@The Movies with PopPop: Timbuktu

Posted on October 5, 2015 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Timbuktu, a 2014 nominee for best foreign film comes from director Abderrahamane Sissako, born in Mauritania but known as a Malian film director (a prior film of his is Bamako). It’s a powerful, beautiful, and often times difficult film, set in and around Timbuktu during the time it was under jihadist control – a few years ago. The film does not focus on the well known story of the Timbuktu manuscripts but rather on the day to day lives of folks and the impact of jihadist control – on both Timbuktu’s residents and the jihadists.

There are several story lines: a Tuareg family living in a tent on the dunes, a woman who sells fish, some musicians, the local commander, and many more. What we see is the absurdity of the dimensions of life the jihadists wish to control, the extremes of Sharia law as applied, and most importantly, many acts of passive and subtle resistance and the human strength they convey. Dress for men and women is controlled, smoking, music and sports are forbidden, etc. (One of the wonderful scenes is some young boys playing soccer without a ball!) Women and their particular struggles are central to the movie.

What the movie is really about is how today’s neighbors can become tomorrow’s oppressors; how long standing differences can become caught in the oppression; how the oppressors lose their humanity in their obsession with power; and how strong are the impulses for resistance and maintenance of humanity.

The movie is in multiple languages: French, Tuareg, English and another local language or two. There are English subtitles, except for sections where the particular translation is unimportant. The capturing of the beauty – sometimes stark, sometimes gorgeous – and the reality of sophisticated urban life (as urban as Timbuktu is) is extraordinary.

It’s not always a comfortable movie to watch, but it’s a film not to be missed.

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@The Movies with PopPop: Pariah

Posted on September 26, 2015 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Pariah is a far better and more interesting movie than the trailers would indicate. It’s the story of a young teen who has realized she’s a lesbian and is struggling with family, peers, and the existing lesbian community, taking place in current times in Brooklyn.

The movie is terribly mistitled in that she’s not a pariah by any means, but a struggling young woman finding her way. And the emphasis in the trailers on the yelling and screaming in her family is not what the movie is essentially about. I found it not only a very well done movie, but one that provided insights into what it’s like for young persons on the brink of coming out. Try to see it.

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@The Movies with PopPop: Even the Rain

Posted on September 20, 2015 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Even the Rain (2010) is a very well done fascinating film that layers two stories. The first is of a film crew that comes to Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2000 to make a left wing perspective film (film is dedicated to the memory of Howard Zinn!) on the interface of Columbus and the Taino Indians (yes, they realize Columbus and the Taino’s were Caribbean and they’re filming in the Andes).

The second is the Bolivian “water wars” (Bolivia’s attempt to privatize its water supply and the Indian-led revolt that forced a reversal of policy) that break out during filming, involving some of the Indians who have been recruited for the film who are also community leaders of the revolt. During the course of the film, lots of lessons are learned by lots of folks — and none by some. It’s quite well done and well worth seeing.

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@The Movies with PopPop: The Wind Rises

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Daniel (@MKNN)

The Wind Rises is a 2013 animated Japanese film by Hayao Miyazaki, possibly his final film. It’s an animated biopic about Jiro Horikoshi, an aeronautical engineer who did wondrous things in improving airplanes, unfortunately including the Japanese WW II fighters. The movie never forgets the dark side, though it’s in the background.

The film is wonderfully drawn, incredibly beautiful and just a delight. It’s been dubbed into English, so no subtitles — virtually flawless dubbing. Worth seeing. This article from the NY Times does a far better job describing it than I could!

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@The Movies with PopPop: Chinese Coffee

Posted on September 4, 2015 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Chinese Coffee (2000) is another of those films directed by and starring Al Pacino that after limited festival showings was never generally released. It’s now part of a boxed set that also includes The Local Stigmatic and Looking for Richard.

