Average movie; watch instead "Gran Torino" or "Moneyball"!

Rating: 5/10 (16 December 2012)

This is one of those Hollywood dramas where every single problem, and believe me there are quite a few, gets solved literally during the last 10 minutes. TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE is basically three things: a Clint Eastwood picture about aging and parenthood problems; a bland romantic thing that involves Amy Adams and Justin Timberlake; and a movie about baseball.
Let's write about Clint first. In that recent directors talk from the Hollywood Reporter, which had Tarantino, Ang Lee, Affleck, Van Sant, D. O. Russell and Tom Hooper, there was an interesting discussion about aging. Tarantino said that filmmaking is a young man's game and that when a director "loses it" is mostly due to aging; later he remarked that Woody Allen's MIDNIGHT IN Paris was his favorite 2011 film, after D. O. Russell brought Woody Allen to the aging discussion - it was really great stuff with a variety of points of view. The case of Clint is quite strange for me. Aging was becoming a great thing for him; in a period of 5 years (2003-2008) he made only solid films, and he was already in his seventies. And now, only 4 years after GRAN TORINO (a personal favorite), he is out there, without a recent great film, bitching against Barack Obama and coming back from acting retirement for an average movie he didn't even direct.
The curious thing is that he came back from retirement to do the same role that we, or at least I thought was going to be his last. Here we have an angry old man who lost his wife and has problems with his daughter (played by Amy Adams) - sounds exactly like Walt from GRAN TORINO, right? I believe by now I have given too many words to Clint; after all this is a performance that will be soon forgotten - a main role that feels like a minor, unnecessary one, if that makes sense.
Now, let's bring the romantic side of the picture. Adams and Timberlake finally getting together inside a lake in the middle of the night? Silly stuff, I know. The curious thing is that both are huge baseball connoisseurs, so Adams' character it's like the dream girl for the baseball nerd. Speaking of the quintessential American sport, well, it's simply impossible not to think in the infinitely superior MONEYBALL while watching this. Clint's character Gus is the kind of scout that Brad Pitt would have fired - an old school scout who couldn't care less for the technology that now is part of the game.
It's average stuff too and I believe a baseball fan won't find much here, aside of some dialog that refers to players and games - it's a pretty boring baseball movie, where nothing happens until the ending (and it's material that's too obvious to really care for). So yeah, don't waste your time with this and watch instead GRAN TORINO or MONEYBALL!
*Watched it on 16 December, 2012