedly deserved his for a great performance, but best director and best picture? Methinks the academy were a little swept up in the 'buzz' two years ago.

However... in this context, I'd still have to say that technically at least, Capote is a good movie. It’s a well-constructed, well-acted ensemble piece with particularly strong performances from Hoffman and Keener, an intelligent script, believable, rounded characters and some beautifully colourful vistas of Kansas in wintertime.

It's just the story that lets it down for me. I mean, on the surface, it's straight-forward enough: Capote is stuck for direction on his next novel, hears of a series of grisly murders in Kansas, and sets about interviewing one the prime suspects. The product of these interviews was a certain novel called In Cold Blood... So with a straight-forward narrative such as this, you would expect there to be a lot more going on under the surface, right? Well, you may be disappointed.. Truman Capote was certainly an interesting, if unstable character. In the movie, his attempts to be all things to all people could be interpreted a number of ways: either he is duplicitous, emotionally insecure, or some combination of the two.

The lead role is superbly played by Hoffman, but my main problem with the character was simply that he was not particularly likeable. Capote is portrayed as intelligent, but more in the sense of being manipulative and self-serving than philanthropic. The means by which he extracts the interviews from the alleged killers in the murder case, and then simply exploits this information for his own benefit - not before taking to bed for a day or to due to the stress of it all, does not warm him to the audience on any human level. Also, the end of the film leaves us in some doubt as to whose blood the title of Capote's novel refers...

I have to say, not being aware of Capote’s work – aside from having seen 'Beat the Devil', a rather lacklustre Bogie movie he co-wrote – I was not inspired by the movie version of his life to learn any more about the man. An interesting character, sure, but perhaps the man had more interesting chapters in his life to put on the silver screen.

Overall, I was left with the feeling that what was on show in Capote was beautiful in it’s own way, but that this beauty only ran skin-deep. Oscar-worthiness doesn’t always mean a great movie… (on the other hand perhaps Capote suffered from being viewed only two nights after PCMR watched 'The Life of Others' – Ed)

... As is often the case with the movie industry, it is very difficult to put together a project without finding some other crew attempting to ride on your coat-tails, putting out an eerily similar movie within a few months of your own. Having personally witnessed a Celebrity Deathmatch between The Prestige and The Illusionist, PCMR now declares Capote to be up against the allegedly superior 'Infamous', released last year, and featuring Sigourney Weaver, Gwyneth Paltrow, and a certain Daniel Craig. Perhaps I’ll hold back from condemning Capote too much until I see Infamous, but on its own merits, I didn’t particularly warm to this movie.