One of Clint's Best!!!

Rating: 10/10 (28 September 2012)

Clint Eastwood provides another variation on his grumpy old man act in freshman director Robert Lorenz's "Trouble with the Curve," a captivating saga about an aging Atlanta Braves baseball scout whose contract is up for renewal. This PG-13 Eastwood epic is one of the few where Clint doesn't brandish a firearm to solve his problems. He does have a scene in a southern bar where he threatens to slash a drunkard's throat with a shattered beer bottle for getting fresh with his grown-up daughter. The rest of the time, he grimaces, squints, and carries on like a crotchety old man. As it turns out, he is cast as an old man with ailing eyes and an attitude. Part of his attitude emerges from doing things the old-fashioned way. He scouts players by attending games in Podunk towns galore and listening to the sound that the baseball makes as it breezes through the air. Comparatively, "Trouble with the Curve" pits Clint against younger guys who prefer to base their scouting decisions strictly on the statistics that they juggle on their laptops. Basically, this movie concerns the generation gap and the difference between the way men conduct business with either first-hand information or second-hand information. "Trouble with the Curve" amounts to the baseball rebuttal to the Brad Pitt movie "Money Ball." Although you know what is going to happen before it does in this pleasing but poignant picture about baseball scouts, "Trouble with the Curve" has a lot of balls and throws them in a variety of ways. Amy Adams co-stars as Clint's adult daughter who has spent most of her life away from her single father living with relatives. Part of the conflict occurs between the two have been apart so long that they don't function together well when they are in each other's company.