The Arms Had to be Out for the World to See

April 21, 2023 11:20 AM

In honor of Vin Diesel wearing 3 different sleeveless shirts in the Fast X trailer, I scoured his films, noting every sleeveless shirt & time spent in them. When he wears 4 sleeveless shirts & spends 14-15% of the films running time in them, the films make more money and have higher critic scores

From the same person who brought us two Con Air seating charts, Brad Pitt movies featuring him consuming 200+ calories of food, and the unsuccessful and unnecessarily large trap that the special forces guy built in 'Predators', among many other fine data analyses.

posted by chavenet (12 comments total)

His arms are kind of like, "his family" so they always need to be out and ready b/c FAMILY is important.
posted by Fizz at 12:04 PM on April 21, 2023 [10 favorites]

Also, really jealous I didn't make this post b/c I love this stupid franchise so much. It's pure hot garbage and its just Avengers with cars in the sky and outer-space with a dash of James Bond spy shit. And it's going to be sad when this series finally ends, I kind of hope it just keeps on going forever.
posted by Fizz at 12:05 PM on April 21, 2023 [12 favorites]

I only counted scenes where his presence is felt and or he could pop up at any moment.

Great, another thing to worry about.
posted by uncleozzy at 12:10 PM on April 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

Well this seals the deal. Correlation is definitely causation, and multiple-testing means you just get a better chance of finding the true positive result we knew all along.
posted by kaibutsu at 12:16 PM on April 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

Musckels!
posted by clavdivs at 1:00 PM on April 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

Brad Pitt movies featuring him consuming 200+ calories of food

Somebody here once called Brad Pitt the world's second-best exposition-eater (after Matt Damon) and I think about it every time I see him in a movie.

Anyway, Vin Diesel! That guy hates sleeves
posted by Gerald Bostock at 2:02 PM on April 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

Arma virumque cano! Virgil was onto something!
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:48 PM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is why we can't have nice statistics.
posted by fairmettle at 4:08 PM on April 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

Life is full of questions, and answers, some of them bad. While seeking answers to our questions, or questing, we all come up with variable solutions, some may be deemed mistakes. Matt Damon, washing someone's hair, in the Bourne Identity, I think it was, made me a forever fan. He did a great job in The Martian.
posted by Oyéah at 6:12 PM on April 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

I feel we must consider that the pattern of causality here may be more complex than first appears. Perhaps films that are well-funded and produced have a larger shirt budget and directors with somewhat superior judgment, tending towards a greater use of multiple sleeveless shirts. This may indeed improve the film, but that effect is likely to be secondary to the more fundamental correlation operating here, namely that films with more funding and better directors tend to be better films anyway. Methodologically we need to make a large number (say 100) of the same identical films, with varying shirt-count, to provide controls. Or perhaps sleeves could be digitally added to copies of existing films and the two rival versions relaunched in two constructed samples of theatres matched for economic and social factors, probably a more feasible proposition in practical terms.
In the meantime I believe a footnote is required.
posted by Phanx at 1:00 AM on April 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

In the meantime I believe a footnote is required

You'd bring a footnote to an arm fight?
posted by chavenet at 1:18 AM on April 22, 2023 [8 favorites]

I reckon there's some over-fitting going on here

(sorry)
posted by moonface at 5:36 AM on April 24, 2023 [3 favorites]