More Than One Lesson

“Football is to baseball as blackjack is to bridge. One is the quick jolt. The other the deliberate, slow-paced game of skill, but never was a sport more ideally suited to television than baseball. It’s all there in front of you. It’s theatre, really. The star is the spotlight on the mound, the supporting cast fanned out around him, the mathematical precision of the game moving with the kind of inevitability of Greek tragedy. With the Greek chorus in the bleachers!” – Vin Scully

In recent years, baseball organizations have become heavily dependent on the contributions of brilliant mathematical minds. Sabermetrics, the highly sophisticated statistical analysis detailed in 2011’s Moneyball, has, let’s be honest, strong nerd appeal. While I am unashamedly a nerd, my love of baseball has nothing to do with acronyms such as WHIP, FIP, VORP, BABIP, or WAR (that last one stands for Wins Against Replacement, which I still don’t understand how anyone can quantify). While I respect the role those statistics have to play in building baseball organizations, I sincerely have no interest in learning how they actually work. I don’t love math and I certainly can’t imagine ever writing about it. I love stories which is why I almost everything I write is about film or television. While baseball is a game steeped in numbers, what it is, really, is a story. Every at bat is a scene, every inning an act, and every game one episode out of 162 of a full season.

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In this episode, Tyler and Robert discuss Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Kong: Skull Island and Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory.

EPISODE BREAKDOWN
00:00:50- Intro, Trainspotting 2, Kickstarter
00:04:20- Kong: Skull Island
01:16:50- Paths of Glory
01:37:15- Episode wrap-up, Nerd Soup

In this episode, Reed and Nathan discuss Bill Paxton’s Frailty.

In 1996, Danny Boyle’s adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s wildly popular novel chronicling the lives of Scottish heroin addicts quickly became one of the highest grossing British films of all-time and an international hit. Trainspotting was accused by many who did not see it of glamorizing drug use. While it was incredibly entertaining and often very funny, its style unflinchingly showed the horrors of heroin addiction without taking a heavy-handed stance about it. If you can watch a character dig into the “worst toilet in Scotland” on his hands and knees, another wake up in a pile of his own excrement, and another dying in squalor of AIDS and come away from that film believing that being a heroin addict is an exciting and glamorous lifestyle then your critical thinking skills are almost certainly broken. While Boyle didn’t back away from the horrors he also didn’t back away from what it is about heroin that creates addicts in the first place. Still, I would imagine that for a teenager, watching Trainspotting would make a far more effective anti-drug teaching tool than anything he or she could learn from D.A.R.E.

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In this episode, Tyler and Josh discuss Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One and Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.

EPISODE BREAKDOWN
00:00:50 – Intro, The Devils, Salty Cinema, The Fear of God, Beauty and the Beast
00:02:45 – Kickstarter campaign
00:05:30 – Rogue One
00:56:15 – Saving Private Ryan
01:12:20 – Episode wrap-up

In this episode, Reed and Nathan discuss Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. Also featuring a reading of the poem by horror actor Bill Oberst, Jr.

For decades, a notorious film by director Ken Russell provoked debate, controversy, and sometimes disgust in audiences who had the rare privilege to see it. Banned in several countries around the world, and lacking formal distribution in any others, The Devils was one of film connoisseurs’ most heavily sought lost treasures. Warner Brothers began a rocky distribution in the early 2000s, releasing the film in limited printings, with sub-par video quality, on DVD. It appeared on iTunes in 2010, only to be removed again without explanation after only 3 days. Even these few releases removed the more severely controversial moments of the film, and a complete version remains extremely elusive, if not entirely lost.

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In this episode, Tyler and Josh discuss Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival and Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko.