Skyfall

I was going to try to fit bone into the headline somehow…but with our recent conversations about 007 and his genitalia, but I thought this was more appropriate. Or inappropriate. That’s what you call diverse writing.

This was the first movie I’ve ever seen in a theater by myself. Well I wasn’t really by myself. I was surrounded by 200 elderly people hacking up their lung butter every time Bond was trying to make sexy lady moves. I couldn’t help but thing maybe that was why he wasn’t getting very lucky this time around.

Anyway, Skyfall is all about Bond and how he’s losing a step, becoming “old balls” if you will. After a near-death experience, Bond isn’t quite what he once was. He’s on edge, jittery. He’s lost his marksmanship, he’s lost as step physically and we find out that his upbringing was less than ideal, leading to some mommy/daddy issues.

Thankfully this is all just in time for homosexually-charged Javier Bardem to get a list of all the MI6 agents and starts pickin’ em off one by one. As if Bond didn’t have enough shit on his plate, he’s gotta deal with this now. At this point in the movie he’d only gotten laid once.

So basically I felt that two over-arching themes “pop, pop”ed out to me in this installment. The first was the old, “I’m getting too old for this shit” shit. I really had a hard time buying into this, since it seems like the series was rebooted to have Daniel Craig portray a younger Bond. We’re only three movies in for heaven sake and he’s already too old for this shit? I wonder at what point in the Roger Moore was getting to old for the shit. Maybe he never did. Although in Craig’s defense, the toughest thing Moore ever did on-screen was…look handsome? Nah, probably the clown thing.

The second theme I saw…well it’s hard to put a finger on. The film was basically trying to tell us what the James Bond franchise is all about. I watched the 60 Minutes interview with Craig the other day, and they asked him why the movies weren’t as campy and fun. He basically said that they had to earn that right. They literally leveled the franchise, because Die Another Day was so bad, that they had to start from scratch.

You can see in this movie, they slowly are starting to add the themes back in. Tastefully I might add. We have Q, but he doesn’t give him that much cool stuff, he’s merely introduced. We see a couple of one liners. While not the greatest, they still made me feel fuzzy. I smiled and felt apart of the movie as a Bond fan. There’s some other great moments that harken back to the days of Connery, but I won’t spoil too much.

Lastly, the thing that made this movie great was they reminded us that no one in Bond is irreplaceable. The reason the franchise has been able to survive for this long is because although actors may come and go, characters, positions, themes…all the reasons we keep coming back for more are still there. Bond is still Bond, and while Daniel Craig isn’t my favorite 007, he’s growing on me fast. At least he’s not emotionally stunted George Lazenby.

Moneyball

Moneyball was an interesting experience for me. When I first heard they were turning the hit book into a movie, I was halfway through a book entitled The Book. That book is a straight up text book read, and although it’s extremely well written and interesting, it is definitely not an easy read. There are no stories, no background, no people or characters, just numbers. Pages and pages of charts and tables, while educational, can lull you to sleep.

That is always the false impression I’d gathered from people talking about Moneyball. So when the rumors of a movie came out, I didn’t think it was going to work, but I was still very excited. Because, you know, baseball.

When started the book, I was amazed. Not that it was the greatest thing I’ve ever read, but it wasn’t a textbook! There were characters! Michael Lewis does a great job setting the scene of Billy’s past, the draft room, the video room, it’s all clear in my mind. There are, of course, more number heavy sections, like when he’s explaining fielding metrics and the different statistic companies that arose independently. But all these gory details could easily be eliminated for the big screen without taking away from the book, and it worked well.

The only real problems I had with the movie were when sometimes it was a little too obvious that they were cramming ideas from the book into made-up scenes from the movie. The most obvious part to me for instance, was the whole David Justice being old balls. In the book, it’s easier for Michael Lewis to just explain to the readers who David Justice is, and how his balls are old and slow. But without a narrator, they had to try to cram it in by having some bimbo TV reporter be like, “Hey, I heard you suck and are old as balls, is that true? How are you going to be able to play with such old balls?”

I’m paraphrasing obviously, but the way the TV reporter acted took me right out of it, because TV reporters are little pussies, and would never say something that direct and upfront. Maybe if they had an old crusty columnist, it would have worked better.

I wasn’t a huge fan of Brad Pitt in the role, even though he won me over more and more as the movie went on. I thought the movie as a whole kind of portrayed Beane as dumber than he really is, and I felt it made him seem like every idea was Jonah Hills, even though I thought Beane had been interested in Bill James before he met DePodesta, but I could be wrong.

Overall, I really liked the movie, and when it comes to baseball movies, it’s probably my favorite. It combines my interest with sabermetrics and my love of baseball, to something I think we all love, a good underdog story. Despite how I can’t stand the A’s and how boring they are and how they are, or the fact they are division rivals, it’s still a great movie and I’m glad it came together how it did.