Category: Film

Fernand Pajot’s list of best documentaries ever

by  Tyler Cowen in

I know most of them, a very good list:

So far I have as S Tier:

The Act of Killing
Apollo 11
Planet Earth 1/2
The Beatles Get Back
Searching for Sugar Man
Free Solo (?)
Citizenfour (?)

Anything else?

Did not make the list, but great:
Herzog stuff
Blue Planet
Our Planet Behind the Scenes
The Last Dance
The Vietnam War
My Octopus Teacher
Meru
Man on Wire
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
Honeyland
The Century of the Self
The Elephant Queen
Magnus
Exit Though the Gift Shop

I suggest adding Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story, and also that Strauss-sympathetic movie about fans of The Shining, room something or other it is called?  What else?

Nat Friedman discusses Sora, and image wisdom

by  Tyler Cowen in

NF: Yeah, I interviewed the Sora creators yesterday, the day before on stage at an event and it was super interesting to hear their point of view. I think we see Sora as this media production tool, that’s not their view, that’s a side effect. Their view is that it is a world simulator and that in fact it can sort of simulate any kind of behavior in the world, including going as far as saying, “Let’s create a video with Ben and Daniel and Nat and have them discuss this,” and then see where the conversation goes. And their view is also that Sora today is a GPT-1 scale, not a lot of data, not a lot of compute, and so we should expect absolutely dramatic improvement in the future as they simply scale it up and thirdly that there’s just a lot more video data than there is text data on the Internet…

And then Andrej Karpathy, I was talking to him the other day too, and he said, “There’s something strange going on-”

[Ben Thompson] And a picture is worth a thousand words by the way, so the number of tokens there is just astronomically larger.

NF: He was exploring this idea that the world model and image and video models actually might better than in text models. You ask it for a car engine, someone fixing a carburetor and just the level of detail that can be in there is extraordinary, and maybe we made a mistake by training on the text extracted from Common Crawl and what we should do instead. I asked him for his most unhinged research idea. He said what we should do instead is train on pictures of web pages and when you ask the model a question, it outputs a picture of a web page with the answer and maybe we’d get way more intelligence and better results from that.

That is from his dialogue with Ben Thompson and Daniel Gross, gated but worth paying for.

What are your favorite non-violent movies?

by  Tyler Cowen in

From Jonathan Birch on Twitter:

What are your favourite nonviolent movies? I don’t mean romcoms, I mean movies that in some way exemplify or explore the idea of nonviolence.

Sorry, but Gandhi doesn’t do it for me.  What actually comes to mind is that old Bruce Dern movie Silent Running.  Or how about Babette’s Feast?  The LLMs in general cough up politically sanctimonious movies.  Is it crazy to suggest Vincent Ward’s Map of the Human Heart, admittedly a tragic work too?  Terence Malick’s Tree of Life is a natural pick, but somehow it has never registered with me.  Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night surely is in contention.

The culture of Hollywood vs. the culture of Bollywood

by  Tyler Cowen in

And a comment: “In Bollywood movies throughout multiple eras, the most shameful thing has always been disrespect of parents/family. By a wide margin.”

My Conversation with the excellent Coleman Hughes

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Coleman and Tyler explore the implications of colorblindness, including whether jazz would’ve been created in a color-blind society, how easy it is to disentangle race and culture, whether we should also try to be ‘autism-blind’, and Coleman’s personal experience with lookism and ageism. They also discuss what Coleman’s learned from J.J. Johnson, the hardest thing about performing the trombone, playing sets in the Charles Mingus Big Band as a teenager, whether Billy Joel is any good, what reservations he has about his conservative fans, why the Beastie Boys are overrated, what he’s learned from Noam Dworman, why Interstellar is Chris Nolan’s masterpiece, the Coleman Hughes production function, why political debate is so toxic, what he’ll do next, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: How was it you ended up playing trombone in Charles Mingus Big Band?

HUGHES: I participated in the Charles Mingus high school jazz festival, which they still do every year. It was new at the time. They invite bands from all around to audition, and they identify a handful of good soloists and let them sit in for one night with the band. I sat in with the band, and the band leader knew that I lived close by in New Jersey, and so essentially invited me to start playing with the band on Monday nights.

I was probably 16 or 17 at this point, so I would take the NJ Transit into New York City on a Monday night, play two sets with the Mingus Band sitting next to people that had been my idols and were now my mentors — people like Ku-umba Frank Lacy, who is a fantastic trombone player; played with Art Blakey and D’Angelo and so forth. Then I would go home at midnight and go to school on Tuesday morning.

COWEN: Why is the music of Charles Mingus special in jazz? Because it is to me, but how would you articulate what it is for you?

