Pictureland

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...

"As Ohio goes, so goes America."  This the pronouncement from a political commentator in George Clooney's latest film, The Ides of March.   The setting for the Ides of March is the Ohio Democratic presidential primary.  It's an appropriate enough place to set a political thriller, Ohio being one of those proverbial battleground states, as the political pundits like to remind us.  The state usually does figure large in primaries and general elections.  Just ask John Kerry, whose presidential aspirations found their graveyard in Ohio in 2004. The Ides of March is based on the play Farragut North , by Beau Willimon.  The playwright was apparently a staffer on another 2004 campaign, that of Howard Dean, which fizzled out after a big showing in Iowa.  In adapting Willimon's play, Clooney and his writing partner Grant Heslov have added the character of presidential candidate and standing governor, Mike Morris (Clooney).  Morris is something...