Category: Film
The best films of 2014
I found this to be a diffuse year in movies, one where old-style mainline releases lost their grip on a lot of multiplexes and opened up the market for more quality and diversity than we have seen for a long time. My cinematic self came away from the year quite happy, yet without a clear favorite or a definite sense of which movies will last the ages. Here are the ones I very much enjoyed or otherwise found stimulating:
The Invisible Woman, the secret love life of Charles Dickens.
Particle Fever, reviewed by me here.
Le Weekend, brutal tale of a vacation and a marriage collapsing.
Under the Skin, Scarlet Johansson in Scotland, to say more would be spoilers.
The Lunchbox, resembles an old-style Hollywood movie about a correspondence romance, yet set among the Indian middle to lower middle class.
Viola, an Argentinean take on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, condensed into 65 minutes.
A Touch of Sin, Chinese, brutal, it did not see mainstream release in most cities, I saw it in London.
Godzilla, Straussian review by me here.
Transformers 4, reviewed by me here.
Obvious Child (under the Straussian reading only)
Ilo, Ilo, a movie from Singapore about a Filipina immigrant. And I had the best dark chocolate gelato I’ve had in America, right after watching it at the Angelika pop-up.
The One I Love, an excellent movie about mind games, love, and commitment. This was perhaps the most clever movie of the year and also the most underrated.
Skeleton Twins
Lucy, the energy and style overcame the absurdity. That gives Scarlett Johansson two for the year.
Fury, an old-style WWII movie with Brad Pitt, there is a good David Denby review here.
Interstellar, my review is here, here is one Straussian reading.
Of that whole list, for favorites I would pick Fury as #1, along with Touch of Sin. Both of them need to be seen on a large screen.
For TV, the Modern Orthodox Jewish dating show Srugim was a clear first, this year I didn’t watch many movies on video but thought Terence Malick’s 2012 To the Wonder had been underrated.
The macroeconomics of the Death Star, revisited
From Chris Taylor’s new How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise:
The comments section on the Marginal Revolution blog post about the Death Star calculation is a case in point. Here, even now, sober economists [TC: is that what you people are?] hash out questions about the variables: Whether to factor in the slave labor of Wookiees (which was partly responsible for its construction, according to the novel Death Star). Or whether you could fund the whole thing from taxes on the population of Coruscant (which is said to have a trillion inhabitants, thus funding the Death Star at a cost of roughly $8,000 per person) or whether a quality assurance engineer should have nixed a thermal exhaust port two meters wide that led to the main reactor shaft, and what effect this oversight might have had on the Empire’s chances of getting an insurance policy on its second Death Star.
The original MR post on the Death Star is here, and by the way the Taylor book is excellent for all those interested in the topic.
For the pointer I thank a Mr. Christopher Weber.
2015 Law and Literature reading list
The New English Bible, Oxford Study Edition
The Law Code of Manu, Penguin edition
Njal’s Saga (on-line version is fine)
Lawyer Poets and that World Which We Call Law, edited by James Elkins
Glaspell’s Trifles, available on-line.
The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka, edited and translated by Joachim Neugroschel.
In the Belly of the Beast, by Jack Henry Abbott.
Conrad Black, A Matter of Principle.
Sherlock Holmes, The Complete Novels and Stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, volume 1.
I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov.
Moby Dick, by Hermann Melville, excerpts, chapters 89 and 90, available on-line.
Year’s Best SF 9, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.
Death and the Maiden, Ariel Dorfman.
The Pledge, Friedrich Durrenmatt.
E.M. Forster, A Passage to India.
Haruki Murakami, Underground.
Honore de Balzac, Colonel Chabert.
Toer, Pramoedya Ananta, House of Glass.
M.E. Thomas, Confessions of a Sociopath.
Films: A Separation, Memories of Murder, other.
Podcast: Serial
If you are eligible (economics graduate students have taken it in the past), do take my class, I am very happy to have you there.
*Interstellar*
A negative productivity shock hits the global economy, and various bad consequences ensue, including The Idea Trap. Behavioral factors exacerbate the course of events. Some degree of mean reversion ensues, to specify that degree would involve spoilers. OLG models remain relevant, indeed more relevant than most others are willing to believe. The rest is detail.
