Moneyball
Good grief, the Michael Lewis rot was there from the start. This was even co-written by Aaron Sorkin, for the radical centrist bingo. It was just hidden under the mass of talented actors squeezing blood from a stone.
Then there’s the bizarre tidbits: the opening is one month after 9/11, set in New York, but this is unmentioned. Special thanks to the US Department of Defense, for some reason. They made Bobby Kotick into a movie star, what the actual fuck. Worse, because of this, that modern day Pinkerton is himself a member of an union, SAG-AFTRA. Insanity.
I’m I supposed to feel bad for a team with a 40 million dollar budget for salaries? Is this an “underdog”? And they lose the World Series anyway, undermining the entire message of the freaking story! The team was bought by the Gap heir a few years later, then moved to Vegas. It’s Little Miss Sunshine all over again!
I have never seen a baseball game in my life, and this is not making me want to do it. Just a bunch of white guys mistreating minorities. And shitting on the coach, hard! The hero is of course the hero is the Yale graduate, not a blue collar guy.
That Hattenberg home run is like the Éder goal in the 2016 Euros final? I just don’t know a damn think about baseball.
My guess is that this is an “hack” that makes the game more predictable, at the expense of making it more boring (if that is possible with baseball). Similar to Spain in soccer, maybe? Frankly, the parallels to financialization and chattel slavery are more apt.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.