The Cue Card

It helps to be a big baseball fan to thoroughly enjoy “Moneyball.” I really liked it; I didn’t realize I was wearing a baseball hat in there (a championship Giants hat from my sister), but as I looked around other people were wearing jerseys and hats, too. I warn that non-baseball movie-goers might find “Moneyball” a bit slow, long to take root and not much action (a lot were there for Brad Pitt, no doubt). But stats, lineups and subtleties are at the crux of baseball.

“Moneyball” explores how a team found a way to compete in a league where huge payroll discrepancies exist, from the New York Yankees with their million-dollar players to the Oakland A’s with far, far less. The movie goes back to the end of the 2001 season, when three of the A’s stars: Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon and closer Jason Isringhausen became free agents and were pilfered by richer teams. Come 2002, what were the less-monied A’s to do?

Enter General Manager Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt, and his fresh out of college assistant, Peter Brand, played by Jonah Hill. They piece together a motley crew of overlooked players based on a statistical analysis of on-base percentage and runs scored. The A’s scouts think they’re totally nuts, and true to form, the team is awful in the first half of the season, compiling losses at an alarming rate. But somehow the little team takes hold and starts to come to life, eventually winning an incredible 20 games in a row, a record still in the American League.

Pitt as Beane and Hill as his nerdy assistant, are the gist of film, as they concoct a roster they believe can win. Both are great, and fill up the screen with anxieties, and at times humor. It’s mostly baseball from behind the scenes, from a GM who nervously listens to games only intermittently on a transistor radio, and who once was a player, too, with the inner scars still to show for it.

I haven’t liked a baseball movie this much, since perhaps “The Natural” in 1984. Kudos to director Bennett Miller (who also did “Capote”) and screenplay adapters Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin who worked from the bestselling book by Michael Lewis. This reminds me: What are the best baseball movies in recent memory? I’d say: The Natural, Moneyball, The Rookie, Bull Durham and Field of Dreams.

What was I thinking? I guess I thought this movie might be summer fun and sort of capture some of the mystery or intrigue that the original “Planet of the Apes” films from 1968-73 had. This latest one is meant to be a prequel about how intelligent apes took over a planet (in this case Earth). But unfortunately I think fans of the original films and others will find it quite disappointing. My brother warned me not to go. Good grief he was right. It’s a far cry from the films with Charlton Heston and Roddy McDowall. This movie feels so separate than those; it doesn’t seem in the same galaxy.

In the original you recall astronauts crash their spaceship on a strange planet in the distant future and find apes in charge. In this film set before that, geneticists looking for a cure for alzheimer’s inject apes with a drug that heightens their intelligence, enabling them to escape their cages and eventually run amok on Earth.

But the latest storyline gets pretty drippy and predictable: about a genetic company out for a buck, the cruelties of animal experimentation in medicine and a scientist with an ill father who breaks the rules. You might be reminded of the recent movie “Splice” perhaps and a few others. Also the computer-generated apes and effects lend it a cartoon-like feel, manipulating the star ape to be endearing and able to do anything. At some points it reminded me of the cuteness of “E.T.”

I’m a bit surprised that “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” got such favorable reviews in the papers. I guess for summer blockbuster fodder it’s pretty on par or above. But the original films were so much more than that; they were interesting and gripping and had something to say. Maybe it was because I was a kid then, but “Planet of the Apes” took me away to another place, it seemed real and scary. This one doesn’t “rise” to the occasion.

“In a Better World” just came to my neck of the woods though it’s been out a year and received high accolades for winning both the 2011 Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It beat out “Biutiful” with Javier Bardem twice among other strong nominees so that’s saying something.

I didn’t know much about “Better World” other than it was Danish, but it turned out to be quite a dramatic film, a bit more ominous considering the recent news out of Norway. It’s about two broken families who cross paths after their outcast sons become friends and get into trouble. In one family, the parents are on the verge of a divorce with the father spending long periods of time in Africa as a doctor in a refugee camp. Meanwhile their son is bullied and harassed at school. In the other family, the mother has just died, and the father and boy move to town, where the boy’s new to the school. Both of the boys going through turmoil become friends and start to act out in ways that pushes them to the edge of disaster.

The film switches between scenes in Africa, where the one father copes with the bloodshed in the camp (and his family separation), to scenes in Denmark, where the sad, troubled boys decide to make a bomb. It’s disturbing for sure, but fortunately these kids turn out to be not as sinister as the attackers in Columbine or Norway. The parents seem to hold sway and come together in the end.

The music at times seems a bit overwrought in “Better World,” but the cinematography and acting capture the isolation and angst. It’s quite sad for sure, more sad than disturbing than two movies out now (“Beautiful Boy” and “We Need to Talk About Kevin”) that deal with the aftermath of a teen’s mass killing spree. It’s just too eerie and horrifying to see either of those any time soon.

Both my parents (who see a movie about once a year or less) and my mother-in-law saw “Midnight in Paris” before I did. It’s one of those little pleasers, perhaps especially to a certain generation, that gains steam through word of mouth-around-town kind of thing. Some folks tell their friends who tell others and they tell others who implore their adult kids to go and on it goes from there.

Woody Allen’s latest film is a clever, charming homage to the city of Paris and the golden age of the 1920s. It’s about an engaged American couple who visit Paris but start to drift apart when Gil, played by Owen Wilson, a struggling writer, falls for the city and wants to move there after marriage. Inez, played by Rachel McAdams, doesn’t share his romantic notions of the City of Lights, and plans instead for their life in Malibu. While Inez is out dancing with friends and tagging along with her parents, Gil opts to walk the city streets, magically falling into a kind of time portal at midnight that takes him back to Paris in the 1920s and all of the famous writers and artists of the day.

The film’s pretty funny from the start, poking fun at hopeless Americans in Paris, but gets a little zanier when Gil starts to meet his idols from the ’20s, including Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, T.S. Eliot, Dali, Picasso and many others. To appreciate the full scoop, it helps if you recall these giants of the ’20s, or the artists who came and went at Gertrude Stein’s salon. By the way, where was Alice Toklas, Stein’s long-time partner in it? The Hemingway character is amusingly funny, spouting dialogue as if from one of his books about Truth and Courage, War and Love.

Along the way, Owen Wilson does a wonderful job carrying the film as the doe-eyed, dream-filled, amusable Gil. His performance reminded me a bit of Woody Allen himself when he played in “Hannah and Her Sisters” and “Annie Hall.” Owen was a hoot in “Wedding Crashers,” but he’s even better in this.

“Midnight in Paris” is perhaps Woody Allen at his least offensive. It’s a nostalgic, heartfelt romp with delightful shots of Paree, a bit safer perhaps than his film “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” and more clever than his recent “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,” which is also about a struggling writer. It shows that Allen still has it even when he’s far from his beloved New York.