Craig Priddle
The Blind Side (2009)
Moneyball (2011)
It was Superbowl Sunday on 2nd February. Big day. Something like 100 million people watched one of the biggest sporting events in the world. And in the West Village, about 15 kilometres away, Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead from a drug overdose. He was alone in his apartment, having split from his partner. Big day alright.
Apparently Philip Seymour Hoffman became interested in acting after injuring his neck wrestling. Sport is an important part of a lot of people’s lives in all sorts of ways. In the United States, two of the biggest sports are football and baseball. Michael Lewis has written about both of them. The football one is The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game and the baseball one is Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.
I haven’t read Moneyball but I’ve read The Blind Side and other books by Michael Lewis. He is an excellent writer, able to explain complex, foreign, and varied topics with a narrative full of complex characters that real people are. His books are nonfiction but read like a novel. They make great movies.
You can watch a great movie over and over again. If you haven’t seen either of these movies let me recommend them. They are united by the author of the books they are based on, and both have an excellent cast. Sandra Bullock won an Academy Award for The Blind Side and both Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill won Oscars for Moneyball if that matters to you. There were other awards for both films, they are seriously good movies.
The Blind Side movie tells the unlikely story of Michael Oher, now playing NFL with the Baltimore Ravens. His childhood was far from advantaged and he was adopted as a teenager by a wealthy Memphis couple. They are white and he isn’t it, and it doesn’t matter to any of them. It is charming and warm and makes you feel good about people and what we can do for each other as human beings.
Moneyball tells the equally unlikely story of Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics. In 2002, Beane accepts a new idea on how to assemble a winning baseball team based on the analysis of statistics. While it may sound dry, a big part of the new approach is seeing what people have to offer when others have cast them aside. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the team manager Art Howe. It is one of his many remarkable performances, different yet familiar.
Watching both of these movies as a double feature would be a tiring experience. They both engage you on an emotional level, and as the stories are true, the impact is (I think) greater. It might just be too tiring emotionally to watch both in one sitting. That’s a good thing. Buy or hire them both and watch them. Single sitting, or multiple sittings, watch and enjoy two great human stories. If you like them, you might read the books and that’s a good thing.
Watch and enjoy some great performances, including the late Philip Seymour Hoffman.
I haven’t seen every movie Philip Seymour Hoffman has made. I haven’t even seen some of the ones I know I should have seen – The Master, Capote, Owning Mahoney. I have those to look forward to. And that’s a good thing.
Vale Philip Seymour Hoffman 1967 – 2014
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