TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE

Warner Bros.

 Rated PG-13

 Running time: 111 Minutes



 Click below to watch the Trouble with the Curve trailer.

 

In Warner Bros. Trouble with the Curve, Clint Eastwood is an aging baseball scout, who had signed up some of the best ball players in the business, trying to convince everyone - including his lawyer daughter Amy Adams - that he can still scout baseball talent.

While in his last few movies, star and producer Eastwood has been playing characters who of course are old - this is the film that I have seen one of Eastwood's movie play up the fact that Clint Eastwood as being old the most. Directed by Eastwood's longtime associate Robert Lorenz in Lorenz's directorial debut - Eastwood came out of acting retirement for this role, and I think the role most suits him. This is the first time since In the Line of Fire that Eastwood has not both directed and starred in a movie.

The Trouble With the Curve mostly concentrated on Eastwood's decreasing eyesight and his possibly not being able to perform his job anymore, especially as Eastwood tries to scout a new high school "green power hitter" Joe Massingill in a small town in North Carolina as Eastwood and Adams stay in a local motel. The concern of Eastwood's boss and best friend John Goodman and Eastwood's daughter Amy Adams over Eastwood's condition showed their love for Eastwood, despite the dysfunctional father-daughter relationship Adams and Eastwood have throughout most of the movie, as Adams leaves home to go with her father Eastwood to look after him. Even young baseball scout Justin Timberlake's admiration and respect for Eastwood's experience added to Eastwood's aging and his inability to adapt to the changes in the business of Major League Baseball. Despite the high tech aspect of baseball, the fact that everyone still travels in cars instead of airlines while scouting shows that the game of baseball really still has not changed.

The juxtaposition between Adams and Eastwood's jobs on the line hit home to me for both father and daughter as smarmy General Manager wannabe Matthew Lillard, with his computerized tracking system of players, wants Eastwood with his old-school scouting experience of scouting real players out of the organization - and Adams is threatened by another lawyer taking her presentation her client as well as the lawyer taking her spot as a partner in her lawyer's firm.

This is a nice role for Timberlake. Timberlake is such a nice guy in the movie as a young baseball scout for another team that gruff Eastwood practically pushes his relationship-challenged single daughter Adams at his young prodigy Timberlake. I guess it was keeping baseball all in the family as Adams grew up with baseball - and has learned quite a lot from Eastwood - and also assists Eastwood in scouting and recruiting talent, despite not always being with her single father Eastwood as she was growing up. It was great to see Robert Patrick as the owner of Eastwood's baseball team the Atlanta Braves - but we really did not get to know Patrick as the owner, which I think is a shame. The other aging baseball fans were also a delight to see. Actually, I am not sure if they were fans or were scouts as well since I did not recall seeing them take notes.

There was definitely an older crowd for this movie when I saw the film. I am sure most of them were there for Clint Eastwood rather than were actual baseball fans. That is how I felt about the audience for Eastwood's Space Cowboys, where the audience were more of a fan of Eastwood rather than of NASA. While I understand movie reviews have been mixed for Trouble With the Curve - as a fan of both Eastwood and baseball, I enjoyed this sports movie. It would be a shame if more of the younger generation do not see Trouble With the Curve.

Rated PG-13 for violence, language, sexual situations. Running time: 111 minutes.

Pancho
All people smile in the same language.

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IN TIME

20th Century Fox Film Corporation

Rated PG-13

Running time: 109 Minutes



20th Century Fox Film Corporation's In Time, is set in the near future where time is literally money - and if you run out of time, you run out of life.

Time poor Justin Timberlake, not meeting his quota of making time scanners, saves the life of Matt Bomer - who has a century of life on his clock. In gratitude, and because he is tired of living forever, Bomer transfers most of the time on his clock to Timberlake while Timberlake is asleep. Timberlake wakes up - just in time to see Bomer's time run out. Timberlake then must go on the run before the ghetto Minute Men and the Time Keepers discover Timberlake has more time than he should.

