My recent trip was an opportunity to watch some movies since I rarely - i f ever - go to the movies on my own.
On my outward journey I watched Moneyball. Good movie, and not at all what I expected. I did not know the story at all, nor did I know the real life personalities. Going into the movie I had thought that Billy Beane was the manager of the Oakland A's. Learning that he was the GM and not responsible for the day-to-day player list certainly educated me but I spent a good chunk of the movie wondering why he didn't just fire the manager for not obeying instructions. I did enjoy Brad Pitt in the title role but i wouldn't categorise it as an Oscar-winning performance. I thought Jonah Hill's performance as Billy Beane's sidekick was the better of the two. It was interesting to hear the baseball announcers at the very end of the movie fall back into the narrow-minded viewpoint against which Beane/Pitt have fought the entire season.
On my return journey, I watched The Guard, an Irish movie starring Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle. This was a thoroughtly enjoyable movie and, if you like avant-garde or off-the-wall (slightly) movies, then I recommend this. Gleeson playes a police sergeant in the west of Ireland who has both an unorthodox and a jaded approach to his job. He knows his community and reacts as they do against outsiders, most notably Cheadle, who plays an FBI drugs investigator assigned to a case in the area. While, I thought that was highly unlikely, the two played off one another really well and both end up as heros though in quite different ways. The Guardian revire sums it up nicely:
It's an amalgam of In the Heat of the Night, The Quiet Man and Pulp Fiction telling the not wholly plausible tale of a combined anti-narcotics operation between the FBI and the Garda on the west coast of Ireland that brings together sly, slobbish, boozy, faux-racist Gerry Boyle and efficient, uptight federal agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle), an African American Ivy League graduate and Rhodes scholar.
And, as they say, its best "taken in the right spirit, which would be Old Paddy with a Guinness chaser".
I also watched "Margin Call" though, to be honest, I started the movie and dozed fitfully throughout. It was about a financial company trying to save itself at the start of the financial crisis - supposedly based on Lehman brothers. It was an OK movie for in-flight entertainment.