One of Those Days: ALEXANDER AND THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD DAY

Judith Viorst’s Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day is a classic picture book funny and smart in capturing the feel of a bad day from the point of view of a little boy. It cleverly portrays how a series of quotidian bummers – not getting the seat you like, or a prize in your cereal, or the dinner you’d hoped for – can snowball, making you grumpier by the minute until by bedtime you’re entirely wrung out. But the book’s only 32 pages, so in making a feature length live action adaptation screenwriter Rob Lieber has expanded a slim and simple idea into a widescreen sitcom plot, giving Alexander’s whole family a horrible, no good, etcetera, day, the better to make it through with a smile because of their love for each other.

It’s a nice message. The movie is a bright, sunny, largely inoffensive kids comedy that’s short – 81 minutes, including credits – sweet, and never particularly funny but at least agreeable in the way better live action Disney comedies can be. It’s broad, cute, and nice enough, idealized squeaky clean family foibles and slightly sharper frustrations around the edges. I suspect kids will enjoy the main character, who has been turned into a Wimpy Kid knockoff. Alexander (Ed Oxenbould, with awkward hair and a face stuck at the exact midpoint between child and teen) is a 12-year-old kid who is perpetually frazzled, scuffed, mussed, scattered. He’s well-intentioned but clumsy and easily frustrated with his lot in life. Things just don’t go his way. It’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days for him. And he’s sympathetic because of it.

The target audience is unlikely to read any reviews, let alone this one. And they certainly won’t care that it’s directed by Miguel Arteta who, with work on relationship semi-comedies like Cedar Rapids, Youth in Revolt, Chuck & Buck, and HBO’s gone-too-soon Enlightened, knows a thing or two about quickly and charmingly sketching relationships and histories between characters. He does his unassuming, pleasant thing here, quickly filling out the ranks of the family so that we feel we’re joining a fairly normal, busy, loving, upper-middle-class life in progress. There’s the stay-at-home dad (Steve Carell), children’s book editor mom (Jennifer Garner), cocky older brother (Dylan Minnette), drama queen sister (Kerris Dorsey), and infant brother (Elise and Zoey Vargas). We get the dynamics immediately. The way the family operates is clear, and, though they mean well, it’s easy to see how Alexander’s struggles can get lost in the shuffle.

He always seems to be having a bad day. Popular kids pick on him. He feels stupid next to his crush. His family members have successes to share around the dinner table while he just mopes and complains. He wishes they knew what it was like to have everything go wrong. Well, they soon do. Car troubles, job crises, medical emergencies, school issues, romantic confusion, scheduling difficulties, wild animals, and a variety of scatological concerns plague the family as the movie clunks through their day from one snag to the next. It’s never zany or farcical, just one fairly ordinary stumbling block after the next played up a notch and a half past normal. The escalating series of events is almost what you'd expect out of a bad day, but a bit more juvenile and movie-ish. The family gets to share the bad day feeling, and only grow closer together because of it.

I kept waiting for the movie to kick into a higher gear, generate a sustained funny sequence or string a few clever lines together. Nope. It’s at a modest even keel beginning to end. The cast is likable and makes a cute family unit. Every once in a while they’re joined by a funny actor (Megan Mullally, Jennifer Coolidge, Dick Van Dyke) who can deliver a half dozen so-so lines in a way that makes them mildly humorous. That’s nice, too. I mean, the whole thing’s sweet enough with only a few spiky moments of borderline off-color humor pinned in by the PG rating. (At one point Carell sighs, "Daddy wishes he could swear right now.") There’s genuine love and camaraderie in this family, and it’s the rare kids movie that acknowledges grown-up feelings and concerns, even if the movie’s too slight and minor to do anything with Carell and Garner's warm, comfortable performances. So it’s not a great comedy, but it has plenty of smiles and good vibes and will fit in perfectly between Dog with a Blog reruns some future weekend on the Disney Channel.

Base Hit: MONEYBALL

Baseball may be a sport, but Moneyball is not really a sports movie. To be sure, it’s based on the book by Michael Lewis about the modestly budgeted Oakland Athletics’ 2002 season in which, against the objections of manager Art Howe, their general manager Billy Beane tried out an untested new method of signing players, focusing on statistics more than stars. It was a risky gambit of the kind that makes or breaks careers and, assuming you may not be knowledgeable about recent baseball history, I wouldn’t dare think of telling you the outcome. Though this movie covers the territory of men trying desperately to eke out enough wins to contend for the championship, though it follows training, strategizing, and yes, even some Big Games, this is not a sports movie. It’s a movie about business.

Major League Baseball is a multi-billion dollar business. It’s America’s pastime, and we love to pay for it. The crux of the film is the Athletics’ budget. As a team, they are dramatically outspent by bigger, more financially flush teams like the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. What Beane decides to do is to hire a recent college grad, a Yale economics major to be precise, to crunch the numbers. He, composite character Peter Brand, is a nice, pudgy guy who has never played baseball but loves the number game. He tells Beane that they shouldn’t be focused on buying players, but instead to focus on buying runs. He pours over tapes, analyzes the data, and is confident that he can identify underestimated, and therefore undervalued (and thus affordable) players.

Beane is played by Brad Pitt as a driven man with a desire to do right by his team, but there’s a part of his initiative given over to bucking baseball’s conventional wisdom. We see Little League pictures of him proudly wearing an A’s hat on his sandy blonde hair. We learn that he signed a Major League contract right out of high school, but that his career didn’t pan out. So maybe he has an all-too-personal understanding of the difference between skill and potential, about the damage under- and overvaluing players can do to a team and its members. Maybe there is some of this underdog spirit to his decision to hire the sweet, serious, and shy Brand (a character played quite nicely by Jonah Hill), and in his agreement to find players that no one else wants, like a catcher (Chris Pratt) who can no longer throw, and find new life for their careers.

His underdog spirit carries over into the A’s organization, where Beane finds himself butting heads with the team’s longtime scouts and the recalcitrant manager (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). Moneyball is at its best when it’s a movie about men at work, about people forming partnerships and rivalries along the basis of their business philosophies as much as true friendships, which are forged in the fires of professional camaraderie. This is not a movie with notable female roles, aside from a couple sweet scenes between Beane and his daughter (Kerris Dorsey). This is not even a movie that follows closely too many baseball games, though that makes the ones that are so very satisfying. This is a movie with its most suspenseful scene one of a telephone call with two men in one office negotiating player trades.

The script, which was written by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, balances the romance of baseball, the pulse-quickening athleticism and the leisurely pace, with the eggheaded tables, graphs and charts of its endless stats. Is there any other sport so beautiful and so wonkish, so skillful and so nerdy? There’s a tension between the themes that is pleasantly dissonant. The film comes from two terrific screenwriters and sometimes I could feel the uncomfortable tension between their approaches to the material, or maybe I was just trying to pin down blame for why I felt the film a little lumpy, pokily paced and overlong. But director Bennett Miller, of Capote, smoothes things over with his resolutely unshowy visual style, which serves to call attention to the small, likable moments the actors bring out of the well-written scenes. Those scenes are hit out of the park, but the rest of the time I was merely interested, not involved. I was expecting a great baseball movie, a real home run, but what I got was a nice, solid base hit of a middlebrow drama.