Here is another:

COWEN: If I understand you correctly, you’re also suggesting in our private lives we should be color-blind.

HUGHES: Yes. Broadly, yes. Or we should try to be.

COWEN: We should try to be. This is where I might not agree with you. So I find if I look at media, I look at social media, I see a dispute — I think 100 percent of the time I agree with Coleman, pretty much, on these race-related matters. In private lives, I’m less sure.

Let me ask you a question.

HUGHES: Sure.

COWEN: Could jazz music have been created in a color-blind America?

HUGHES: Could it have been created in a color-blind America — in what sense do you mean that question?

COWEN: It seems there’s a lot of cultural creativity. One issue is it may have required some hardship, but that’s not my point. It requires some sense of a cultural identity to motivate it — that the people making it want to express something about their lives, their history, their communities. And to them it’s not color-blind.

HUGHES: Interesting. My counterargument to that would be, insofar as I understand the early history of jazz, it was heavily more racially integrated than American society was at that time. In the sense that the culture of jazz music as it existed in, say, New Orleans and New York City was many, many decades ahead of the curve in terms of its attitudes towards how people should live racially: interracial friendship, interracial relationship, etc. Yes, I’d argue the ethos of jazz was more color-blind, in my sense, than the American average at the time.

COWEN: But maybe there’s some portfolio effect here. So yes, Benny Goodman hires Teddy Wilson to play for him. Teddy Wilson was black, as I’m sure you know. And that works marvelously well. It’s just good for the world that Benny Goodman does this.

Can it still not be the case that Teddy Wilson is pulling from something deep in his being, in his soul — about his racial experience, his upbringing, the people he’s known — and that that’s where a lot of the expression in the music comes from? That is most decidedly not color-blind, even though we would all endorse the fact that Benny Goodman was willing to hire Teddy Wilson.

HUGHES: Yes. Maybe — I’d argue it may not be culture-blind, though it probably is color-blind, in the sense that black Americans don’t just represent a race. That’s what a black American would have in common — that’s what I would have in common with someone from Ethiopia, is that we’re broadly of the same “race.” We are not at all of the same culture.

To the extent that there is something called “African American culture,” which I believe that there is, which has had many wonderful products, including jazz and hip-hop — yes, then I’m perfectly willing to concede that that’s a cultural product in the same way that, say, country music is like a product of broadly Southern culture.

COWEN: But then here’s my worry a bit. You’re going to have people privately putting out cultural visions in the public sphere through music, television, novels — a thousand ways — and those will inevitably be somewhat political once they’re cultural visions. So these other visions will be out there, and a lot of them you’re going to disagree with. It might be fine to say, “It would be better if we were all much more color-blind.” But given these other non-color-blind visions are out there, do you not have to, in some sense, counter them by not being so color-blind yourself and say, “Well, here’s a better way to think about the black or African American or Ethiopian or whatever identity”?

Interesting throughout.

Culture splat (a few broad spoilers)

by  Tyler Cowen in

Challengers is a good and original movie.  Imagine a 2024 rom com, except the behavior and conventions actually are taken from 2024, and with no apologies.  The woman says the word “****ing” a lot, and no one treats this as inappropriate or unusual.  There is bisexuality and poly.  Society is feminized.  Of course opinions will differ on these cultural issues, but the movie is made with conviction and so it is truly a tale of modern romance.  Who in the movie is in fact the emptiest shell?  Opinions will differ.

Zendaya dominates the screen  — for how long has it been since we have had an actress this central and this charismatic?

Also, I quite like the new Beyonce album, and Metaculus estimates the chance of an H5N1 pandemic at about two percent.

The politics of *Civil War* (full of spoilers, do not read)

by  Tyler Cowen in

I saw the film as having very definite politics, and yes I am aware of the pronouncements of the director — ignore them!  I am writing about the movie, what was on the screen.

The seceding states — California, Texas, and Florida — all have substantial Latino population segments.  The core political message is that a nation cannot hold together under those conditions.  The “Democrat vs. Republican” issues become irrelevant in those scenarios, and that too is part of the political message.  Ethnic considerations become primary in the final analysis.  And note that the separate Florida, not part of the Western Alliance, is the one state with lots of Latinos and not so many Mexicans.  It is California and Texas that share the same ethno ambitions.

The key moment is the scene when they encounter the evil blond-haired guy with the big gun, and he asks “What kind of American are you?”  The naive viewer expects the Socratic dialogue to shift in the direction of red vs. blue states, but no the baddie starts talking about “Central Americans” and “South Americans.”  The real question has become what kinds of Americans are we indeed.

The Hong Kong/Chinese guy is shot immediately, once he announces his nationality, again a stand-in for the broader ethnostate divisions the movie is portraying.

