I thought
Moneyball was fantastic. If you are not a baseball fan, you may not enjoy it quite as much. Ebert:
http://www.rogerebert.com/apps/pbcs....0929999/-1/RSS
"Moneyball," a smart, intense and moving film that isn't so much about sports as about the war between intuition and statistics.
It centers on the character of the Oakland Athletics' general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), who after a bad start as a MLB player, moved over to management and was driven by his hatred of losing.
This is really a movie about business.
All that matters is that you win the last game of the season.
It is the "hatred of losing" that informs the whole movie. Beane lost his major league dreams, his wife, and I think it is his fear of losing his daughter that keeps him in Oakland. The scenes with his daughter were some of the best moments in the movie.
Moneyball was written by Zaillian and Sorkin, and there are some scintillating scenes that reminded me of the intense dialogue in
The Social Network. Ex. the war room with the scouts, Beane meeting Peter Brand in Cleveland, and Beane's meeting with the Red Sox.
The acting was uniformly great. Philip Seymour Hoffman is barely recognizable as Art Howe. The score is very minimal, and melancholy.
I don't know how the book compares.