the digital tape measure pan is one of the greatest moments of jon bois' filmography and one of the best moments in all of film of the 2010s

I had a friend named Bob in elementary school. We were in the same class and the same Cub Scout group, but he moved to a different part of the city and we lost touch after third grade. I met him again in the mid-90s--we worked at the same video store. But by that point, he had already become Robert.

damn never thought i would feel so sad about the name bob... we gotta protect the bobs. "if your name is bob, it means somebody really loves you" — a world without bobs is a world without love.

somebody give jon bois proper theatrical distribution so i can see these big graphs on a sufficiently large screen

Compared to Bois' prior feature-length doc Fighting In The Age of Loneliness, this is totally unfocused, probably because it lacks a thesis beyond "hey, guys named Bob are an effective microcosm!". Still, nobody but Bois could turn that into a genuinely heartwarming tale about the human capacity for astonishment and how important it is to remember our history, but I'll admit, even he strains a little with this one. All the same, you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll learn something, and along the way you'll even hear a sick tune by my favorite library music composers of all time, the Bastow brothers. Jon's one of the few documentarians out there to love data as much as I do.

"later, beamon will say of this leap: "i felt alone.""

jon bois is one of my favourite documentary filmmakers working, and while this anthology-style film loses a little focus just because it's unrelated stories connected by a first name, it's still massively entertaining to watch and demonstrates all the dramatic tension involved in slowly panning along a chart as well as anything could.

would have clicked like for the long-jump section alone

Not knowing fuck all about sports is actually a benefit here because I got to experience that tape measure pan reveal completely pure.

Jon Bois: pan shot of a ruler

Me: proud crying .gif

It will always be funny to me that the guy behind Breaking Madden has turned out to be the most exciting sports documentarian of his generation. I can't believe I'm about to spend 180 minutes learning about the Seattle Mariners.

I kept being reminded of the Mountain Goats' Beat the Champ, another artwork that casts its often marginal sports figures in an adoring but un-nostalgic light, combining the child's desire to root for the underdog with the adult's understanding of the factors that led to them being an underdog in the first place. Some Bobs are tragic, some are laughable, but all seem like the most beautiful people in the world under Bois' lens.

"...And we will never know why. But he was a Bob. He played a note in this symphony. He mattered."

All points on a graph have a story.

All Bob's are destined to become Robert's. It is like Newton's law of gravity, except instead it is Bois' law of bobity.

The 1968 Bobs Beamon and Gibson and the X-Games Bobs Pereyra and Burnquist singlehandedly would make this a great alone, but then there’s the boxing Bobs Fitzsimmons and Armstrong really anchoring a century of athletic history and its evolution from the epitome of racist classism - to relatable exceptionalism - to being too sexy and serious for people going by Bob.

i think i should probably stop watching sports docu-series that fill me with existential joy and numbers i can't make sense of. but i don't want to 🔪

Essential viewing for members of the Church of the Subgenius.

The part where Bob Beamon breaks the long jump record in 1968 made me cry.

I don't even like sports

nice as always

Presenting a selection of random sports stories all connected by the name "Bob". Extremely well done.

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Is The Bob Emergency cinema? The better question is, "Does cinema deserve The Bob Emergency?" Jon Bois is known for his ability to make a bunch of charts both visually interesting and emotionally investing, and that gift for finding beauty in the mundane is on full display here. This dude can literally make a camera panning across one and a half feet of a ruler the emotional centerpiece of a story. It's absolutely phenomenal.

The depths of Jon Bois's research is just incredible, as is his ability to surface compelling stories about the Bobs who already hold a significant place in sports history as well as some Bobs who have been lost to it. And since Bois's style is narrative in nature, it's crucial that his writing be at the same level as his research—it is.

I'm retroactively adding this to my list of the best films of 2019.

I didn't expect a humble documentary about Bobs to make me emotional like this. I don't generally care too much about sports, but this exploration of Bobs throughout history is too good not to enjoy.