Last night, Sony boss Amy Pascal told the L.A. Times’ Patrick Goldstein that she killed Steven Soderbergh’s Moneyball movie because of the director’s annoying commitment to realism (his last-minute revision of the screenplay allegedly sought to explain some events through interviews with real-life participants instead of acted scenes, and he supposedly deleted jokes that were in Steve Zaillian’s draft of the script but not in Michael Lewis’s original book). Also, hilariously, the trailer for Soderbergh’s The Informant! was released, in which we find out that he’s transformed journalist Kurt Eichenwald’s book on a nineties corn-price-fixing scandal into a screwball comedy.
We figured this would be a lecture-y Soderbergh movie, in the vein of Syriana or Traffic, but it seems a lot more like Burn After Reading, which we guess is fine with us. Matt Damon put on a reported 30 pounds to play whistle-blower Mark Whitacre, and to his credit, he looks totally fat here. This looks funny, but we doubt Amy Pascal is laughing this morning.