It’s a film version of a play by Ira Lewis, written in the early 1990’s and worked on by Pacino and others at the Actor’s Studio throughout the ’90’s. It’s essentially a two person play set in the ’80’s in Greenwich Village, starring Pacino as Harry Levine and Jerry Ohrbach as Jake Mannheim. Harry is 42, an old fashioned, NY, Village starving writer, full of neuroses, eking out an existence so he can continue to write. He’s had two books published that went nowhere, and has just finished his third book, essentially an imaginative take on his life over the past years and his relationship with his long term, now-ex, girlfriend, and Jake and his wife. Jake, perhaps a decade older, is a brilliant, omni-knowledgeable, read everything guy who earns a living as a nightclub photographer. Having written two short stories when he was 19 — and nothing since — he still likes to think of himself as a writer.

Harry has come to see him on a cold February night, trying both to collect some money Jake owes him, and more importantly to find out what Jake thinks of the new book.

Like all Pacino, it’s quite intense, penetrating, witty, and often dark — and very funny. The dialogue is extraordinary, and the understanding of someone who has to write because that’s what he’s about and someone who can’t ultimately deal with that is quite powerful — and resonates far beyond the issue of being a writer!

If you like Pacino, and like great dialogue, you’ll love it.

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@The Movies with PopPop: Barbara

Posted on August 29, 2015 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Barbara is a film about an East German doctor prior to the collapse of the Wall and reunification, who as a result of trying to leave East Germany has been sent to a rural location to practice medicine. The doctor in charge of the hospital she works in, while required to be the eyes and ears of the East German authorities is also both a good doctor and a more complex character than he appears at first.

The movie is essentially about Barbara’s relationships with the town to which she’s sent, with a female adolescent work camp prisoner she takes care of, with the doctor, and with her plans for escape. It’s well done and interesting, if not great.

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Soccermetrics: Let the Data … Squeak?

Posted on August 26, 2015 by Daniel (@MKNN)

{My opening salvo drew what is–for me–a much, much wider audience than almost anything else I’ve written. So that’s great, but it also ups the pressure for this second post. We’ll see if I’m up to it.

I am trying to keep these relatively brief (< 1K words), as my goal is to build an ongoing context/set of hypotheses to work from over time. That may bite me, as it prevents some deeper data dives, but I’ll incorporate those separately as I can.

Finally, a tip of the hat to fantastic designer Juhan Sonin (@JSonin) for the title and rallying cry.}

I want to work the baseball comparison a little more.

There was a moment in the late 90s where I had four different websites running off various versions of databases that contained complete historical information for the entirety of MLB history. (This was before baseball-reference took over the world–I mean that in a good way.) One of these had been modified and extended to include minor league players, another for hundreds of players from the Negro Leagues, another tracked fantasy performance in relation to actual. And this was pretty easy to do. The core data and its structure was easily available, and importing it into SQL (it was the 90s) and optimizing it, writing stored procedures, etc was all relatively straightforward given a moderate amount of technical skill.

This was the baseline, and it was pretty rich: yearly performance totals for every player and every team, ever. Sure, the data flaked out the further back or further afield you went, but it was a solid platform for building and testing notions and working hypotheses.

Note the focus: I am most interested in player performance. There is some great work being done on team performance, and, yay, that’s fantastic. But I am most fascinated by how the individuals combine to create that performance. In sabermetric terms, I am more interested in analyzing Win Shares than Wins.

This is entirely missing from the soccermetrics ecology.

It gets back to one of the points from my Opening Salvo: we aren’t counting useful things.

And I don’t see a solve for this: I don’t think there are enough useful things to count on a seasonal basis. I enhanced that sentence because it’s damn important: the things that are emerging that seem worth counting are almost exclusively context- and situation- dependent. The data we have barely squeaks at the player level.

So, let’s dive into that for a moment, again working the baseball parallel.

I really don’t think it is possible to overestimate the importance of Retrosheet (and, by extension, the tireless efforts of Dave Smith) in the growth of sabermetrics. Retrosheet isn’t sexy, it isn’t fancy, there’s no infinite scroll, 3-column theme, there’s very little to invite the casual user into its labyrinthine depths. There are also no ads.

