Category: Film
*Mirror, Mirror* (paging Leo Strauss)
Not often does Hollywood put out movies romanticizing tyrannicide and the assassination of foreign leaders of friendly countries, in this case India. Julia Roberts is the wicked Queen, witch, and false pretender, but actually the stand-in for Indira Gandhi, with an uncanny resemblance of look and dress in the final scene (I wonder if anyone told her?). This movie presents a romanticized and idealized version of how her assassination should have proceeded and should have been processed, namely in a triumphal manner with no reprisals but rather celebration and joyous union and love. As the plot proceeds, you will find all sorts of markers of Sikh theology, including numerous references to daggers, hair, mirrors, water, immersions, submersions, bodily penetrations, transformations, the temple at Amritsar, dwarves who enlarge themselves, and the notion of woman as princess, among many others; director Tarsem Singh knows this material better than I do (read up on Sikh theology before you go, if you haven’t already). The silly critics complained that the plot didn’t make sense, but from the half dozen or so reviews I read they didn’t even begin to understand the movie.
Without wishing to take sides on either the politics or the religion, I found this a daring and remarkable film. The sad thing is that no one is paying attention.
The movie’s trailer is here.
Project Nim
I highly recommend Project Nim, the documentary about the life and times of the chimpanzee Nim who was raised as a baby in a human home and taught sign language.
There are a lot of strange moments in the film but perhaps none stranger than this: Stephanie LaFarge, Nim’s adopted mother who breast-fed him as a baby, is eager to reasure us that as Nim grew older and more interested in sex:
I never felt sexually engaged with him. There was a sensuality but Nim was a pre-teen.
Do think about that for a moment.
Nim is later taken from her but she sees him once again when she is now a much older woman. She describes her first thoughts and reactions:
He wasn’t particulary attracted to me now that he was an adult chimpanzee. I wasn’t beautiful or anything like that.He wasn’t particularly attractive to me now that he was an adult chimpanzee. I didn’t have a, “Oh, isn’t he beautiful,” or anything like that.
Project Nim is from director James Marsh who also made the great Man on Wire.
Addendum: Lots of great comments in this post. See especially Belle Ball who knew Nim and who corrected my quotation.
Correlations on porn
Firstly (using the General Social Survey) I found no relationship between being pro the legality of porn, or propensity to watch porn, and pro social behaviors e.g. volunteer work, blood donation, etc.
We can dismiss the feminist (and sociological) charges of porn increasing sexual violence and leading to sexism. The USA, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands (2) and Japan were just some of the countries that suddenly went from no legal pornography to quite widespread availability and consumption of it. These studies all found that greater availability of, and exposure to, pornography does not increase the rate of sexual assaults on women, and probably decreases it (3). Japanese porn is quite frequently violent and yet even there rape decreased from an already very low base. It’s interesting that an increase in porn exposure decreases sexual violence only, and has no effect on other crime. Economists would put this down to a substitution effect.
Several countries have sex offender registers – mainly of pedophiles. A wide variety of professions are represented on these registers. Members of professions that supposedly promote morality e.g. clerics or teachers, are quite common on it yet conspicuously absent from such registers are men who have worked in the porn industry.
This study (1) found no relationship between the frequency of x-rated film viewing and attitudes toward women or feminism. From the GSS (controlling for IQ, education, income, age, race and ideology) I found that those who are pro the legality of porn are less likely to support traditional female roles, more likely to be against preferential treatment of either gender, and to find woman’s rights issues more frequently salient. Although I found that women’s rights issues are less salient to male watchers, and female watchers are less likely to think women should work, I also found that watching porn is unrelated to negative attitudes toward women and feminism.
In short exposure to and tolerance of pornography does not cause anti-social behavior (and may even reduce it in relation to sex) and does not get in the way of pro social behavior either.
The sociological and religious charge that pornography undermines monogamy and family values does however receive support. From GSS (and controlling for IQ, education, income, age, race and ideology) I found that men who are pro legalizing porn are less likely to marry and are more pro cohabitation. There was no such association for women. A higher propensity to watch porn movies is also associated with a lesser likelihood of marrying but is unrelated to cohabitation attitudes – in both men and women. So a pro porn attitude is consistent with a reduced respect for marriage.