I am often skeptical of Christopher Nolan movies for lacking heart, but I enjoyed this one more than I expected to. It would have been better, however, if no character had been allowed to articulate any propositions of physics.
What I’ve been reading
1. Emmanuel Carrère, Limonov, The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, A Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia. Blends fiction, non-fiction, and occasional social science (was a non-corrupt transformation of the Soviet Union really possible?, Gaidar ultimately decided it wasn’t), but in terms of the subjective experience of the reader it is most like a novel. Excellent and also entertaining. I consider this a deep book about why liberalism will never quite win over human nature. Here is an interesting Julian Barnes review, although in my opinion it is insufficiently appreciative.
2. Kenneth D. Durr, The Best Made Plans: Robert R. Nathan and 20th Century Liberalism. I may be biased because I just gave a talk at the Nathan Foundation and received it as a gift copy. I call this the “real history of economic thought.” It’s a look at the career of a man who worked with Simon Kuznets to improve gdp statistics, helped lead the war effort in the 1940s, supported the civil rights movement, founded a major economic consulting firm, and supported the idea and practice of economic development, most of all for South Korea and Myanmar. It’s a splendid look at twentieth century economics as it actually influenced the world, without centering the story on academia. By the way, here is Diane Coyle on Walter Lippmann.
3. Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings. This account of 1970s Jamaica, centered on a plot to shoot Bob Marley, shows a remarkable amount of talent, as well as a mastery of plot construction and different novelistic voices, some of which are in Jamaican patois. If you pick up this book you will be impressed and indeed many of the reviews are glowing. Yet somehow never did I care, feel entertained, or wish to read further. I stopped. I remain interested in that era, but will instead recommend a viewing — or reviewing — of The Harder They Come or Marley.
4. John D. Mueller, Redeeming Economics: Rediscovering the Missing Element. That element would be Providence, and this work looks at how Scholastic insights can serve as a foundation for economic thought. Loyal MR readers will know that is not exactly my brew, but some of you will find this of interest.
A Real Life Milgram Experiment
This amazing video, introduced by Philip Zimbardo, discusses a real world Milgram “experiment” in which people obeyed an authority figure to an astounding degree, even when the authority figure was just on the telephone.
The video comes from the Heroic Imagination Project which hopes to use the results of social psychology to help people to take effective action in challenging situations. More videos on obedience to authority, including from Milgram’s experiment, can be found in the resource section along with other social psychology videos and other interesting materials.
Here is one more, this time a little lighter, an experiment in which people find themselves unexpectedly married:
Where’s my flying hoverboard? (Back to the Future)
From The Daily Beast:
Greg and Jill Henderson, founders of Hendo, have developed a real hoverboard. Yes, the flying skateboard that millions of moviegoers have wished were real since Back to the Future Part II premiered back in 1989 may become the must-have Christmas gift for 2015. Using “hover engines” that create frictionless magnetic fields, the hoverboard only appears to hover an inch or two off a metallic floor. It’s not exactly ready for, or usable on, concrete but everything has to start somewhere.
There is more here. It needs something like a copper sheet below it. There are different accounts here, with varying degrees of enthusiasm or lack thereof, I found this one useful. Still, this is more progress than we were seeing a year ago.
Rich countries download music, poor countries download movies
Peer-to-peer file sharing of movies, television shows, music, books and other files over the Internet has grown rapidly worldwide as an alternative approach for people to get the digital content they want — often illicitly. But, unlike the users of Amazon, Netflix and other commercial providers, little is known about users of peer-to-peer (P2P) systems because data is lacking.
Now, armed with an unprecedented amount of data on users of BitTorrent, a popular file-sharing system, a Northwestern University research team has discovered two interesting behavior patterns: most BitTorrent users are content specialists — sharing music but not movies, for example; and users in countries with similar economies tend to download similar types of content — those living in poorer countries such as Lithuania and Spain, for example, download primarily large files, such as movies.