What it is: a thoroughly vetted, crowd-sourced, amateur (in the absolutely best sense of the word) repository.

It was among the earliest successful efforts at statistical crowdsourcing. Retrosheet would help a researcher gain access to box scores (often grainy photocopies of newspaper accounts or scoresheets provided by people who attended the games), the researcher would convert that information into a digital, structured form and send it back. Over time, this meant a game by game, and in many cases, play by play, database emerged that was publicly accessible and queryable. Suddenly, if you wanted to know what Honus Wagner did on July 17, 1910, you could. That’s pure esoterica. But the data generated significant research as well.

There was a source of trusted information–and if you couldn’t find it, Tom Ruane could and usually would.

So, we have two things that were simultaneously available/emerging: a standard for game-by-game reporting and easy access to important season-over-season historical information.

This allowed a much wider range of innovation, and while there were many, many missteps, it was critical to a true understanding of the game. Not only did Bill James famously “break the wand,” there was also nothing that he did that other people could not have done. I mean, short of being less dedicated, less innovative, less determined, and less entertaining than James.

The parallel here is to the various game-state data systems that exist in proprietary forms right now: things that track field position, activity, time, stuff like that (that is, with the score 2-1, Juan Mata attempted a cross from x,y coordinate on the right wing and a foul was called on Marouane Fellaini).

Not only is there nothing like this for soccer, nothing seems coming on the horizon.

The reason, essentially, is profit. And, look, I respect the profit drive. I think, yes, Opta (and all the rest) should profit from their work. See here for a decent overview of the issue.

But it’s not an either/or situation (it rarely is). The possibilities are legion, but the obvious solve is for those organization to release partial data sets (entire past seasons, all data for a single team, all data for a dozen players, whatever–you can slice this however you want). But release it in an easily downloadable, structured, form.

Yes, the data will be imperfect; yes, the older data is likely not nearly as rich as current information. But you know what?

It won’t matter.

That information will yield both gold and dross. And Opta (or whomever) would retain their competitive edge by incorporating the gold into their current and future products.

Somehow, some way, we have to let the data scream, loudly and publicly.

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Reading Well: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Posted on August 18, 2015 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Station Eleven is delightful and complicated and a well-needed antidote to the brutal banality of much post-apocalyptic fiction.

Emily St. John Mandel has posited a world where a horrifically virulent disease has wiped out something like 499 of every 500 people. The devastating impact of this is handled with a lyrical grace that is stunning, in one chapter simply listing out all of the things that simply fall apart. The practicalities are intriguing as well: the sheer abundance of bodies makes cities inhospitable, with the survivors trying to rebuild their lives either constantly on the move, in small enclaves that emerge in the sparsely populated intersections of abandoned highways, or small rural communities. It all holds together, and if perhaps she underestimates the speed with which bits of technology would reappear, that is a small quibble easily surrendered.

The book follows several strands simultaneously, moving around in time with little effort and with a clarity that is rarely found in the genre. The protagonist was a child when the disease struck, and her harrowing first two years of survival are only referenced and never fully described. This is the antidote mentioned above: St. John Mandel writes about what happens after all the rape and carnage, what is left once the bloodbath has faded. Don’t get me wrong: there is grave peril in the book (and some rape and carnage), and clear acceptance that not everyone, perhaps not even most, would be guided by their higher nature in such circumstances.

But the focus is on a traveling symphony, a group of artists whose caravan moves along a small route in the Midwest, stopping to alternate classical music with performances of Shakespeare, their lead wagon covered with a slogan pilfered from Star Trek, Because Survival is Insufficient. Lovely. Their camaraderie and commitment to the transformational potential of performance is captured sweetly, and the relationships that matter most are generally among these characters.

The overall plot is compelling, but not the reason to read the book. Instead, it’s the smaller things: the description of the arc of discovery for many characters that this is not just another news story, but a legitimate global disaster; the creation of a museum of artifacts from before the disaster in a small airport lounge; the subtle presentation of character’s weaknesses in a way that doesn’t alienate us from sympathizing with them.

