
Analyzing networks of characters in 'Love Actually' - mwsherman
http://varianceexplained.org/r/love-actually-network/
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steven2012
As a side note, the blog poster, and the blog post he references,
characterizing the movie as terrible annoys me and shows that they both
absolutely missed the point of the movie.

The movie depicts all sorts of different types of "love". Lust is
characterized by the man who cheats on his wife; Sex is characterized by the
guy who goes to the US; Platonic Love is the love between the rock star and
his manager; First Love is the story of the young boy; Unrequited Love or
Unattainable Love is the man who is in love with his best friend's wife, and
so forth.

It's not a terrible movie at all, it's freaking brilliant.

~~~
tailgate
It's a pretty screenwriting 101 level of symbolism. Why does that make it
brillant?

~~~
duncanawoods
The poster successfully conveyed the insight that made it brilliant film for
them and their enthusiasm makes me wish to see it again.

I don't know what practices are actually taught in 101, but the greatest
artists won't be those that think themselves above them, but those who really
appreciate them.

You wish to suggest you are superior but multiple stories to give different
angles of a concept isn't symbolism, its a theme. The narrative structure is
definitely unusual in the genre, frequently described as clever/innovative by
reviewers and stands as a substantial achievement to have brought so many
stories together successfully. None of that means you have to like it but the
cheap middle-brow dismissal fools no-one.

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pierrec
Seems like you could get new insights and ideas by getting lost in the graphs
(if only I had better recollection of this film!) The interactive graph-
timeline is a rather uncommon visualization technique, but I can see it being
very useful. It only needs smooth graph transitions while using the timeline
scrubber, and it could make a very useful tool with different applications.

And as films go, I think a similar analysis performed on Cloud Atlas would be
extremely interesting.

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svec
If you like that movie you must read through to the very last sentence of the
post. It's a terrible pun? Joke? Reference? Whatever it is, it's funny and a
great end to a nifty bit of analysis.

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minimaxir
A minor R tip: if you're trying to filter on substrings in dplyr, using
grepl() is faster and does not require loading an extra package.

That said, this is a great, clear writeup, and I wasn't aware R had dendrogram
capabilities _natively_. I'll have to spend more time looking into Igraph too.

~~~
hadley
I find that surprising. Do you have benchmarks?

~~~
minimaxir
Huh. Turns out I'm wrong. I ran benchmarking on a 1.8M row dataset of SF crime
data w/ 100 replications.

Running grepl() via:

    
    
       benchmark(df %>% sample_frac() %>% filter(grepl("ARREST", Resolution)))
    

completed in 257.58 seconds.

Running str_detect() via:

    
    
       benchmark(df %>% sample_frac() %>% filter(str_detect(Resolution, "ARREST")))
    

completed in 248.917 seconds.

Overall, str_detect() is faster by 3%. The stringr packages has more surprises
than I thought!

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avyfain

        For legal reasons I don’t want to host the script file myself, but it’s literally the first Google result for “Love Actually script.” Just copy the .doc contents into a text file called love_actually.txt
    

Isn't this fair use?

~~~
minimaxir
The use of the script for statistical analysis is fair use; _distributing_ it
isn't.

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gyunt
nice work

