Issue #333: The Boston Celtics' Head Coach Does Film Criticism
It has been a celebratory week. I went to the Celtics’ championship parade, saw them tonight kicking it at Fenway Park during a Red Socks game, and finally turned my dissertation into my committee. Feels pretty good. Just a bit of a stretch before the defense and I will finally feel like I have this Ph.D behind me. The final sprint of formatting was not without its issues, but they are conquered.
This Wednesday, you can go see Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004) in your local theater. I highly recommend doing that. I will also, thrillingly, be seeing Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness (2024). Hopefully I’ll report back.
Cinema Has Never Been More Important to an NBA Championship Than It Was For The 2023-24 Celtics
The story of Joe Mazzulla and The Town (2010) is, at this point, overblown. He’s been branded as “obsessed,” a “The Town stan,” and has quoted the movie more than a few times. But the real story is a little less romantic. And it’s a familiar one to anyone who loves movies but also has relatively repetitive work in front of them. Mazzulla told Boston.com:
As an assistant, I watched it two to three times a week, easy … We do most of our work after the games, so you have to stay up late at night. I never liked waking up with work to do from the day before. When I was an assistant, and I had to turn in my postgame edits, I would go home and just work from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. I needed something to kind of keep me up or keep me going.
But the story of The Town hides a greater truth about this Boston Celtics team. Their mindset and approach to basketball is, above all, driven by Mazzulla’s status as a movie buff. He watched The Departed (2006) before playing Game 5 against the Dallas Mavericks in this past Finals:
He watched The Dark Knight (2008) with Jayson Tatum to find approaches to deal with media expectations:
And he paraphrased Whiplash (2014) in his Finals post-game interview:
For a league whose relationship to cinema, when not the subject of it, can be encapsulated in a humorous twitter account dedicated to NBA Film Tweets, the way film is front and center to Mazzulla’s Celtics is noteworthy.
From my perspective, Mazzulla’s incorporation of cinema into the approach of Celtics has turned him into a critic of sorts. His view is one that elevates film to something that provides valuable life lessons. Mazzulla also accomplishes this without cheapening film’s aesthetic and interpretive value. Films like The Departed and The Town, which follow criminals, instill lessons beyond their manifest plot. Mazzulla reads their subtext to discern the lessons he applies to his coaching.
More fascinating to me than all of this is the relationship of Mazzulla’s cinematic interests with his faith. Mazzulla has made no secret of his religion, repeatedly highlighting his Christian beliefs and the importance of those beliefs to the team’s success. At the same time, films that depict certain kinds of behavior aren’t viewed by Mazzulla as corrosive social forces. This would put him at odds with Plato, for instance, who writes in the Republic of poetry, “[a]ll such things seem to maim the thought of those who hear them and do not as a remedy have the knowledge of how they really are.”
Mazzulla may stop short of implying cinema provides a moral education, but it is nonetheless a useful medium for understanding how to navigate life’s challenges. This insight, the way he values film, is more important and fascinating to me than an obsession with any particular film. I wonder what movies will be a part of the Celtics’ next season.
Solo Leveling Might Deserve the Hype
Netmarble has to be one of the most reviled F2P developers out there. Despite all odds, however, I am a fan of the core action RPG gameplay they return to again and again. From Lineage 2 (2016) to Ni No Kuni: Cross Worlds (2022), I enjoy games with relatively high production values, auto combat, and most importantly auto pathing.
This may not make a lot of sense to people. If the game walks and attacks for you, what’s the point? For me, I enjoy setting up the build and putting things in motion to win battles efficiently, earn more experience and loot, and repeat the loop. I played Ni No Kuni: Cross Worlds a lot. I even had leadership roles in top, competitive guilds. And I think the game is a lot of fun, with the biggest knock against it being the penalties to progress the game can inflict. This moneymaking setup is beyond what one would expect from a gacha game.
Today, I have finally returned to the Netmarble fold with their new game, featuring auto combat and auto pathing: Solo Leveling: Arise (2024). The game has a lot of edges over Cross Worlds. Weapon and item power ups randomly succeed or fail, but failures can’t set you back in your progress. The game has no multiplayer component, so there is very little incentive for players to spend. And the presentation of the story is simple enough that I took the time to watch it — I usually skip cutscenes in mobile games. In fact, the premise of Solo Leveling: Arise is intriguing enough that I even started watching the anime.
Netmarble’s game is part of a multi-media push for the Solo Leveling franchise, with the anime also having been released early this year. The premise is unique. I expected a standard isekai, a plot where some unsuspecting loser gets teleported to a fantasy or sci-fi world and enjoys the power and status he’s denied in his real life. Solo Leveling certainly borrows from isekai tropes: protagonist Sung Jin-woo is a plucky loser who stumbles into immense, exceptional power. But the story takes place in a contemporary world into which video game logic has been introduced.
There is a clear gap in understanding as to the ways the world has changed. Portals to some sort of alternate fantasy dimension has appeared, but no one knows why. Individuals, equally randomly, “awaken” to abilities that make them capable of defeating the fantasy monsters who threaten ingress into the world through the portals. Society ranks each awakened individual based on their capacity to fight the monsters, but the technology to assess these ranks required years of development. The greater mysteries of the world of Solo Leveling may lead it to resemble a traditional isekai more than it initially appears.
As it turns out, the gap in understanding seems greater than it initially appears. One of the important elements of the awakening is that one’s power never increases or decreases, regardless of the number of monsters they kill. Sung Jin-woo, however, beings seeing a video game UI that allows him to gain experience, manage his inventory, and function like a video game character within real life. I have no idea where the story is going, but the nature of the world and why Sung Jin-woo experiences it differently is an interesting hook.
As for Solo Leveling: Arise, there’s nothing better than making a video game out of a television show that already has video game mechanics. The story of Solo Leveling turns an implicit underlying logic into a visible, obvious element of the main character’s existence. In Arise, the screens the player manipulates will often be the same as ones Sung Jin-woo navigates in the TV show and comic. Arise seems limited by the finite length of Solo Leveling’s plot, so I will be curious to see how they handle that endpoint to try to keep players invested in the game.
Weekly Reading List
https://www.wiley.com/en-ie/Disavowal-p-9781509561209 — Alenka Zupančič’s Disavowal (2024) is another hit in a string of hits for the indomitable psychoanalytic theorists.
This new video series from TCGplayer is a nice, well-produced reminder of a moment in Magic’s competitive history.
Until next time.