moneyball

Brad Pitt, 47, (wearing a Tom Ford brown velvet jacket) took part in a press conference today at the Toronto Film Festival to talk about his new baseball movie, Moneyball.

The star talked a bit about being a sports fan.
“As a kid, I loved the Bad News Bears. North Dallas Forty was the first R-rated film I snuck into. (He would have been about 16 when it came out.) There’s this thing about overcoming adversity. I don’t know if it’s in our DNA, but my team (the Saints) lost to the Packers last night, but so be it.”

Read more/discuss. Thanks Gabriella.

For my money, the best baseball movie of the last 25 years is Bull Durham (sorry, but I never got into the mystical sports-in-the-cornfield corn of Field of Dreams). It was a movie as much about talk — loose, low-down, purplish, and inspired — as it was about baseball. The super-sharp and rousing Moneyball, which may be the best baseball movie since Bull Durham, is also about talk, but in a coolly heady and original inside-the-front-office way. Based on the nonfiction book by Michael Lewis, and written by the powerhouse talents of Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin (the director, proving his major-league mettle, is Capote‘s Bennett Miller), it opens with footage of a playoff game in which the New York Yankees beat the Oakland A’s, illustrating an essential reality of modern sports: the deeper a team’s pockets, the more probable it is that the team will win. (The Yankees’ budget that year was $114 million; the A’s was $39 million.)

Read more/discuss. Spoiler alert.

The Hollywood actor told a Toronto International Film Festival presser for Moneyball that renegade digital filmmakers will increasingly figure in a movie business long dominated by the studio system.

TORONTO — Can the art of winning an unfair game be applied to Hollywood?

Moneyball star Brad Pitt thinks so.

“Because we’ve been doing something the same way, for so long, does that mean it’s alright for today. We can’t stop questioning the context of how decisions are made at the time,” the star of Bennet Miller’s baseball movie told a Toronto International Film Festival press conference Friday.

“Why, if we’re inventing the automobile today, would it run on a finite resource that we need to go to war for… It’s this type of questioning I feel inspired by,” Pitt, who plays Oakland Athletics’ general manager Billy Beane in the Sony Pictures Entertainment pic, added.

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