I loved it - you might not

Rating: 8/10 (10 October 2011)

Being a baseball fan and longtime reader of The Baseball Abstract by Bill James, this was a movie I knew there was a good chance I would like. Having now seen it, I'm happy to report that it did not disappoint.
Billy Beane's application of baseball metrics I had long believed in and then experiencing success with it was a vindication of the way I looked at baseball (often to the derision of my other baseball fan friends). As such, this is an engrossing and compelling story to me. I remember well the details and actual people involved. Given all that, it could still have been done poorly but, happily, it was not.
Brad Pitt is compelling as Beane and Jonah Hill is a scene stealer as Peter Brand, the nerdy statistics analyst who serves as Beane's inspiration to try something different and then his right hand man. Some of the peripherals of the story (Beane's personal life, for instance) could have been tightened up but serve to chronicle the pressure on Beane from all sides as his new approach fails miserably at first.
The movie kept me interested throughout and told a story I already knew in a compelling way, at least to me who knew the background. A word of warning, though, my family who saw it with me was evenly divided between sports fans and non-sports fans, with the non-sports fans finding it boring and way too long.