The word baseball loses you about 50% fans as women do not care for sports, math loses you 25% of the remainder as sports jocks are not very cerebral people. Adding Brad Pitt into the mix gets 25% of the women back! But Moneyball proves that it is possible to make a smart film that stays true to the source material, and by eschewing real math and replacing it with occasional flashes of spreadsheets on screen, also make it crowd-pleasing. Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane, the GM of the Oakland Athletics. He describes his team as “There are big market teams, then there are the poor teams and then there is large gap and then there is us!!” Without any money, having just lost three of his best players, he is scrambling to put together a team that can play. That is when Peter Brandt (played by Jonah Hill) comes on board and things start to change for the Oakland As. A team of misfits that are supposed to do the job, are put together. But the team manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) refuses to buy into the big vision of Beane. Finally Beane guts the team to leave Howe with no other choice.
Prehistoric and cosmic visions aside, Terrence Malick's film is an unashamedly epic reflection on love and loss
Brad Pitt in The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick's Cannes 2011 offering
Terrence Malick's mad and magnificent film descends slowly, like some sort of prototypical spaceship: it's a cosmic-interior epic of vainglorious proportions, a rebuke to realism, a disavowal of irony and comedy, a meditation on memory, and a gasp of horror and awe at the mysterious inevitability of loving, and losing those we love.
In preparation for Inception, Time magazine came out with a list of 10 top films that mess with your mind!
1. Last Year at Marienbad
"Didn't we meet at Marienbad last year?" an unnamed man asks an unnamed woman. So begins one of the most confusing (and frustrating) movies ever made. Two people are at a French château. One says they know each other. The other denies it. Back and forth they go, over and over, while director Alain Resnais' camera endlessly stalks the château's spooky corridors. All the while, organ music blasts out at unpredictable moments. Some well-dressed people stand in a sunlit garden. They cast shadows. The triangle-shaped trees surrounding them do not. There appears to be no plot. It's all very dreamlike. What is this movie about?
2. Memento
Before Christopher Nolan's Inception, there was Memento, a great big puzzle of a movie whose protagonist suffers from short-term-memory loss. With the help of Polaroids, notes and tattoos (give him credit, the man is dedicated), Leonard Shelby tries to track down his wife's murderer, known only as "John G." As he tries to piece everything together, so does the audience, which sees much of the action as fragments shown in reverse chronological order. We alternate between black-and-white and color, forward movement and back, truth and lies. Leonard doesn't know whom to trust ... and neither do we.
3. 2001: A Space Odyssey
Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi classic had apes, astronauts (some hibernating), a mysterious monolith — and HAL, a talking computer. Despite the presence of a verbally active machine, there isn't much dialogue in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The emphasis is on the visuals, whose grandiosity is matched only by the film's symphonic soundtrack. As TIME noted when the movie came out — in suitably trippy and pre-moon-landing 1968 — "Kubrick turns the screen into a planetarium gone mad and provides the viewer with the closest equivalent to psychedelic experience this side of hallucinogens." The film, based on a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, won an Oscar for visual effects.
4. El Topo
TIME's 1971 review of Chilean-Russian director Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo (The Mole) described the allegorical cult western film as "a vivid if ultimately passionless passion play." The film's 1970 trailer proclaimed, "It is a mystic film. It is tender. It is sexual." It is also a bit strange. A mysterious cowboy kills a group of outlaws before abandoning his naked son to ride off with a woman. El Topo (played by Jodorowsky) then embarks on a series of bizarre adventures. He challenges and defeats the four great gun masters of the land and then is betrayed by a woman with a man's voice who shoots him, leaving stigmata wounds. After El Topo heals and finds religious enlightenment, he begins an affair with a dwarf woman and helps a group of outcasts escape from a subterranean prison, only to see them massacred by cultists. That's when things really get weird. El Topo was a cult favorite at midnight showings in New York City before finally being released on DVD in 2007.
5. Pi
Maximillian Cohen is a mathematician burdened by crippling social anxieties and an all-consuming belief in the power of his science. As he's about to discover a singular mathematical solution to the patterns of the universe (or so he believes), Cohen falls prey to the schemes of a clutch of cutthroat Wall Street bankers and a sect of Hasidic Jewish Kabbalists, both keen to profit from his revelation. What follows in Darren Aronofsky's black-and-white meta-thriller is a hallucinatory collapse, with an eerie score that sounds out the tormented, psychic depths of a man driven to insanity by his quest for order.
6. The Oeuvre of David Lynch
It's hard to say which of David Lynch's works is the craziest. A profound madness lurks beneath them all, from Eraserhead (1977), his trippy film-school debut, to Blue Velvet (1986) and the Twin Peaks TV series, all the way to Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Dr. (2001) and Inland Empire (2006). Characters in Lynch films hover on the margins of reality, entering, through portal after portal, phantasmagoric dream worlds that are often as unsettling as they are hypnotic. Though Lynch runs a foundation that advocates a brand of popular meditation, there's little that's calming or stable about his vision. Beneath the thin sheen of daily life is an unfathomable, terrifying darkness. That, it seems, is what Lynch repeatedly tries to bring to light.
Read more about Fight Club, Brazil, Persona, and Blade Runner HERE
It was one of the most controversial films of 1999, a bitingly funny, pitch dark look at modern consumer culture and the difficulty this generation has in connected in any meaningful way. That, or an ultraviolet fascist fantasy, depending on who you believe. Ten years on, here's the story of how the David Fincher-Brad Pitt-Edward Norton masterpiece / disaster came about...
How The Novel Began
Chuck Palahniuk wrote the novel after an "altercation" on a camping trip in the mid-1990s. "I went back to work the next week with my face completely trashed. My eyes were just panda-black." Back at the truck company where he worked, co-workers looked away when they asked if he did anything over the weekend. "I would say, 'Look at my face. C'mon people.' If you look terrible enough, no one will want to know the truth about you." As he scribbled what would become Fight Club on clipboards, life imitated art and Palahniuk also found himself getting into more fights. "While I was writing Fight Club, it started at work and just bled into the rest of my life. On one hand, I really loved it. I felt so exhausted and so tired and I slept so well after one of these terrible shoving matches. I really wanted to share it with the world". On that front, job done sir.
It was one of the most controversial films of 1999, a bitingly funny, pitch dark look at modern consumer culture and the difficulty this generation has in connected in any meaningful way. That, or an ultraviolet fascist fantasy, depending on who you believe. Ten years on, here's the story of how the David Fincher-Brad Pitt-Edward Norton masterpiece / disaster came about...
How The Novel Began
Chuck Palahniuk wrote the novel after an "altercation" on a camping trip in the mid-1990s. "I went back to work the next week with my face completely trashed. My eyes were just panda-black." Back at the truck company where he worked, co-workers looked away when they asked if he did anything over the weekend. "I would say, 'Look at my face. C'mon people.' If you look terrible enough, no one will want to know the truth about you." As he scribbled what would become Fight Club on clipboards, life imitated art and Palahniuk also found himself getting into more fights. "While I was writing Fight Club, it started at work and just bled into the rest of my life. On one hand, I really loved it. I felt so exhausted and so tired and I slept so well after one of these terrible shoving matches. I really wanted to share it with the world". On that front, job done sir.