At first Timberlake decides to get out of the ghetto time zone that is his home - and live it up in the rich time zone. Traveling across the different time zones requires more and more time for payment, which surprises ghetto-raised Timberlake. While in the rich time zone, time-rich Timberlake meets Amanda Seyfried and gambles with her rich father Vincent Kartheiser at their mansion party. When Time Keeper investigator Cillian Murphy crashes the party to arrest Timberlake for the death of Bomer and take Timberlake's extra time - Timberlake takes Seyfried hostage and they go on the run.

While the beginning may start out similar to Blade Runner, the movie soon turns into Bonnie and Clyde. While kidnaped, rich Seyfried soon has her clock drained by the leader of the gang of Minutemen in the ghetto. Soon, Seyfried is living minute by minute, just as Timberlake has been living minute by minute all of his life. In order to change life in the ghetto - Seyfried and Timberlake soon begin to rob Kartheiser's time banks and disseminate the time scanners to the people.

While this supposedly takes place in the near future, it seems that the technology to produce this culture must have taken place over a long period of time - especially if you engineer everyone to be of the age of 25. The culture is too near to the our present for such a radical cultural change. Also it is somehow implied that everyone's clock just suddenly appeared, which would require a major scientific breakthrough to effect the entire world all at once. Other than that, the moral of using time as money and that when you run out of time - you die. This is a rather graphic portrayal of being broke, as shown with Timberlake's mother Olivia Wilde. A much more interesting portrayal than people just running out of money and being broke. This idea makes you appreciate being much more frugal with your money.

Pancho
All people smile in the same language.

 Pancho's Movie Reviews

The Social Network

Columbia Pictures

Rated PG-13

Running time: 121 minutes



Click below to watch The Social Network trailer.



Columbia Pictures The Social Network is about the creation of the website Facebook and the legal problems Harvard computer undergrad creator Mark Zuckerberg had as a result of the website's creation.

With flashbacks between the creation of Facebook and the legal problems Zuckerberg goes through, and a script by Aaron Sorkin, there is twice as much dialog in this film than in a normal film which can be exhausting if you are not used to that much dialog. This is evidenced by the first five minutes of the film of an intense dialog with Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg, and his then girlfriend who are sitting in a bar before the opening credits roll. That was supposed to be eight pages of dialog crammed into five minutes of film - where normally it is a minute's worth of dialog per page. Although there is a lot of dialog, with David Fincher's direction, this is not a talking-heads movie. The dialog basically shows what an intense jerk Zuckerberg is in the movie and you can imagine how his personality could lead him into trouble as he goes about creating what was then known as The Facebook, a social networking site allowing people to stay connected with each other which was originally created for Harvard. When Zuckerberg gets involved with Justin Timberlake, as Napster creator Sean Parker, the business potential for Facebook grows into the billions - where most of the legal troubles begins.

Watching the movie initially brought back memories of college for me, both with the intense academic life and the sorority life. It is interesting that while the Facebook website was originally created for college students, a lot of the movie-going audience that I saw the movie with was of an older crowd. While it is said that a lot of the material was created for the movie, and is not real, the movie gave me an idea of what goes on behind the scenes of such a big business.

Another aspect of the movie deals with the twins Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, with Armie Hammer playing both parts. The Winklevoss twins - Hammer - got Zuckerberg involved in creating a Harvard social networking website for themselves. One interesting thing about the Winklevoss twins, aside from their legal actions against Zukerberg for stealing their idea, is that the Winklevoss twins were part of Harvard's Crew Team. As a videographer who spent a season videotaping the Orange Coast College's Crew Team - who are known as "The Giant Killers" for defeating well-known crew teams such as Harvard, it was a delight for me to get a glimpse of this sport again as it is rare that I get to see crew in a movie. It was also a delight to see Disney Channel star Brenda Song in an adult role for once as the girlfriend of Zuckerberg's friend and co-creator of Facebook Eduardo Saverin, Andrew Garfield.

There is talk of an Oscar and I could see an Oscar for this film.

Rated PG-13 for sexual situations, language, and drug use. Running time 121 minutes.

Pancho
All people smile in the same language.

 Pancho's Movie Reviews