“Looking into this world of Internet traffic, we see a close interaction between computing systems and our everyday lives,” said Luís A. Nunes Amaral, a senior author of the study. “People in a given country display preferences for certain content — content that might not be readily available because of an authoritarian government or inferior communication infrastructure. This study can provide a great deal of insight into how things are working in a country.”
Amaral, a professor of chemical and biological engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Fabián E. Bustamante, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, also at McCormick, co-led the interdisciplinary research team with colleagues from Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Spain.
Their study, published this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences…reports BitTorrent users in countries with a small gross domestic product (GDP) per capita were more likely to share large files, such as high-definition movies, than users in countries with a large GDP per capita, where small files such as music were shared.
Also, more than 50 percent of users’ downloaded content fell into their top two downloaded content types, putting them in the content specialist, not generalist, category.
The full article is here, the paper and data are here, and for the pointer I thank Charles Klingman. Can you explain the rich-poor, music vs. movies difference using economic theory?
My favorite cinematic things Hong Kong
Where to start?
1. John Woo. The Killer holds up the best on repeated viewings, but Hard Boiled makes the biggest first impression, at least circa the early 1990s. It is less shocking today, precisely because it has been so influential. Bullet in the Head has some incredible peak moments, but I’ve never loved A Better Tomorrow as many people do, neither part I nor part II. Once a Thief — the true Hong Kong edition only — is a good dark horse pick, nimble and philosophical. Of the American Woo movies, Windtalkers, about the Navajo code talkers during World War II, is much underrated, a fine work.
2. Ringo Lam. City on Fire, and also Prison on Fire. I would like to know more of them.
3. Wong Kar-wai. I love all of his movies up through 2000, after that I have mixed feelings at best. Essential viewing, perhaps my favorite is Chungking Express, for capturing a certain era in Hong Kong, although I doubt that is the best one.
4. Tsui Hark. I am sorry, but I never have loved them, the less pretentious the better. I did enjoy Chinese Ghost Story.
5. Jackie Chan. Drunken Master II is my favorite, for some U.S. releases this was retitled simply Drunken Master. You’ll just have to figure it out. I love the first thirty minutes or so of Armour of God, you can skip the rest. I consider him one of the comic geniuses of recent times.
6. Bruce Lee. Enter the Dragon is a perennial favorite, plus there is the fight scene with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Game of Death, and with Chuck Norris in Return of the Dragon.
The Infernal Affairs trilogy is quite good, as is Election. Some of the early Shaw Kung Fu movies have entertaining moments, best seen is excerpts. Chow-Yun Fat is perhaps my favorite movie actor. There is plenty more I don’t know about.
The bottom line: People, you need to have seen all of these movies, now. Just ask Scott Sumner.
My favorite things Kentucky
1. Popular music: The Everly Brothers, I recommend this song. There is also Loretta Lynn and Dwight Yoakum and Merle Travis, I like this video. In jazz there is Lionel Hampton.
2. Visual artist: Edgar Tolson, that image is not fully safe for work. John James Audobon worked in the state quite a bit.
3. Movie, set in: Goldfinger, though of course immobilizing that stock would not affect the world price of gold very much. And keep in mind the nominal price of gold was pegged back then under Bretton Woods — should we really have expected a lot of goods and services deflation, just because some nutcase set off a bomb? I don’t think so.
4. Monk: Thomas Merton. He was an excellent writer, as a monk I cannot judge.
5. Author: Hmm…I don’t really like either Robert Penn Warren or Hunter S. Thompson. So Thomas Merton wins a second category, try The Seven Storey Mountain.
6. NBA player: The incandescent Rex Chapman, recently arrested for shoplifting. I liked Pervis Ellison too, believe it or not.
7. Movie director: I believe John Carpenter grew up there, he has several excellent films, including The Thing, Starman, Dark Star, and Escape from New York. I don’t actually enjoy the D.W. Griffith movies.
8. Poet and impresario: Muhammad Ali.
For some inexplicable reason Victor Mature was one of my father’s favorite actors. There is also Johnny Depp and George Clooney. Economist Milton Kafoglis passed away not long ago. How about the Kentucky Colonels?
