Category: Film
How China is reshaping Hollywood
The German director’s [Roland Emmerich] “2012” movie was a hit in China with a plot that was gold for patriotic Chinese audiences: As the Earth’s core overheats, world leaders build an ark in the mountains of central China to house people and animals that can repopulate the planet. Scenes from the nearly three-hour movie feature a U.S. military officer saying that only the Chinese could build an ark of such a scale so quickly.
It was seen in China as a refreshing change for audiences after decades of unflattering portrayals of the communist nation in Hollywood movies.
Emmerich said he didn’t make “2012” specifically to appeal to Chinese.
There is more here. You will note that in Pacific Rim they do not kiss, respect and loyalty to family are major motives in the plot, and there is nothing approaching a nude scene, except when the female lead sneakingly admires the torso of the male lead.
The Rise of Artificial Intelligences
Here is a well done video from PBS on artificial intelligence(s). Robin Hanson is excellent and is featured around 3:27-5:30.
My favorite things Scotland
And so the journey continues.
Let’s put the Scottish Enlightenment aside and turn to some more recent creations. Here goes:
1. Novel: Alasdair Gray, Lanark. Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod deserve notice as well. I don’t relate to Trainspotting. I understand the case for Robert Louis Stevenson and would wish to jump on board, but usually I lose interest before the end of his books.
2. Painter: Henry Raeburn was part of the Scottish Enlightenment I think. So where to turn? Ken Currie? Scotland is not strong in this category.
3. Classical music: Umm…William Primrose was a strong violist.
4. Architect: Charles Rennie MacIntosh, especially the library.
5. Inventor: James Watt, but there is lots and lots of competition here.
6. Actor: How about Sean Connery? Don’t forget Zardoz.
7. Movie: Gregory’s Girl.
8. Movie, set in Scotland: The Queen.
9. Popular music: David Byrne was born in Scotland. I know the Cocteau Twins, Boards of Canada, Franz Ferdinand, and others, they are OK but I do not love them. Dire Straits and Annie Lennox deserve mention, but overall I suspect many of you rate this group higher than I do. Jesus and Mary Chain? While we’re at it, there is Ewan McLennan and Bert Jansch, both of whom I enjoy.
The bottom line: These are people of intellect (remember the Enlightenment!) and also people of action. For explorers and inventors the record is extremely strong. Yet for music and some of the arts the contributions are rather faint.
Foreign markets encourage Hollywood sequels
Jim reviews the numbers: “The first Ice Age does $175 million domestically, $206 million internationally. The second one does $192 million domestically, $456 internationally. The third one does $200 million domestically and $700 million internationally.”
That is from the new Lynda Obst book, Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the NEW ABNORMAL in the Movie Business. The book is poorly written but sometimes of interest for those who follow this topic.
*World War Z*
I was surprised how serious a movie it is and also by how deeply politically incorrect it is, including on “third rail” issues such as immigration, ethnic conflict, North Korean totalitarianism, American urban decay as exemplified by Newark, gun control, Latino-Black relations, songs of peace, and the Middle East. Here is one (incomplete) discussion of the Middle East angle, from the AP, republished in el-Arabiya (here is a more detailed but less responsible take on the matter, by a sociology professor and Israeli, spoilers throughout).
The movie is set up to show sympathy for the “Spartan” regimes and to have a message which is deeply historically pessimistic and might broadly be called Old School Conservative, informed by the debates on martial virtue from pre-Christian antiquity. But they recut the final segment of the movie and changed the ending altogether, presumably because post-Christian test audiences and film executives didn’t like it. Here is one discussion of the originally planned finale. It sounds good to me. The actual movie as it was released reverts to a Christian ending of sorts. My preferred denouement would have relied on the idea of an asymptomatic carrier or two, go see it and figure out the rest yourself.
By the way, for all the chances taken by the film makers, they were unwilling to offend the government of China (see the first link), in part because you cannot trick them easily with subtle, veiled references. Such tomfoolery works only on Americans — critics included — which I suppose suggests a lesson of its own.
Here is a Times of Israel review of the movie, interesting throughout, and it notes that the Israel scenes are simply translated to “the Middle East” for Turkish audiences.