Another quote (and contra Sartre): Hell is the absence of the people you long for. Ultimately, Station Eleven is about that hell, and the slow recreation of humanity on the other side of the passage through it.

Highly recommended.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

The ability to move from narrative thread to narrative thread without confusing or annoying the reader. I was never unsure of where or when I was, and I was fairly equally engaged in each of the strands, whether they ultimately connected or not.

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@The Movies with PopPop: The Lone Ranger (What?)

Posted on August 14, 2015 by Daniel (@MKNN)

You may not believe this, but I’m recommending you see The Lone Ranger, a 2013 release, with Johnny Depp as in incredible Tonto.

When it was first released, I had a very negative reaction to what I understood about it. Over the past few months, I’d heard various positive comments from unanticipated sources — a Native American activist and a left wing political commentator whom I respect. So we watched it.

First, the central character is Tonto, not the Lone Ranger. He’s a bona fide Indian, doing what he’s doing to try to revenge an earlier, childhood unanticipated betrayal, and quite aware and part of “the old traditions.” He’s smarter than the Lone Ranger, who’s a newly returned law school graduate arriving as sort of a district attorney. The stereotypes are played with — of Westerns, of the TV show, and mainly of our expectations. It ways, it could be a Mel Brooks film — lots of “bits” connected by a very thin plot. Much of it is laugh out loud (some echoes for me of Django Unchained without the violence).

A trip, especially for those with Rossini, silver bullets, kimo sabe, and hi yo silver echoing in our heads. See it, you’ll enjoy it and laugh a lot.

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Dashing: 12 August @ Seattle Reign FC

Posted on August 13, 2015 by Daniel (@MKNN)

{Another one watched on the stream. No issues there, and the images seemed cleaner than usual, don’t know if that is part of the Reign’s sponsor’s involvement–Bootstrapper Studios–or not. Props to their announcing crew as well, although the camera work was a bit rough throughout.}

Bottom line here is that the better team on the night won, with the Reign–especially in the second half–dominating much of the contest. It’s always hard to figure these things out from a single game, but I was very impressed with what I saw as Laura Harvey‘s coaching influence on the Seattle team. This loss just about dooms the Dash’s playoff push, although there are technically enough games left for them to catch the Spirit for the final slot.

Writeups on what happened can be found at Dynamo Theory, Keeper Notes, and elsewhere–as usual, I’ll try to focus more on the tactical/evaluative than the game narrative.

#THEGOOD

Positionally, Rachael Axon was very good in the holding role. She was rarely caught out, and her anchor allowed all three of our deep midfielders–who are all more in the mold of Andrea Pirlo than Nemanja Matić–to venture forward at will. That role is key for the Dash, and while I like Axon, I do think it is one that could see an upgrade for next season.

Along the same lines, the combination of Keelin Winters and Jess Fishlock was fantastic for Seattle. It’s a different role when you have two deep midfielders playing side-by-side (tactically, the Dash lined up in more of a 4-1-3-2 and the Reign in a 4-2-um, 4-2-something: Megan Rapinoe, being made of awesome, defies all tactical alignments), but watching Fishlock and Winters combine with Rachel Corsie and Lauren Barnes to shut down the deep middle of the park was fantastic. It was textbook: the DC’s would spread themselves to either channel and Winters would drop into a shallow triangle between them, and the Reign were able to easily transition the ball into midfield and attack either by going wide to Stephanie Cox or Kendall Fletcher on the flanks or by working with Winters, Fishlock, and the effervescent Kim Little through the middle.

Morgan Brian may have had her best game of the year. She played a more attacking, positive role, and her deepest strength–the magnets that attach the ball to her feet in close quarters–was on fine display.

