This year's opening day psych-up movie

Happy baseball opening day, everyone.

Two teams played two counting games in Japan last week, but now it's time for the other 28 to join them. One of the best days of the year, if you ask me. And you're reading this, so I guess you're asking me.

I do like to tie in opening day to the movies, and I've usually done that in the form of watching Major League, a task made easier by having purchased the film on iTunes. But given that I did watch it each of the past two years, I figured maybe it was a good time to switch things up this year -- at least for one year.

So, Moneyball it was.

This may not be the movie you'd first tap for this honor, at least on the surface. It's about the love of the game, as most baseball movies are, but that love is buried deep within number crunching and philosophies about how to maximize wins from a small payroll.

There is, though, the dramatization of a 20-game winning streak by the 2002 Oakland Athletics, and that's about as sports movie as it gets.

And truth be told, much of my excitement about baseball nowadays is inseparable from my various fantasy baseball interests. So crunching numbers and evaluating players purely on the basis of what they can do for you is certainly on message for that type of thing. (Just so you don't think I'm some kind of soulless baseball fan, I'll tell you that my burning desire for my team, the Boston Red Sox, to win the World Series has been quenched by them having done that four times successfully since 2004, including last year most recently.)

Anyway, I really enjoyed sinking into my beanbag chair with a couple beers and a bag of grain twists for my third viewing of a film that made my top ten of 2011. It scratched the itch and then some.

And in just a few short hours ... play ball.

You're so Money, baby

I have two little rules of doing business on The Audient, and I adhere to them even if I'm the only one who cares about them.

1) I never use the same poster art to top a post more than once. If I'm going to write a second or third post about a particular movie, I'll find a different poster (or sometimes a still) from that movie as my artwork. I may reuse a poster at some point in the future, but it can only appear once on the top of the post. It can appear again somewhere in the body of the post, but not at the top. (The logic has something to do with being able to distinguish one post from another at a glance, but beyond that it's basically irrational.)

2) I never use the same title for a post twice.

I'm breaking rule #2 today -- sort of. You see, it was almost exactly a year ago that I used the title "You're so money, baby" for a post, and in fact, I'm only comfortable repeating the title this time because of the capitalization and italicization of the word "money," which technically makes it a different title. (Or so I'm telling myself.)

There are two reasons I'm willing to (sort of) break this rule:

1) Swingers quotes never go out of style.

2) I'm intentionally drawing a comparison to the post from a year ago -- triggering a sense of deja vu, if you will. That's because I'm getting a sense of deja vu from Trouble With the Curve.

The "You're so money, baby" post from September 23, 2011 was to herald the arrival of Bennett Miller's Moneyball, which went on to become a critical favorite, a (modest) hit with audiences and a best picture nominee. The producers of Trouble With the Curve would simply love it if those three outcomes followed from the arrival of their film.

The movies have more than a release date in the September 20s in common. On the most obvious level, they're both about baseball. More specifically, they're both about the side of baseball we don't see on the field. Even more specifically, they deal with scouting. In fact, you could say that Clint Eastwood's character in this film might have walked out of an Oakland A's scouting meeting after bristling at some idea espoused by that young whippernsapper Billy Beane.

Even more specifically than all that, the posters for both movies feature a talent evaluator whose body is pictured leaning forward at about the same angle. Consider Brad Pitt's posture in this Moneyball poster:

Must really chap Eastwood's ass to be forced by the marketing department to so closely imitate an unwashed hippie like Brad Pitt.

(If you're looking for more comparisons, one of the central focuses of both films is the lead character's relationship with his daughter.)

Outside of direct imitation, though, what we're seeing here is the notion that late September is the perfect time, psychologically, for a viewer to consume a contemplative meditation on baseball. Late in the baseball season is the new season for prestige baseball movies, and I wouldn't be surprised if we saw another one hit theaters on September 20th of 2013.

And if the marketers have done their jobs right, this movie will catch audiences in the moment of their greatest readiness for Trouble With the Curve, meaning at least one of those three desired outcomes -- the modest hit with the audience part -- will come true.

If they've done their jobs right, Clint Eastwood won't have to spend this weekend talking to a bunch of empty chairs.

You're so money, baby

I think Moneyball is going to be awesome.

This may surprise some of you. After all, I spent two posts in the past two weeks (here and here) explaining to you why I don't really like sports movies.

Then again, the second post dug into that argument a little deeper. My biggest complaint is with standard sports movies -- and Moneyball promises to be anything but. (Now that I think about it, my original statement wasn't that bold -- who likes the most standard version of anything?)