When the two individuals shift cars, and jump from one moving vehicle to the other, that is the true portend of pending disaster, as Hollis Robbins has pointed out.  Stay in your car (country)!

Of course Hollywood cannot put such a message on the screen explicitly, nor are most critics capable of seeing it.  Mostly they are left wondering what has happened to the Trump vs. anti-Trump divisions they heard about on NPR.

If you doubt whether this movie is historically detailed and aware, consider how it portrays West Virginia on this civil war “next time around.”  They are less interested than are the Virginians.

You won’t see much Christianity in the film at all.

Except for the black veteran, the media class are shown as selfish, elevating the scoop above all while disclaiming moral responsibility, enjoying the witnessing of violence, and verging on the psychotic.  It is not an entirely favorable portrait (and yes I do know the director’s words on this).

The U.S. citizenry gets rather caught up in fighting the war, and the most positive visions are of the two fathers who retreat to their farms, again a reactionary message.

Blacks are shown as the servant class of each side in the civil war, a portrait that, if people were more aware, would be considered offensive.

So those are the politics of the movie, but with the distractions of the violence on the screen and of current culture wars, we just don’t notice how much they are pushed into our faces.  I give the director credit for his guts, noting that George Lucas ripped off Leni Riefenstahl and I still like that movie too.

To be clear, those are not my politics at all, as loyal MR readers can attest.  But that is not how I judge movies and this one — while definitely flawed — was still pretty good.

*Civil War*

by  Tyler Cowen in

This movie was more cinematically serious than I was expecting, and with some odd (but mostly good) 1970s vibes.  It is also an interesting case study in anhedonia.

Video and grenades seem scarcer than they ought to be, even given the constraints.  Good characters.

The movie works very hard not to reveal its politics to a mainstream audience, but of course they are there, you just have to squint and think a bit.  No, I’m not going to spoil that one for you.

“Thirty Canadian?”

Excellent soundtrack as well.  The same director also made Annihilation and Ex Machina.

What to Watch

by  Alex Tabarrok in

3 Body Problem (Netflix): Great! A captivating mix of big ideas, a compelling mystery, and spectacular set-pieces like the Cultural Revolution, strange worlds, the ship cutting and more. Of course, there are some weaknesses. 3 Body Problem falters in its portrayal of genius, rendering the British scientists as too normal, overlooking the obsessiveness, ambition, and unconventionality often found in real-world geniuses. Ironically, in its effort to diversify gender and race, the series inadvertently narrows the spectrum of personality and neurodiversity. Only Ye Wenjie, traumatized by the cultural revolution, obsessed by physics and revenge, and with a messianic personality hits the right notes. Regardless, I am eager for Season 2.

Shogun (Hulu): Great meeting of cultures. Compelling plot, based on the excellent Clavell novel. I didn’t know that some of the warlords of the time (1600) had converted to Christianity. (Later banned and repressed as in Silence). Shogun avoids two traps, the Japanese have agency and so does the European. Much of it is in Japanese with subtitles.

Monsieur Spade: It starts with a great premise, twenty years after the events of “The Maltese Falcon,” Sam Spade has retired in a small town in southern France still riven by World War II and Algeria. Clive Owen is excellent as Spade and there are some good noir lines:

Henri Thibaut: You were in the army, Mr. Spade?

Sam Spade: No, I was a conscientious objector.

Henri Thibaut: You don’t believe in killing your fellow man?

Sam Spade: Oh, I think there’s plenty of men worth killing, as well as plenty of wars worth fighting, I’d just rather choose myself.

Yet for all the promise, I didn’t finish the series. In addition to being set in France, Monsieur Spade has a French cinema atmosphere, boring, long, vaguely pretentious. There is also a weird fascination with smoking, does it pay off with anything? I don’t know. Didn’t finish it.

What I’ve been watching

by  Tyler Cowen in

1.” In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon,” a two-part special on MGM+.  It’s time to admit that either he or Bob Dylan is the greatest songwriter in American history.  At four hours I was never bored, and there is plenty of coverage of Simon today, and also his wife.  My main gripe is they don’t say just how good an album Hearts and Bones is, rather they only mention it was a commercial failure.

2. The Miracle Worker, Amazon streaming, an old Arthur Penn movie, black and white, about Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller.  There is plenty to object to about this movie, including some dramatic clunkiness and a variety of stereotypes, including (but not only) about the disabled.  Nonetheless the best scenes are amazing, most of all when Anne and Helen “have at it,” in extended fighting sequences, without dialogue of course.  They are some of the most powerful and best acted scenes in Hollywood history.  Kudos to Patty Duke most of all.

