Oscar nominees Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill take a different approach with the Oakland A’s in MONEYBALL
MONEYBALL (Bennett Miller, 2011)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Saturday, July 9, 6:30
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
www.moneyball-movie.com
After winning 102 games during the 2001 season but then falling to the New York Yankees in the American League Division Series in five tough games, the cash-poor Oakland A’s also lost three of their most prominent players, Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, and Jason Isringhausen, to free agency. To rebuild the team with limited funds, general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) turns to an unexpected source: Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a young stat geek who believes that on-base percentage is the key to the game. The A’s scouts find it hard to believe that Beane is looking at has-been catcher Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), aging outfielder David Justice (Stephen Bishop), and underperforming submariner Chad Bradford (Casey Bond) to get the A’s to the World Series, as does manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who refuses to use the new players the way Beane insists. But when the A’s indeed start winning after a few more questionable deals pulled off by Beane and Brand, the entire sport world starts taking a much closer look at what is soon known as “moneyball.” Based on the 2003 bestseller Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis, Moneyball is an exciting film even though the vast majority of it occurs off the field. Pitt is wonderfully understated as Beane, a former five-tool prospect for the Mets and divorced father of a twelve-year-old girl (Kerris Dorsey).
Pitt earned an Oscar nod for Best Actor for his portrayal of the real-life Beane, a confident but nervous man who may or may not have a big chip on his shoulder. Hill was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role as wiz-kid Brand, a fictional character inspired by Paul DePodesta, who refused to let his name and likeness be used in the film; Brand instead is an amalgamation of several of the people who work for Beane. Director Bennett Miller (Foxcatcher, Capote) takes the viewer into a number of fascinating back-room dealings, including a revealing scene in which Beane tries to acquire Ricardo Rincon from the Cleveland Indians, furiously working the phones to pull off the deal. Also nominated for Best Picture, Best Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Adapted Screenplay, Moneyball firmly belongs in the playoff pantheon of great baseball movies, with the added bonus that you don’t have to be a fan or know a lot about the game to get sucked into its intoxicating tale. The film is screening July 9 at 6:30 at Metrograph and will be followed by a Q&A with writer, director, and actor James Toback, who wrote The Gambler and Bugsy and wrote and directed such other pictures as Fingers, Love and Money, and Seduced and Abandoned as well as the 1999 drama Black and White, which stars Mike Tyson, Robert Downey Jr., Brooke Shields, Claudia Schiffer, Raekwon, Ben Stiller, and Gaby Hoffmann and is being shown at Metrograph right after Moneyball and will also be followed by a Q&A with Toback.
After a thirty-year hiatus, Max Rockatansky is resurrected in the ultrafeminist Mad Max: Fury Road, but this time the lonely hero is played by Tom Hardy, following in the footsteps of Mel Gibson, who starred in 1979’s Mad Max, 1981’s The Road Warrior, and 1985’s Beyond Thunderdome. After nearly two decades of stops and starts, Mad Max creator George Miller finally completed the fourth picture in the franchise, and it’s quite possibly the best of the bunch. In a postapocalyptic world where the primary goal is simply just to survive, Max has been captured by Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and turned into a blood bag for the skeletal Nux (Nicholas Hoult). But when Max encounters Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) driving a big War Rig, escaping from the Citadel with five of Immortan Joe’s breeding wives — Toast the Knowing (Zoë Kravitz), Capable (Riley Keough), the Dag (Abbey Lee), Cheedo the Fragile (Courtney Eaton), and the Splendid Angharad (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), who is pregnant — they are forced to team up if they are going to make it to the Green Place and live. Max, who still has regular flashbacks of his brutally murdered wife and child, is, in a way, forming a new family with the tough-as-nails, one-handed Furiosa, the young wives, and even Nux, as Miller (Babe, Happy Feet) and cowriters Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris emphasize motherhood and milk amid the spectacular, nonstop car chases and sensational violence. As always, Miller has included a cast of lunatic fringers, including Slit (Josh Helman), Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones), the People Eater (John Howard), the Bullet Farmer (Richard Carter), the Organic Mechanic (Angus Sampson), the Valkyrie (Megan Gale), the Keeper of the Seeds (Melissa Jaffer), and Corpus Colossus (Quentin Kenihan), along with some awesome vehicles, all caught on film with breathless glee by cinematographer John Seale. Mad Max: Fury Road blends wrought emotion with a mostly analog technical virtuosity that earned it ten Oscar nominations, winning for Best Film Editing (Margaret Sixel), Best Production Design (Colin Gibson and Lisa Thompson), Best Costume Design (Jenny Beavan), Best Makeup and Hairstyling (Lesley Vanderwalt, Elka Wardega, and Damian Martin), Best Sound Mixing (Chris Jenkins, Gregg Rudloff, and Ben Osmo), and Best Sound Editing (Mark Mangini and David White). It’s a glorious tale that, if we’re not careful, could be our destiny. Mad Max: Fury Road is screening July 6 on the Pier 63 lawn in Hudson River Park in the Hudson RiverFlicks: Big Hit Wednesdays series, which continues through August 5 with such other 2015 films as Trainwreck, The Big Short, and Creed.
Director Monte Hellman and star Warren Oates enter “the mystic realm of the great cock” in the 1974 cult film Cockfighter. Alternately known as Born to Kill and Gamblin’ Man, the film is set in the world of cockfighting, where Frank Mansfield (Oates) is trying to capture the Cockfighter of the Year award following a devastating loss that cost him his money, car, trailer, girlfriend, and voice — he took a vow of silence until he wins the coveted medal. Mansfield communicates with others via his own made-up sign language and by writing on a small pad; in addition, he delivers brief internal monologues in occasional voiceovers. He teams up with moneyman Omar Baradansky (Richard B. Shull) as he attempts to regain his footing in the illegal cockfighting world, taking on such challengers as Junior (Steve Railsback), Tom (Ed Begley Jr.), and archnemesis Jack Burke (Harry Dean Stanton); his drive for success is also fueled by his desire to finally marry his much-put-upon fiancée, Mary Elizabeth (Patricia Pearcy). The cast also includes Laurie Bird as Mansfield’s old girlfriend, Troy Donahue as his brother, Millie Perkins as his sister-in-law, Warren Finnerty as Sanders, Allman Brothers guitarist Dickey Betts as a masked robber, and Charles Willeford, who wrote the screenplay based on his novel, as Ed Middleton.
It’s déjà vu all over again in South Korean writer-director Hong Sangsoo’s latest masterpiece, Right Now, Wrong Then. Hong’s previous films, such as Tales of Cinema, 