It's a movie about an unconventional sports philosophy, made unconventionally. If you only know that Moneyball is a baseball movie starring Brad Pitt, let me tell you a little bit more about it. Brad Pitt plays Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane, who tried to make the most of his team's miniscule payroll by using a revolutionary new set of metrics to assess ballplayers. He figured he could get some players on the cheap because they were considered castoffs by their current teams. What their current teams weren't considering was that these players had the ability to get on base, and getting on base is the most basic building block to scoring runs. Didn't matter if how they got there wasn't flashy, or whether they could play good defense (or were even suited to playing their defensive position). All that mattered was their ability to get on base, and this radical philosophy coalesced into a ton of wins at dime store prices.

So not only was Beane's philosophy unconventional (to say the least), but this movie is unconventional as well. The book it was based on, written by Michael Lewis (full title: Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game), was a best seller, beloved by both baseball fans and people who don't know a double from a double play. So why shouldn't that make for a hit movie?

Because a lot of it is about analyzing baseball stats, which can be dry as toast if you are not a baseball fan. And not even the "good stats," like home runs. Beane didn't really care if you could hit home runs, though that was certainly a bonus. He cared if you could walk. He cared if you could get hit by the pitch. He cared if you had more of a likelihood of reaching base on an error than the next guy. (Okay, that's totally out of the hands of the batter -- but if he felt it was reasonable to consider that, he would have.)

It's exactly these reasons that I think the movie might be really interesting. I already know what happened in this particular season of Oakland A's baseball (2002 -- you can look it up if you want), so I know there could possibly be some "typical" baseball scenes of game-winning homers and other moments of joy. However, I also know the A's didn't win the World Series that year (spoiler alert!) so I know it certainly doesn't end in prototypical sports movie fashion. (Not without a massive outcry from anyone who considers the truth to be sacrosanct, that is.)

So I'm thinking this movie is going to do a lot of cool stuff with on-screen representations of baseball stats. I know this partially because I actually saw a bit of one such scene in the trailer.

And this is the kind of sports movie I can get behind. A movie that uses the sport in ways that don't put paramount importance on the outcome of one final match. A movie that uses a baseball locker room for color and atmosphere and humor, not for a rousing speech by the team captain before the big game.

And it does look like it will be funny, right? I especially like that bit where Pitt says "I'll tell them" with a mouth full of food.

But another reason I'm looking forward to Moneyball is that I've actually read the book on which it was based. As I've committed myself more and more to watching movies in the last half-decade, I've sadly been reading fewer and fewer books. I was never a fast reader, but I used to get through at least 2-3 per year. I don't even want to tell you my current reading rate. In the book I'm reading right now, a book I'm re-reading, I devoured about 150 pages of it while I was on vacation in Mexico back in April. Since then I've read about 50 more pages over nearly half a year. (In case it isn't obvious, I greatly regret this priority shift and hope to make a course correction ... next week. Yeah, next week.)

So when a film adaptation of a book I've actually read does come out, I'm all the more excited to get my eyeballs on it. In this case I'm not going to be judging "how they got the book wrong," because it's not that kind of book. Really, I'm just familiar with the stories presented in Lewis' book and I want to see how they materialize on screen.

One last reason I think Moneyball is going to be awesome: The poster above. Can you judge a movie by its poster? I hope so, because this poster is so money, baby. And I'm not just talking about its lush green color.

The one thing about Moneyball that's unfortunate -- but then in a different way fortunate -- is that I'll have to wait until next weekend to see it. My friend Don will be out in Southern California next weekend for a convention in San Diego, and I'm going to meet him down there to spend Saturday night in my sister city to the south. (I don't think San Diego is actually considered the "sister city" of Los Angeles, but it sounded good when I wrote it.) We'll be catching Moneyball in a theater that's as-yet unfamiliar to both of us. We always put an emphasis on seeing a good movie together when he visits, and hopefully, this will be no exception. (Last year we saw 127 Hours and Four Lions in the same weekend-long visit -- talk about some of the best of 2010.)

Truth is, I couldn't see Moneyball this weekend anyway because my wife will be two hours east of here for the weekend on a work weekend. My son and I will be joining her for about 24 hours from Saturday afternoon to Sunday afternoon, but I'm on daddy duty both before then and after then until she gets home on Tuesday.

So the flip side of not being physically able to see Moneyball this weekend is that I will have the living room TV at my command tonight, Sunday night and Monday night.

Suffice it to say I will use that time to watch movies, not to become a better reader again. (Next week, I promise ...)