Unlike other dolphin or whale movie, this movie played the handicap angle very well. So a dolphin was beached and tangled in the wires of crab trap. He was rescued by this self-inhibited, late-developed kid, Sawyer. Sawyer’s handicap complements the dolphin’s (Winter’s) handicap – amputated tail and got her to start living beyond her disability. Another character, Sawyer’s cousin was injured in the Iraq war and found consolation on Sawyer’s effort to get Winter to live like a normal dolphin. Of course, the entire movie is about handicapped underdogs’ finding their life meaning and living to their full potential.

It’s a feel-good movie for someone who’s down on himself/herself due to his/her disability. Living above their disabilities and making the best of life is the best policy. Why not? Life is too short.

I have read Michael Lewis’ book of the same name so I’m sort of familiar with the essence of the movie, which added more characters and personality to the story main characters and made it even more interesting.

For all baseball lovers, this is a must-watch. Baseball traditionally has been a game played by big-ego, high-earning players reinforced by all the supporting characters (coaches, recruiter, and fans). The small team like Oakland Aces weren’t going to cut it with its limited budget. To win the game, it needs a new business model to win. This called for a new math wizard who crank out equations and statistics and came up with a new way to recruit cheap players who can make hits, instead of home runs or being good defensively. This broke all the traditional models known for the last 100 years, and ended up allowing Oakland Aces to win 20 consecutive games, a record. Unfortunately, at the end, Billy Beane could have gotten a fat $12M paycheck to go to Boston Red Sox. Instead, he stayed put in Oakland without a championship ring. Is it for the love of the place, dogmatic about his method? Or simply winning is not his ultimate goal – being a good underdog is as he had fallen from being a superstar right out of high school without going to Stanford as he often regretted.

Brad Pitt, acting as Billy Beane, was good and loveable in this movie, though not as believable. Like the movie anyway.

Watched this movie on the plane. This is a thriller movie about the plot to kidnap an evil Nazi physician who performed experiments on babies. The three agents (one woman and two men) received high honor in Israel in killing the physician in an ill-fated attempt. But the truth is that the physician outsmarted them and escaped. One man’s life was destroyed (killing himself) in his desperate attempt to avoid facing his failures: one on kidnapping the physician and another one on capturing/confirming his love for the female agent, who married the more promiscuous agent because she was pregnant with his child as part of the act to trick the physician. It’s a thrill to see the chase for the physician 30 years later as before and the final struggle to do him in.

Overall, this movie kept me on my edge of my seat and kept me guessing what’s going to happen next based on the flashback hints dropped throughout the movie. The debt of hiding the truth and yet being honored as heroes was too big of a debt for the three agent to bear. Very well done. I like it.