Pictureland

After a less than rousing speaking engagement at a local elementary school, Olympic gold medal wrestler Mark Schultz returns to his compact car and heads home, first stopping at a fast food restaurant, one of whose greasy offerings we seem him greedily scarf.  Home is a second floor apartment in one those mock Tudor apartment buildings whose fooling nobody pretense of exposed timbers against whitewashed walls herald the flimsy construction and dreary rooms to be found within.  Mark Schultz occupies one such ill-lit dwelling, a wall of which is dominated by a shelving unit devoted to the wrestler's many ribbons, medals and trophies.  The most prized, of course, being that Olympic gold that he returns to a central place of honor in its box, almost petting the memento as if to apologize for the affront it faced at school.   Despite his lofty position in the sport of wrestling, Mark Schultz's life could hardly involve less fanfare, less luxury, as seen early on in...

In baseball, at least at the Major League level, one encounters an almost paradoxical mix of poetry and mathematics.  Perhaps to those who can wield and see the patterns in numbers as impressively as a big leaguer pivots to complete a double play or manages to hit a breaking pitch that's moving at 90 miles per hour, the math and poetry are one in the same.  Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane (Bradd Pitt) as portrayed in Moneyball is not exactly one of these savants, but he tries to bring off the marriage of seeming opposites out of necessity.  He's aided by the much more statistically-inclined Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a young economics graduate of Yale University, whom he acquires from the Cleveland Indians after he practically gets laughed out of the Indians' offices after trying to bring off trades for actual players with the depleted stock of his ball club after the 2001 season. Moneball, based of the book of the same title by Michael Lewis, chronicl...