Moneyball (2011)

In the past year, Aaron Sorkin has written the screenplays for Moneyball and The Social Network, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.  Taken on the surface, no two films could be more dissimilar; one is about baseball, the other about the internet.  So what would draw Sorkin to such disparate subjects, if not for the simple challenge of doing something different?  Dig a little deeper, however, and you may just find that these two films are meant to serve as bookends.  Both deal with men who speak a language unfamiliar to the common man.  Their central characters live in sealed worlds we couldn’t possibly hope to penetrate.  Neither man is motivated by money, but is in search of something greater than it.  In The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg pursues a dream of creating the perfect method for human beings to connect with one another, all the while sacrificing his own personal relationships.  And in Moneyball, Brad Pitt plays a man so desperate to achieve a different kind of dream, that he steamrolls everything and everyone in his way to do it.  I can only imagine the sort of pleasure Sorkin must have experienced when he was approached with the idea.

Whip It (2009)

Fun, light, but not forgettable, Whip It is Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut about a small town Texas girl who eschews her smothering mother’s beauty pageant dreams for the shit-kicking brutality of girls’ roller derby.

Ellen Page, who is turning into her generation’s most important actress, plays Bliss, anything but, and tired and weary of pageant competition.  One day, she answers an add for derby try-outs and, based on her preternatural speed, makes the team and is monikered as Babe Ruthless.  Along the way, Babe makes new friends who all have awesome derby names like Smashley Simpson (Barrymore herself) and Rosa Sparks.  And Maggie Mayhem, played by the terrific Kristen Wiig, gets some of the movie’s best dialogue (“You think you’re gonna sleep with your regional manager and he won’t give you crabs…Have you ever had crabs?”).