3. You Can Call Me Bill, currently in theaters.  At first the viewer thinks this movie is terrible, and in a way it is.  A 90-minute monologue of William Shatner?  Yet as the narration proceeds the tale becomes ever deeper.  Yes, he seems like this corny guy with no taste, but repeatedly you end up asking yourself whether your own philosophic musings are actually much better than his schlock.  Unclear!  And he was so productive.  He just loved to act.  Did he ever know the difference between his good and his bad work?  Was there a difference?  And how is it that he, now well into his 90s, stayed far more vital and alive than just about any of you are going to manage?  Recommended, provided you are willing to sit through the spills and turns and winces.  Those are indeed the point.

4. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.  If nothing else, this movie illustrates the Solow model that the capital stock is indeed costly to maintain.  It also shows there is a Laffer Curve when it comes to monster fight scenes, which apparently are no longer scarce.

Pacific Heights: A Movie Ahead of Its Time

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Pacific Heights is a 1990 movie starring Michael Keaton, Melanie Griffith, and Matthew Modine. Conventionally described as a “psychological thriller,” or a horror movie it’s actually a Kafkaesque analysis of tenancy rights and the legal system. The movie centers on a young couple, Drake and Patty, who purchase a San Francisco Victorian with dreams of fixing it up and renting several of the units to help pay the mortgage. Their dream turns into a nightmare  when Carter Hayes (Michael Keaton) moves in and exploits tenant protection laws to torment and exploit them.

Hayes moves in without permission and without paying rent and he changes the locks. It doesn’t matter. When Drake (Modine) shuts off the power and heat, Hayes calls the police and the police explain to Drake:

What you did is against the law….turn the power and heat back on and apologize because according to the California civil code he has a right to sue and most likely he will win. If he’s in, he has rights, that’s how it works.

A lawyer later adds “He’s taken possession so whether he signed a lease or paid money or not he’s legally your tenant now and he is protected by laws that say you have to go to court to prove that he has to be evicted but the net effect of these laws is to…slowly drive you bankrupt and insane.”

What makes Pacific Heights a horror movie is that the tenant’s rights laws depicted are very real. Here’s just one example of thousands from NYC:

As I wrote on twitter “Decades of anti-landlord legislation has created a moocher-class of squatters who steal homes and then call the police on the owners.” Moreover, even today such laws continue to be added to the books. A bill in Congress, for example, would prevent landlords from being able to screen tenants for criminal records.

All of this has been exacerbated recently by COVID laws preventing eviction (some of which remain but which acclimatized some tenants to not paying rent and contributed to court backlogs), court backlogs and the greater ease of finding unoccupied houses using foreclosure data, death announcements, Zillow and so forth. In extreme cases it can take decades to evict a squatter who uses the law to their advantage.

Returning to Pacific Heights, what the movie gets wrong is the second half where Patty (Melanie Griffith) extracts revenge against Hayes. A less cathartic but more accurate ending would have had the couple exhausted with the complexities of tenant law and the court system and finally giving up when they realize that the law is not for them. Instead, they pay Carter Hayes a ransom to leave their own home. Of course, Drake and Patty choose never to rent to anyone ever again.

What is wrong with movies these days?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is one bit from a longer and very interesting essay by Vicky Osterweil:

This kind of audience-condescending premise-forward literalism is not just in the narrative and scripting, it’s in the acting. The actors of Dune 2 almost all speak in that tedious whisper-growl that stands in for profundity, a vocal-style also popularized by Nolan, in Christian Bale’s portrayal of the caped crusader in 2005’s Batman Begins. I believe that if a movie features a bunch of good actors and all the performances are flat and dull, as is the case in Dune Part Two, where even Florence Pugh, Lea Seydoux and Josh Brolin lack all charisma, it is ultimately a reflection on the director (and the script), not the actors.

Worth reading the whole thing, though I think it is quite wrong about Russian constructivism in the visual arts, which is a far more diverse tradition than the author lets on.

*Dune 2*

by  Tyler Cowen in

From the get go it is far too self-consciously portentous, with nary a bit of humor to lighten it up.  It feels more like an adaptation of memes from gaming than a cinematic version of a novel, much less a living, breathing movie.  And exactly what is the moral stance we are supposed to hold on the war anyway?  I love Hans Zimmer but his score is not in the emotional service of anything meaningful.

By objective standards the visuals are quite good, but in The Age of Sora they no longer seem so creatively cutting-edge either.

The crowd mostly seemed bored, and I saw a lot of people looking at the time on their phones.  Was there any line from the movie that anyone is going to repeat?

Battery technology seems especially advanced in this world.

In terms of expressing the power of cinema, or captivating the viewer with a sense of magic, I’ll take that Robert Bresson film about the donkey any day of the week.

If you read the major reviews carefully, a lot of them feel the same way, though understandably they don’t want to crush Hollywood’s future economic prospects in the bud.