The bottom line: If I had better taste in fiction, this list would be strong across the board. I’m in Louisville for the day.
Assorted links
1. Bill Gates and The Big History Project.
4. Claudia Sahm now has a blog.
5. Cyranoids.
6. The One I Love is a pretty amazing conceptual movie, with nods to Lem, Albee, Shakespeare, Saramago, and Rod Serling, among others.
Ikea’s Simulacrum
An amazing 75% of the images in an Ikea catalog are not photographs but CGI.
…the real turning point for us was when, in 2009, they called us and said, “You have to stop using CG. I’ve got 200 product images and they’re just terrible. You guys need to practise more.” So we looked at all the images they said weren’t good enough and the two or three they said were great, and the ones they didn’t like were photography and the good ones were all CG! Now, we only talk about a good or a bad image – not what technique created it.”
Is growing income inequality diminishing middlebrow culture?
A.O. Scott considers that question in The New York Times. I am not sure I can sum up his view in a sentence, so I don’t know if this is criticizing him or partially agreeing with him. In any case, I don’t see growing income inequality as the main driving force behind the decline of middlebrow American culture. An individual’s level of education often predicts cultural consumption better than does his or her income, and education has not in general declined in this country.
Furthermore many forms of culture have grown much cheaper. Once you are paying for cable, the marginal dollar cost of watching a show or a movie at home is zero. Songs and music are much cheaper than twenty years ago, and eBooks make many (not all) books cheaper. In other words, if stagnant income groups wanted middlebrow culture, they still could afford it.
Global markets are growing and those markets are often relatively middlebrow in their orientation, which should maintain the return to producing middlebrow culture. And the United States continues to grow in population, even though the middle is shrinking in percentage terms. The supply of creative activity is quite elastic, so it is hard to argue the wealthy have placed all relevant artists in their employ and thus choked or starved the middle.
It is much more expensive to organize a middlebrow art exhibit than fifteen years ago, and we see fewer good ones, but that is mainly because of 9/11 and insurance rates and related institutional issues, not income inequality.
My view is a lot of people never wanted middlebrow culture in the first place, at least not in every sphere of their cultural consumption. The internet gave them more choice, they took it, and much of middlebrow culture lost its support base. Consider one area where the internet still doesn’t play that much of a role and that is theatrical productions. You can watch plenty of theatre on YouTube, but it’s not such a close substitute to seeing the show live. And if you look at Broadway theatre, it seems more relentlessly and aggressively middlebrow than ever before. Ugh, that is why I stopped going. NFL football seems middlebrow to me and the audience base still is there, again because the internet has not come up with a close competitor. If the sport has a problem it is the violence and injury, not that we’ve evolved into a mix of polo ponies and roller derby.
How and whether contemporary cinema will survive
Liam Boluk has written an excellent four-part series, which should be read by anyone with an interest in movies or cultural economics. He addresses whether movies are a dying or shrinking business, and the installments are here:
- Part I: The US Film Industry is Not a Growth Business
- Part II: How the Major Studios can Drive Domestic Growth
- Part III: Saving Independent Filmmaking
- No More 1UPs: Why Video Game Studios Keep Dying
Here is one excerpt from number three:
One of the primary barriers to indie success and growth comes from screen distribution. In 2013, 50% of indie films were released on fewer than ten screens – nearly half of which maxed at only two. The reason for this is simple: the audience for the average indie film tends to be small and heavily concentrated in select cities (New York, San Francisco, Portland). As a result, expanding a film’s footprint into additional markets – even cities such as Seattle, Washington DC or Atlanta – can be financially destructive. Yet, even as the theater count is scaled, total performance can remain modest.
And here is Boluk’s blog.
Will Amazon copy Netflix?
According to Gigaom, the e-commerce giant [Amazon] is working on a subscription ebook service called Kindle Unlimited, which would offer unlimited ebook rentals for $9.99 a month.
There is more here. According to one estimate it would be for 638k titles or so, of course it will matter a great deal which ones. I would consider this “developing,” but also “not yet confirmed.”
Addendum: Virginia Postrel offers a good analysis.