To celebrate Akira Kurosawa's birthday tomorrow, Hulu has opened 24 of his movies for free streaming through Sunday midnight. However, I recommend you just consider ponying up $7.99 for Hulu Plus so you can watch them all commercial free, streaming through your choice of devices. It's worth that alone just to watch the treasure trove of Criterion movies available exclusively on Hulu Plus.
I've been a bit slow on the draw recently, but I loved David Lipsky's essay comparing Seinfeld and The Simpsons in the semifinals of Vulture's bracket to determine TV's greatest sitcom of the past thirty years. Reading the essay was so nostalgic I immediately wanted to immerse myself in episode after episode of each series again. The Simpsons is the only one of the two still on air, but the sensibility of Seinfeld was so distinct that every tweet from the hilarious Twitter account Modern Seinfeld crystallizes in my brain with perfect clarity.
I'll let you click through to find out the winner, but one choice excerpt:
So what The Simpsons immediately offered was how the world looked to extremely intelligent people in whom high school had perhaps encouraged skepticism and unconfidence. The result is a chaos of noisy, less-intelligent people holding onto authority by bullying and jargon. Cops and doctors are incompetent; the bartender keeps caged pandas. No straight men; everyone is funny. It wasn’t so much an observational show as one written by ear. When Seinfeld does a parody movie title, it’s something like Sack Lunch or Agent Zero. You nod. Pretty good, yeah, that does sound like a movie. When The Simpsons does this, it’s so exact it stops you. A romantic comedy called Love Is Nice. Homer visits an experimental lab named the Screaming Monkey Medical Research Center. The show is so tight, these jokes come within 30 seconds of each other. The comedy of the particular dialect any job and worldview locks you into; it’s something that writing staff hears too. Lisa Simpson provides timely advice to an in-crisis TV producer. “That’s it, little girl,” he says. “You’ve saved Itchy and Scratchy!” A lawyer steps forward: “Please sign these papers indicating that you did not save Itchy and Scratchy.” Hideous space aliens, impersonating the presidential candidates, are unmasked before a startled crowd. “It's true, we are aliens. But what are you going to do about it? It’s a two-party system: You have to vote for one of us.” Human crowd-member: “Well, I believe I’ll vote for a third-party candidate.” Alien: “Go ahead — throw your vote away.”
What Seinfeld and David heard with special fidelity were the surprising things their heads said. The inner world, not the outer. George to Jerry: “She just dislikes me so much, it’s irresistible. A woman who hates me this much comes along once in a lifetime.” Jerry to Elaine: “You’re attracted to him because he can’t remember anything about you.” Elaine: “But that’s so sick.” Jerry: “That’s God’s plan. He doesn’t really want anyone to get together.” Jerry meets a woman — she’s more or less a female him — he can finally love, and reports, “I just realized; I know what I've been looking for all these years. Myself. I've been waiting for me to come along, and now I’ve swept myself off my feet.” A few scenes later: “I realized what the problem is: I can’t be with someone like me. I hate myself.”
Here's the guest judge's commentary on the finals, which pitted one of these two semifinalists against Cheers (which you can watch, in its entirety, on Netflix now).
Zach Lowe's breakdown earlier this week of what the Toronto Raptors are able to do with SportsVU data is incredible. Using expected point value from the each player on the opposing team and where they are situated on the court, the Raptors are able to simulate ideal defensive positioning for each player on the court. By comparing the ideal to the actual defensive positioning, the Raptors are able to coach their players on why they should play where on the court.
Lowe's analysis of the computer's recommended positioning of the Raptors' defense on several pick and rolls run against them by the Knicks offers insight into why the Bulls are so good on defense. The computer recommendation on defending the pick and roll always seems to be to send more help sooner on the strong side. Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau has always preached that, even when he was the defensive coach of the Celtics.
The other strategy the computer recommends almost universally is that teams shoot more 3-pointers. Granted, if you don't have good 3-point shooters, it's no guarantee of success, but the salient point is that most teams should swap out more mid-range jump shots for 3-pointers.
Baseball has changed a lot due to better analysis, but the sport that has made the greatest strides the past several years is basketball. SportsVU being used to simulate ideal player movement takes it to another level, it feels like SimCity but for sport.
I wonder how long it will be before we see a version of SportsVU used for analyzing football. If you can simulate the ideal defense in basketball, there's no reason you couldn't also simulate the ideal defense against various offensive formations and personnel packages.
Bilge Ebiri has a beautiful and insightful interpretation of Terrence Malick's To the Wonder. I caught the movie at the Toronto Film Festival last September and enjoyed it. Many have criticized To the Wonder as being slight in scope as compared to The Tree of Life, but one could have said that about just about any movie that came after a movie that sought to understand the meaning of life and the universe. That criticism feels simply like a matter of sequencing.
Ebiri's insight is that Malick's desire to structure his movies more like musical pieces, with movements, rather than using the traditional act-based narrative structure of classical screenwriting, extended in a very unique way to To the Wonder.
"When I first saw To the Wonder, it seemed clear that Malick had gone further in this direction. The movie unfolded more like a piece of music than anything else, rhythmic and fluid and concerned more with the emotional valence of a given scene rather than its narrative value. The second time I saw the film, however, I was floored. Yes, Malick had furthered his approach, but I hadn’t realized to what extent. And I think that herein lies the key to the film.
The fact is, the performers in To the Wonder are not acting; they’re dancing.
I don’t mean that metaphorically, either. They are almost literally dancing. The movie is, for all intents and purposes, a ballet."
To the Wonder has not opened yet, but watch the trailer. Observe the choreography of movement of camera and human bodies just in select shots and you'll understand what Ebiri means. The Tree of Life stayed with me longer, but To the Wonder was rapturous in its own way.
Ebiri's discussion of movie and dance spurred a memory of another movie where music and image came together, for just a scene, as dance. Given how rarely movies attempt to become a dance (I'm excluding movies that are explicitly musicals here), I wanted to revisit that movie and that scene.
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