A chart and some thoughts. That is all.
My last message was a while back.1 I really struggled to find the time to get a new email out to you, but here I am again, with a new data visualisation.
I had some time off from work this week due to a little medical procedure (not plastic surgery! Ha ha!) that required some home-based R&R. It was great. I ended up using the time learning how to create a very small R package which at time of writing has been submitted to CRAN and is going through the final review stages. If you are an R person you can find out about it here. It’s a data set of cast from all the Wes Anderson films with data drawn from my beloved wikidata. I was inspired to do this after watching The Phoenician Scheme - meaning, I found this movie a little bit ‘mid’ and my mind drifted thinking about other things for a lot of it (including wondering how hard it would be to make a package of a dataset of the cast list of all his films). A few weeks ago as a family we went to see The Royal Tenenbaums, and I told our son how new and exciting Wes Anderson film making felt when we saw it back in 2001. It was mannered but it had a strong story underpinning it. Lots of style, but also substantive.2 This latest one had all the manner but not much of the heart. I probably need to watch it again.
Anyhow, visualisation people like data sets. We like data that we can practice and play with, and this is a data set for play! You can use it for a whole bunch of things, including networks. So please, if that’s your thing, download it and make stuff!
I was going to do a network chart with this (maybe next week?) but instead I looked at all the people who have been in three or more of his films. You can see that Bill Murray leads with 8 roles. It’s also interesting to see people work with Anderson for a few films then drift away. Murray is a constant.3
If I had my time again I probably would have combined The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar series screened on Netflix, and looking closely it seems my aggressive filtering of film length in the underlying data set up has removed one of them (Poison)4.
Colours used in the chart can be found in the very very very popular Wes Anderson Palettes - a celebrated R Package. I extracted four colours from “AsteroidCity1”.
So enjoy this below and hopefully it won’t be to much longer before I send you a new one. Have you seen The Phoenician Scheme? What did you think? What is your fave WA film? I am torn between The Royal Tenenbaums, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Darjeeling Limited and Moonrise Kingdom. Oh and Isle of Dogs…and The French Dispatch - I guess I like a lot of them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Lots of stuff has happened, the main thing being my great-aunt was getting more frail and died in April this year. I really enjoyed going and seeing her and hanging out. She had a good sense of humour, and I liked hearing stories about her and Gran when they were young. Looking back, I can see we were both mourning Minnie, and it was nice for us to be able to sit and talk about her. When I told her that I missed Gran she understood the most. When she said the same to me, I understood as well. I liked hearing about her life. She was 104. I really miss her and my gran a lot.
Gene Hackman was wonderful as Royal and seeing Margot/Gwyneth step off the bus and walk in slow motion towards Richie/Luke on the big screen again is burnt into my memory forever as one of those perfect filmic moments. (Whatever happened to Luke Wilson?)
Even if it’s for mere moments on the screen rather than a substantive role it still counts.
I can also now see that I have not got in here Fantastic Mr Fox or Isle of Dogs - two of my very fave Wes Anderson movies! This requires a new package release! I can see what happened. On Wikidata I queried the property of all actors listed under movies matching Wes Anderson as director. BUT I did not use the property of Voice Actor. An easy fix, but I’ll wait for the CRAN news next week before I release a new version.
This newsletter was created on Gadigal Land. Just up the river from where I live, pictures and marks were made on rocks to share stories about the world with others, and they were put there tens of thousands of years ago. I want to acknowledge that this tradition of story telling and using images to communicate and pass on information is nothing new - and the Custodians of this unceded land were here, and doing it first.