I do love me some front-line flexibility. For Seattle, Rapinoe was all over the place–both flanks and central, and had a typically inventive and hard-working game and Kealia Ohai was consistently found on both the left and right flanks. Rapinoe is actually a decent comparison for Ohai: Ohai is faster and more direct and Rapinoe is more creative and unpredictable/impulsive. In this game, Ohai scored (a goal, btw, that was the epitome of placement over power), and her runs to the endline were trouble for the Reign all night, but I think Rapinoe had the greater impact on the game for her team, despite her lack of scoresheet stats.

This is really neither #GOOD or #UNGOOD, but it was, for me, the key tactical choice of the match. Houston packed the box defensively, often drawing the fullbacks in, and pulling back both Axon and one of the upfield trio. This worked very well to help negate Little and Rapinoe (although both got free inside the 18 at least once), but it gave up massive amounts of space on the wings. OK, fine, you have to believe Randy Waldrum knew that would happen, right? What I don’t know if he anticipated was just how *good* Seattle was at exploiting that. Time and time again, Seattle would deliver deep, cross-field passes that were nearly perfectly on target and quickly brought under control, whether to Beverly Yanez on the right wing, or one of the fullbacks pushing up, or to Rapinoe. It was a clinic in one side taking, and effectively exploiting, what the other team was willing to give.

This tactical choice is linked to some amazing recovery runs by the Dash throughout the game, most notably a thirty yard sprint by Ella Masar to catch back up with Rapinoe and knock away a clear one-on-one opportunity. The Dash have the ability to make those runs, which is great, but the need for them is a product of being too easily caught out by fairly direct play.

Camila. That’s right. Camila in #THEGOOD. As a late substitute, she had tons of energy and danger in her runs and had as many threatening touches in her few dozen minutes as Carli Lloyd did all game (see below).

#THEUNGOOD

Paralleling the above, Axon doesn’t offer much other than her “Destroyer Mode.” This can lead to the Dash being caught out when none of the other three midfielders are available for clean, simple outlet passes.

Andressa was … fine. Fine equals #UNGOOD here, given how positively impactful she can be. She was part of a wider, troubling tendency for the Dash: they played a lot of one-touch soccer, nicely intricate 1-2’s. So why is this in the #UNGOOD? Because way, way, way too many of those didn’t come off: the second pass of the 1-2 was into space or slightly off target, or, much worse, directly to a Reign player. The ideas were all good, and that’s fine for a youth team. If you want to make the playoffs, you have to execute those ideas. Primary culprits here were Andressa and Lloyd.

Speaking of whom … Lloyd was essentially a non-factor. Seattle tracked her well all night, but she also made very little hay when given her opportunities, taking too long on the ball and not seeming very comfortable as part of the trio. One would hope that both of these issues are worked out in practice over the next week, before the rematch with the Reign in Houston next week.

The tying goal was a shambolic affair. First, Andressa gave the ball up and then just sort of moped in place, along with a teammate or two. So, there was a real failure in transition for the Dash that led to the Reign’s attack having the advantage; then Erin McLeod got decent contact on the ball, but it spun quite nicely (from a Reign point of view) into Mathias’ path; then, there was a pretty clear handball (armball?) as Mathias got the ball under control before slotting it home. But it all went back to the failure in transition from offense to defense, something that seems to plague the Dash somewhat constantly.

At the same time, the Dash were lucky to escape a collision in the box between Ohai and Little without being called for a foul and penalty. So, even if I would dispute how the Reign tied the game, a 1-1 score at halftime–and a loss at the end of 90 minutes–reflects the game pretty well.

#FAVES

My favorite moment was watching Meghan Klingenberg use a fantastic bit of skill to keep the ball in play along the left touchline late in the first half. Everyone–including Laura Harvey–assumed the ball was headed out of bounds (and Harvey had already begun to raise her hand to signal a throw-in) when Kling did her thing. WANT GIF!

Second favorite was the announcer describing the Reign bringing on Elli Reed as a defensive substitution. Reed is defensive in the same way that Caitlin Foord is, which is to say, not very much at all …

 

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