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Jon Bois and his collaborators specialize in documentaries about risk-free crews. Then brandish tables and graphs with fascinating effect.
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By Calum Marsh
Near the end of “The Atlanta Falcons Story” (2021), a seven-part, nearly seven-hour documentary, writer-director Jon Bois depicts a wonderful 82-yard interception through Falcons cornerback Robert Alford executed with a few minutes remaining in the first half of Super Bowl LI. in 2017, as “one of the most impactful singles games in all of NFL history. “
Almost any other filmmaker would have settled for leaving it at that. But Bois shows his work. On the online sports statistics page pro-football-reference. com, Bois explains, there’s a metric called expected issues that “estimates how many issues a violation deserves to score on a trip before and after a specific game. “Subtract one from each other and you realize that the total influences the match. Alford’s interception went back resulting in a negative seven points for the New England Patriots in a practice that earned them three, for a difference of 10. 7. Bois charts the differential “of the 8,982 individual games in Super Bowl history. “Alford’s touchdown, as you can see obviously, ranks third all-time.
This is not an exaggeration for the rhetorical effect. When Bois says a piece is “one of the most impactful,” he means it.
Bois is the poet laureate of sports statistics. His documentaries, the acclaimed “The History of the Seattle Mariners” (2020) and the recent Charlotte Bobcats theme “The People You’re Paying to Be in Shorts” (both streamed on their YouTube channel, Secret Base), are packed with charts, graphs, and charts that scrupulously track wins, losses, points, races, and goals in the box with a rigor that borders on science.
“I was one of the weird kids who enjoyed algebra at the best school,” Bois said recently in a video interview. “And growing up, I enjoyed the statistical aspect of sports. Scatter Plot: More or less, you can watch a thousand games in 10 seconds. It’s like a small span of time. “
Bois, 40, a longtime sports editor and editor of SB Nation, Vox Media’s respectable sports industry blog, has a singular voice in documentary film; In part, he explained, due to the taste that “fell” him and also to his “limited technical capabilities”. A self-taught video editor with no experience in motion graphics, Bois, unusually, does most of his video paintings on Google Earth’s satellite imagery app, uploading photographs directly into Google’s 3D environments and using satellite imagery. maps as a type of virtual map. sandbox. It looks a bit like a PowerPoint presentation carried out on a street map, with large blocks of text floating in the most sensitive part of pixelated representations of roads and baseball stadiums.
The taste is undeniable. The camera floats in the air above the graphs and tables and, as Bois or one of his collaborators recount, they give us old photographs, quotes from newspaper clippings and grainy excerpts of footage from archival games. And it’s all made of comfortable yacht rock and loaded with synthesizers and comfortable jazz. It’s as if Ken Burns adapted “Moneyball” with a soundtrack by Steely Dan.
“In an era of impersonal and interchangeable web content, Bois has his own signature,” said Jordan Cronk, film critic and discoverer of Acropolis Cinema, a series of screenings in Los Angeles. “Unlike other bloodhounds who have attempted to make films, Bois has discovered a cutting-edge form for pop-encyclopedic explorations of sports history, combining the talent of a YouTuber to tell stories with a hyper-analytical control film culture. “
Bois claimed that “for better or worse, he doesn’t look like or like anything else. “And for him, it is the ultimate “not to be bigger than anyone else, but to be another of everyone else. “
No less exclusive are the kinds of stories Bois and his usual co-writer-producer Alex Rubenstein decide to tell. The teams, players, and seasons they focus on are little known, without the apparent drama of the good fortune of the underdog or the glory of poverty to wealth. The Mariners, Falcons and Bobcats are not perennial favorites or sources of inspiration. Its tradition is esoteric and unconventional.
“We learned that no one a thousand years from now would make a movie about the history of the Mariners or the history of the Falcons,” Bois said. “These stories will be treated as they deserve. “
Wood’s point of accuracy can be overwhelming and, in generous operating times, exhausting. But their task isn’t for statistic nerds who want to be informed about numbers. In fact, his technique has the opposite effect: the intensity of the films makes them more accessible. You don’t want to know anything about the Sailors to enjoy your nearly four-hour documentary about them. He doesn’t even want to know anything about baseball.
“He manages to use statistics not as a background for dramatic entertainment, but as the maximum outstanding and visually stimulating detail of his narratives,” said Jake Cole, film critic for Slant Magazine.
As Bois said, he and Rubenstein “make sports documentaries for other people who don’t watch sports. “
“I think it’s not only a wonderful honor, but also a big laugh to be able to bring this cool, weird and stupid World Cup to someone who in a different way hasn’t won the invitation,” Bois said.
The essence of this party is to be carried away by the vicarious emotion of an unknown team and its banal drama. Bois and Rubenstein manage to compress decades of tumultuous history into a few hours of dense nonfiction, describing the dramatic narrative of the rise and fall (or fall and fall) of a hard-to-understand team on a momentous scale. After watching one of their films, you inevitably feel an intimate connection to the subject: you know each and every one of the heartbreaking losses of the Bobcats and each and every one of them. each and every hard-won Sailor wins. It’s rewarding access to a World Cup regularly reserved for local fans.
Bois doesn’t necessarily come to those stories like an amateur. His most recent, “The People You Pay to Be in Shorts,” is about the 2011-12 Charlotte Bobcats, a short-lived team that was known among basketball enthusiasts for its record. Breaking the horror and breaking NBA records for wasting streaks before returning to its previous name, Hornets, in 2014. (The team was the Charlotte Hornets from 1988 to 2002. )
But Bois was quick to admit that he wasn’t an NBA expert. To get this full glimpse of a really ugly season, he recruited basketball manufacturer Seth Rosenthal and spent countless hours poring over old copies of The Charlotte Observer, reading “everything they knew. “have written about the Bobcats” at the time. ” I learned that I didn’t want to be a basketball expert,” Bois said. “But at random I can be the greatest expert in the world in this season of a team,” he added. using a swear word for the abysmal Bobcats.
The result is a documentary that puts you at the roots of this glorious collection of eccentrics despite acknowledging how incredibly horrible they are. It gets to the heart of the issue of contract negotiations, career purpose percentages, and the NBA. Writing lottery odds in a way that makes the numbers captivating, and discovers a cosmic good look in the contrast between the worst team in league history and its main owner, Michael Jordan, the greatest player of all time. It’s not just that you end up learning more about a difficult team to understand. You place yourself moved through them.
“I work with the general theory that there is a story,” Bois said. There, no matter what.
He paused for a moment. ” Although,” he reconsidered, “the more terrible the team, the better. “
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