By Joe Bendel. In the dead of December, New York sports fans turn their attention to Major League Baseball’s Winter Meetings. Of course, Yankee fans are always hoping their well-heeled team pulls off a blockbuster deal. Yet the business side of baseball holds a fascination even for fans of so-called ‘small market’ teams. Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane tried to radically alter the business operations of shallow-pocketed teams. His somewhat successful efforts spawned a host of imitators, a nonfiction bestseller from Michael “Liar’s Poker” Lewis, and a subsequent, long-in-development Hollywood adaptation, Bennett Miller’s Moneyball, which opens today nationwide.
As a teenager, Beane was recruited hard by MLB scouts. Foregoing a full-ride Stanford scholarship, Beane pursued glory on the baseball diamond and failed badly, scratching out a front office management career instead. As Moneyball opens, his team has just been knocked out of the post-season by the dreaded Yankees and is about to be gutted by free agency. With an owner unwilling to pony up the big bucks, Beane spurns the star system of free agency, using unconventional methods to select players.
With the help of his Ivy-League educated numbers cruncher, Beane signs statistically under-valued players, placing greater emphasis on on-base-percentage than sexier stats like home runs or stolen bases. This produces a roster full of players considered rejects by the sports media, because they mostly were. They were cheap, though, and could fulfill their specific roles.
Not surprisingly for a film co-written by Aaron Sorkin, Moneyball takes a few liberties with the historical record, ignoring the fact that Beane’s predecessor (and current Mets GM) Sandy Alderson initiated the team’s “sabermetric” approach. Unfortunately, Alderson looks nothing like Brad Pitt, so that’s Hollywood for you. Using the Yankees as a symbol of large market imperialism is also getting to be a tired cliché, especially considering many of the players on their late 1990’s championship teams were farm system products. Continue reading Small Market Blues: LFM Reviews Moneyball
By Jason Apuzzo. • We had some very sad news lately in the Sword & Sandal world with the passing of Spartacus’ Andy Whitfield, who recently succombed to non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The intense Whitfield was only 39 years old, and after his first – and only – season as the star of the hit cable series Spartacus on Starz his career really seemed to be on the rise. We extend our condolences to his family and friends and to his colleagues at Starz – and the network will be holding an Andy Whitfield-Spartacus marathon in his honor. Whitfield will be missed; the arena won’t be the same without him.
• Otherwise, the biggest news of late on the Sword & Sandal front is the long-rumored return of Mel Gibson to the genre with a new film project on the Maccabees story, the freedom-fighting tale of Jewish revolt against Syrian and Hellenic rule in second century B.C. Judea – essentially the story that inspired Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights. Almost as striking as the fact that Gibson is taking on this material is that the gruff and colorful Joe Eszterhas (Basic Instinct, Showgirls) will apparently be returning from self-exiled Hollywood purgatory to write the screenplay – returning to material with which he is familiar, having previously written about the Holocaust in Hungary.
How do I react to all this? Twenty years ago this project would’ve sounded great. Today it sounds like two middle-aged guys who want to bond over bottles of Cazadores while auditioning dancing girls. In the wake of Gibson’s distasteful anti-Semitic tirades, this film is feeling like his belated mea culpa, like D.W. Griffith making Intolerance as penance for Birth of a Nation – which is not to imply, incidentally, that Gibson has a fraction of Griffith’s talent or determination.
Look, Gibson can do whatever he wants to do with his career as far as I’m concerned. Personally, however, I can’t watch his films anymore – even the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon movies I enjoyed so much years ago. His behavior has ruined those films for me; the magic is gone, Gibson’s ‘charm’ eroded away after too many boozy encounters with police, racist and/or paranoid rants, and Russian mistresses. I get very tired of people these days talking about how ‘George Lucas spoiled their childhood’ just because he re-edited a few scenes from Star Wars, or dropped some new digital creatures into the back of Jabba’s palace. You know who’s really spoiled a lot of fond memories from my teenage years? Mel Gibson. I look forward to the day when Gibson’s personal psychodramas are no longer routinely inflicted on us as industry news.
• The Immortals continues to roll down the tracks with a new marketing push, although the film still isn’t looking any better than it did before. Is it the bad dialogue? The trite storyline? Mickey Rourke wearing bunny ears? Hard to say. A lot of eyes will be on the film in November because it stars the new Superman (Henry Cavill), and because Freida Pinto will likely be getting her last chance to make an impression in a major film. Director Tarsem Singh will probably survive, of course, because he can always be hired to do Christian Dior ads.
By Joe Bendel. At best, the peasants live at subsistence level. The workers are exploited and young entrepreneurs forgo today to invest for the future. Yet there are those making enormous sums of money and consuming conspicuously in contemporary China. Whether it is called globalism, crony capitalism, or old fashioned authoritarianism, Guo Xiaolu (born in China, based in Britain) gives a human face to those grappling with realities of today’s China in Once Upon a Time Proletarian (trailer here), which screens at the Asia Society this Sunday, launching their latest film series, Visions of a New China.
Like a documentary sampler platter, Proletarian presents twelve (or an uneven baker’s dozen) sketches of life in post-Olympics go-go China. Not surprisingly, the old peasant is bitter, expressing open nostalgia for the days of the Mao regime, when the peasantry was at the top of the country’s social hierarchy. Migrant workers are nearly as disillusioned, including those employed at luxury hotels. Though it might sound more pleasant than factory or farm work, their long shifts without bathroom breaks certainly would not pass muster with OSHA. Perhaps most intriguing is the young partner in a prospective chain of economy hotels. She is overseeing the construction of their second hotel, which when finished will cater to construction workers. That’s one way to ensure quality control.
As connective tissue, Guo films young school children reading ironic stories (the term joke would be too strong) from their readers, which do not really relate to the following profiles per se, but express the peculiar zeitgeist of unbalanced times. Eventually, though, Guo turns her camera on them in earnest, getting a sense of their personalities and ambitions. They are all bright and engaging. Indeed, they represent the best of their country’s future, yet for some reason the government is trying its best to make them scarce (particularly the girls, who appear somewhat under-represented). Continue reading Vérité Visions of a New China: LFM Reviews Once Upon a Time Proletarian
By Joe Bendel. In the dead of December, New York sports fans turn their attention to Major League Baseball’s Winter Meetings. Of course, Yankee fans are always hoping their well-heeled team pulls off a blockbuster deal. Yet the business side of baseball holds a fascination even for fans of so-called ‘small market’ teams. Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane tried to radically alter the business operations of shallow-pocketed teams. His somewhat successful efforts spawned a host of imitators, a nonfiction bestseller from Michael “Liar’s Poker” Lewis, and a subsequent, long-in-development Hollywood adaptation, Bennett Miller’s Moneyball, which opens today nationwide.