A good film, I liked it. How many other movies offer commentary on Thucydides, Exodus, Gush-Shalom, Lawrence Dennis, and George Romero, all rolled into one?
The decline of interest in female film stars
Glamour featured film stars on half of its covers in 2012. But the May 2012 issue featuring Lauren Conrad, the former star of the reality show “The Hills,” was the year’s best-selling issue, at 500,072 copies. The magazine now expects to make film stars the minority presence in 2013.
At Cosmopolitan, the best-selling cover this year featured Kim Kardashian in April, with 1.2 million copies sold, followed by the singer Miley Cyrus in March with 1.1 million copies. In 2012, three out of five of Cosmopolitan’s top covers featured the celebrities Demi Lovato with 1.379 million copies sold, Khloé Kardashian at 1.354 million copies and Selena Gomez at 1.334 million copies.
Vogue’s best-selling cover in the first four months of 2013 featured Beyoncé with 340,000 copies sold. In 2012, Lady Gaga commanded the cover of Vogue’s September issue and sold nearly double the number of copies of the January 2012 issue, featuring Meryl Streep.
It’s not just younger women’s magazines that are moving away from film stars. When Redbook landed an interview with Gwyneth Paltrow for its January issue, the magazine featured her with her trainer Tracy Anderson and not in what the magazine’s editor in chief, Jill Herzig, called the “traditional A-lister in a ball gown kind of way.”
It is music and TV which are in the ascendancy. I blame the globalization of the movie market in part, which skews Hollywood movies more toward Asian male audiences, in turn limiting their appeal to American females. In general international audiences lower the return to good dialog and raise the return on action and explosions, which on average hurts prominent female roles. Note that men’s magazines are now having more film stars on their covers. And there is this:
A recently published study by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism showed that the percentage of female characters with a speaking part in the nation’s top movies each year reached its lowest point in the past five years in 2012, at 28 percent. Ms. Coles said it had become so difficult to find female film stars to feature from this summer’s blockbusters that her magazine was publishing an article about the problem.
The full article is here.
Claims about Sony
A new report from the investment banking firm Jefferies delivered a harsh assessment of Sony’s electronics business. “Electronics is its Achilles’ heel and, in our view, it is worth zero,” wrote Atul Goyal, consumer technology analyst for Jefferies, in the report, released this week.
Here is more. And oh, there is this:
…Sony’s most successful business is selling insurance. While it doesn’t run this business in the United States or Europe, Sony makes a lot of money writing life, auto and medical policies in Japan.
Its financial arm accounts for 63 percent of Sony’s total operating profit last year. Life insurance has been its biggest moneymaker over the last decade, earning the company 933 billion yen ($9.07 billion) in operating profit in the 10 years that ended in March.
*Stories We Tell*
Matt Yglesias appreciates *Star Trek*
You will find his essay here, and I have many points of agreement with him, but I think he undervalues the first series. Characters and script were excellent in about sixty percent of the original episodes. It is also noteworthy that the original characters have entered popular culture for an enduring period of time and we are still making movies about them forty-five years later. It’s not absurd to think of someone saying “Beam me up, Scotty” fifty years from now. I don’t see Data or any other later character receiving the same treatment, nor do I think that any of the later installments would have, on their own, generated an entire franchise of installments, spin-offs, sequels, and the like, where Matt can tweet something like “Animated series is non-canon, people. Get with the program.” If you’d like a treat, watch some of the D.C. Fontana-scripted Star Trek episodes, noting that “Tomorrow is Yesterday” is one of the funniest and most profound takes on “the great stagnation” to be found in popular culture or anywhere else for that matter. And it was written before the great stagnation even started, and by Roddenberry’s office assistant at that. Magic was in the air. As for “Spock’s Brain,” well, that is another matter.
*Oblivion*
It is one of the most visually spectacular movies I have seen. The first half is a very good movie in its own right. The second half is mostly narcissistic trash, only periodically compelling, in which Cruise also rewrites the story of his break-up with Nicole Kidman, in what seems to me an unseemly manner.
Most of all, it is a Straussian commentary on Scientology (and Kidman), you can start your research here. I am stunned but not surprised that very few reviews have picked on this angle at all (so far it seems that none have and even Quora fell down on the job). Without such knowledge, the movie makes no sense whatsoever. With such knowledge, the movie is entirely coherent but in some regards more objectionable.
