#24 — Moneyball (Bennett Miller, 2011) Baseball thrives and withers on its sense of tradition. The national pastime and the grand old game, baseball has a professional legacy that no other sport can match. The Chicago Cubs, for example, played … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 10s — Number Twenty-Four
The Academy Awards ceremony that took place ten years ago was a mess of mixed emotions. It anointed Crash as Best Picture, which many consider to be one of the worst choices for the Academy’s top prize in recent decades (I maintain the real worst choice in my lifetime is A Beautiful Mind, though The Revenant seems primed to become my new choice for that dubious category) and strained to honor a couple movie stars in the acting categories by awarding George Clooney and Reese Witherspoon Oscars for mediocre work. But then, Ange Lee won his first directing Oscar, entirely … Continue reading From the Archive: Capote
Shortly after Olympic wrestler Dave Schultz was shot in killed, in 1996, a spokesman announced at a press conference, “John du Pont is a marksman, and he has an arsenal. We don’t know how many guns or how much ammunition he has.” This man pushing sixty, unbelievably wealthy thanks to a family fortune that stretched back generations, had taken one of the weapons from that arsenal and written an ugly, lurid story with the pull of a trigger. Back before stories celebrity freak shows and rampant gun violence seemed to arrive with the regularity of the tides, the twisted tale of … Continue reading You scream and everybody comes a running
Perhaps the only thing more unlikely than Michael Lewis’s journalistic take on the statistically-driven transformation of the small market Oakland A’s turning into a major bestseller is the eventually film adaptation, which had its own torturous path to completion, standing … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2011 — Number Two
I never read Moneyball, the 2003 nonfiction bestseller by Michael Lewis that serves as the source material for Bennett Miller’s long-awaited follow-up to the wonderful Capote, but I didn’t come into the film entirely blind either. The film focuses on … Continue reading You can get tangled in a ball of rubber bands and twine
Coffee for Two 