At The Movies

Moneyball
Brad Pitt stars as Oakland A's manager Billy Beane, who changed baseball with a radically different approach to hiring players. Billy Beane was once a would be baseball superstar who, stung by the failure to live up to expectations on the field, turned his fiercely competitive nature to management. Heading into the 2002 season, Billy faces a dismal situation: his small market Oakland A's have lost their star players (again) to big market clubs (and their enormous salaries) and is left to rebuild his team and compete with a third of their payroll. Driven to win, Billy takes on the system by challenging the fundamental tenants of the game. He looks outside of baseball, to the dismissed theories of Bill James, and hires Peter Brand, a brainy, number-crunching, Yale-educated economist. Together they take on conventional wisdom with a willingness to reexamine everything and armed with computer driven statistical analysis long ignored by the baseball establishment. They reach imagination-defying conclusions and go after players overlooked and dismissed by the rest of baseball for being too odd, too old, too injured or too much trouble, but who all have key skills that are universally undervalued. As Billy and Peter forge forward, their new methods and roster of misfits rile the old guard, the media, the fans, and their own field manager, who refuses to cooperate. Ultimately this experiment will lead not only to a change in the way the game is played, but to an outcome that would leave Billy with a new understanding that transcends the game and delivers him to a new place.
 

On DVD

Bridesmaids
Kristen Wiig leads an all-star cast of fantastically funny women in this summer's blockbuster comedy hit. Thirty something Annie has hit a rough patch but finds her life turned completely upside down when she is asked to be the maid of honor in her best friend Lillian's wedding. Though lovelorn, broke and in way over her head, Annie bluffs her way through the expensive and bizarre rituals on the road to the big day. Braving one disaster after another, but determined to succeed, she'll show Lillian and her hilarious hodgepodge of bridesmaids just how far you'll go for someone you love.

The Buzz...

CBS drew a stunning 27.7 million viewers for Ashton Kutcher's debut on Two and a Half Men Monday. The ninth season premiere drew a 10.3 rating/24 share in the prized 18-49 demographic, and was easily the most viewed episode in the show's history. It was also the highest rated show on television since the Feb. 27 Academy Awards, which had an 11.7 rating and 37.6 million total viewers.

Gordon Ramsay is expanding beyond cooking and setting his sights on a new makeover target: Hotels. Fox has ordered a new Ramsay series where the reality kingpin will partner with a team of hospitality experts, traveling across the country to try and fix every aspect of struggling hotels, motels and bed & breakfasts. The working title: Hotel Hell.

Sheryl Crow will write the music and lyrics for an upcoming musical adaptation of the 1982 film Diner on Broadway. The Grammy winning singer songwriter joins Barry Levinson, the director of the original film, who will pen the stage adaptation.

Paramount Pictures wants to expand and upgrade its lot over the next 25 years and is filing documents with the city of Los Angeles this week to begin the process. The $700 million project would take down four 5,000 square foot soundstages and build five new, 20,000 plus square foot soundstages. When the project is complete, Paramount will have 27 soundstages. It has 30 now.

CSI: Miami is about to get a little hotter with the addition of a fan favorite Sopranos star. Drea de Matteo is set to guest star on the CBS hit during November sweeps, and she has what sounds like a fun role on the show: de Matteo plays a sexy and smart poker player who’s the only woman competing in a dangerous, high stakes illegal game. When the game is robbed and a man is murdered, we learn she’s actually a devoted mother out to avenge the attempted murder of her son in a similar robbery that left him disabled.

Syfy has announced another acquisition to their reality roster, as they've picked up Dream Machines, set to premiere late spring/summer 2012. Dream Machines, which was given a six episode order, follows two brothers (Marc and Shannon Parker) who recreate famous vehicles in movies and television (i.e. the Bat Pod, the motorcycle from Tron) for an assorted mix of clients. Returning to the air at the same time as Dream Machines will be Hollywood Treasure and Haunted Collector, both of which aired their first season this past summer. Hollywood Treasure, also getting a six episode order, focuses on Joe Maddalena, a famous auctioneer of movie and TV artifacts, and his quest to find the rarest of rare traces of pop culture past.

Just days before All My Children is due to serve up its final broadcast episode on ABC, the producers of the show’s online continuation have signed its first cast members. “Pending a final agreement with AFTRA, Prospect Park has confirmed that … Cameron Mathison (Ryan Lavery) and Lindsay Hartley (Dr. Cara Castillo Martin) have agreed to deals to join the company’s new production of All My Children,” Prospect Park, an upstart media venture, has announced.ced.

So far in his career, Brad Pitt's done all the right things: He's never played Superman; he's never graced the box of Madden NFL. But has he pushed his curse free luck by appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated? Unlike most pop culture curses, the SI cover jinx has a reputable booster: SI. In 2001, the magazine went back through about 50 years' worth of issues, and found that a "demonstrable misfortune or decline in performance" occurred in cover subjects about 37.2 percent of the time. Asked point blank by CNN if the cover jinx was real, the article's author said yes.

Rob Zombie recently shot down Avenged Sevenfold's hopes of landing him as the director for their new video Buried Alive. Zombie was too busy with pre-production on his new witchcraft film, Lords of Salem.

Stone Sour has tapped former Dream Theater and Avenged Sevenfold drummer Mike Portnoy to fill in on drums for the band’s Rock in Rio Festival performance in Brazil on September 24. Roy Mayorga, the band’s regular drummer, asked Portnoy to take over the drums for the festival gig because he is at home awaiting the birth of his first daughter.

Dancing with the Stars viewers didn't give Metta World Peace a chance. The basketball star formerly known as Ron Artest was the first celebrity ejected Tuesday from the 13th edition of the ABC dancing competition. The show's judges gave World Peace the lowest score on Monday's premiere: 14 out of a possible 30.

Rumors of a Rolling Stones 50th anniversary tour have been floating around for months. But if they’re true, Mick Jagger isn’t saying. “I have no idea if there is going to be a tour,” the Stones frontman said during an interview. “We haven’t really discussed it. We are talking about if next year is the 50th anniversary, sort of. It depends where you are counting from.”