There are also some nice references to other Cruise movies, such as Top Gun and Eyes Wide Shut, not to mention some of the non-Cruise classics of science fiction cinema, including Star Wars and 2001 and Solaris.
I am very glad I saw this movie, but your mileage may vary. The Wikipedia entry is here.
Virginia Postrel has a new book coming out
The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion, due out in November 2013, and I thank Yogesh for the pointer. It has a nice cover, as it should.
Robots are making a movie about humans, sort of
…the BlabDroids are attempting to make what could be the first documentary ever filmed and directed by robots.
Created by artist and roboticist Alex Reben for his master’s thesis at MIT, the BlabDroids are tiny, adorable robotic cinematographers who will be filming interviews at this week’s Tribeca Film Festival in New York as part of the the film festival’s transmedia Storyscapes program. At least 20 BlabDroids will zip around to attendees–they’re self-propelled via motorized wheels– and ask them often very personal questions like, “Tell me something that you’ve never told a stranger before,” “What’s the worst thing you’ve done to someone,” and “Who do you love most in the world?”
Each droid carries a digital camera, a speaker that asks a series of pre-programmed questions to ask whomever it encounters and a button to be pushed to prompt new queries.
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
*Spring Breakers*
What comes to mind are Wild Things, The Night of the Hunter, Girls, Russ Meyer, Sam Peckinpah, David Lynch, Camille Paglia, Roissy, Calderon, Ross Douthat, and The Real Cancun. Not for everyone, but more vital than almost all of the Hollywood movies I have seen over the last few years. Here is one useful review.
What I’ve been reading and viewing
1. A Lost Lady, by Willa Cather. A knockout, and oddly neglected these days.
2. The Dinner, by Herman Koch. It sold millions in Europe, but I don’t find snark about rich Dutch people that interesting.
3. Wave, by Sonali Deraniyagala. Smart reviewers love this memoir of a woman who lost her family in the tsunami, but it didn’t have enough structure to grab my attention.
4. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography and Bentham and Coleridge. Of course these are re-reads. Especially when read in conjunction, they are two of the best books on how to think, as well as gripping stories in their own right.
5. Amour, the new movie by Michael Haneke. I can’t review it without introducing spoilers, but it’s one of the two movies this year I have been recommending. The other is the Chilean film NO, a fantastic account of how, even in the strangest of circumstances, democracies filter policy outcomes, as indeed autocracies do too (in different ways).
Why isn’t there even more nepotism in Hollywood?
Alan Crede emails me the following:
It seems there’s a lot of nepotism in Hollywood (the Sheens, Clooneys, Douglases, Arquettes, Goldie Hawn-Kate Hudson, Aaron Spelling-Tori Spelling, etc.).
But it seems for every Angelina Jolie with industry connections, there’s someone like Brad Pitt (an outsider from Missouri).
My question is why is it not *all* nepotism?
I’m struggling to think of a bit of a theory of economic theory that could explain the equilibrium that we see other than the (question-begging) contention that, in order to maximize profits, Hollywood producers cast the ablest actors available to them.
Imagine a talent selection system with many different levels of filters and many, many applicants and also few winners. The first level could be something as simple as “does anyone even look at your photo shoot or ask you for an audition?” Let’s also say that nepotism gets you past the first filter, or maybe a bit more, but not past the final filters. They won’t let you star in a movie just because you’re Goldie Hawn’s daughter (by that time most of her clout is gone). Nonetheless relatives of famous actors, actresses, etc. still will end up considerably overrepresented on the screen.
There is also someone known who can vouch for you, albeit not always with perfect credibility: “Believe me, if you give my brother this role, he won’t ruin the movie promo efforts with a cocaine addiction.” And so on.
You will be remembered more easily: imagine a director saying “hey for this bit part, why don’t we get what’s-his-name, you know the brother of [xxxx].” It is then easier to work your way up.
Being the brother, sister, etc. of a famous actor gets you publicity and makes for a good story. It draws interest from viewers, just as I was keen to have met Alex’s brother in Toronto last year. That will help your chances too. At the same time, talented outsiders still will make their way through the process and achieve stardom.
Nepotism and focality are closely related and they often reinforce each other.