Both genders also tend to have fewer kids in marriage, if they are pro the legalizing of porn. However, for men, a higher propensity to watch porn movies is associated with having MORE children within marriage. Note that pro legal porn attitudes and porn movie viewership is not associated with having children out of wedlock – for men its associated with a lower chance of that happening – so porn doesn’t lead to that kind of irresponsible behavior.
Possibly part of this general pattern, I found that both being pro the legality of porn and watching porn are related to lower voting rates in general elections.
I found no relationship to a variety of ‘family values’ type questions e.g. importance of family, or to the value of relationships and friendship.
Being pro the legality of porn, and porn viewing, are associated with unhappiness with the family or marriage – especially for men. Those who are pro porn also tend to have a greater number of sexual partners and are more likely to have a sexual affair. This supports the 1984 and 1988 discoveries of Dolf Zillman and Jennings Bryant (4) that the effects of repeated exposure to standard, non-violent, commonly available pornography includes: increased callousness toward women; distorted perceptions about sexuality; devaluation of the importance of monogamy; decreased satisfaction with partner’s sexual performance, affection, and appearance; doubts about the value of marriage; and decreased desire to have children. Later research studies further confirm their findings.
Garth’s excellent and underrated blog is here. I have put it in my RSS feed.
Sherlock Holmes v. Sherlock
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is ok so long as you are expecting a comic book adventure along the lines of Captain America or Iron Man (natch) and not a detective-mystery ala Sherlock Holmes. A smart character requires smart writers and in this movie the producers saved the money for special effects.
In contrast, the British TV series Sherlock is a must see. Sherlock reboots Holmes into our world. Yet despite advancing in time some 130 years when Sherlock first meets Watson he says, exactly as in the original, “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” A shiver ran down my spine.
Sherlock is fast-paced but clever. It’s written by two Doctor Who vets who invest Holmes with wit, originality and intellect, rather than the quasi-magical powers found in the aforementioned movie. The chemistry between Holmes and Watson is clear – one understands in this version what is lacking in many others, these two need each other.
The first season has only 3, 90 minute, episodes but a second season just ran in Britain and I expect it will soon be available in the U.S.
*A Separation*
It’s hard to review this movie without introducing spoilers, I’ll just say I would be surprised if it doesn’t end up as the best movie of the year, if we count it as a 2012 film. One trailer is here, the film is in Farsi with subtitles.
Assorted Movie Reviews
Warhorse – stilted acting, cliche ridden in word and image and without a single honest emotion. Some people will love it.
Mission Impossible -Ghost Protocol – proves that Tom Cruise can still deliver the goods and director Brad Bird is bankable for live action even if his animated greats (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) had more plot and humanity. Great scenes on the Burj Khalifa (esp. in IMAX). Drags on in a peculiar effort to connect with story elements from the previous MI that no one cares about or remembers. For plot reasons, the final scene should have been in San Francisco not Seattle.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Overall, Daniel Craig doesn’t James Bond it, although at times one wonders whether he is just pretending to be scared. Rooney Mara is good although I prefer Noomi Rapace who was both tougher and more beautiful, as the moment required. Fincher is the better director and the supporting cast is excellent. Lisbeth Salander rings strong in my imagination and I would watch more adaptations.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – excellent performance from Gary Oldman as Smiley. At something like 8 minutes in I realized that the lead character had yet to speak. It was good but I defy anyone to make a great movie from the Le Carre book, too much is interior. How many viewers will know, let alone appreciate, that many people once did prefer communism for aesthetic reasons?
The Descendants – George Clooney has limited emotional range but it suits him in this role where part of the point is that his character is too boring, methodical, and unemotional for his thrill-seeking wife (why did these two ever marry?) and his now needy children. Excellent performances from Robert Forster and supporting cast and a plot that is involved without being contrived. The contrast between external paradise and internal misery was delightfully disconcerting.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – started out strong but by the time it ended I hated it. Every element of the movie is manipulative; 9/11 is used as a prop (like using 9/11 to sell life-insurance), the parents are perfect even when the story demands imperfection and the kid is weirdly unlikable. Finally, the movie has a happy ending, which made me sad.
What kinds of movie stars marry each other?
Marital sorting on education is an important but poorly understood source of inequality. This paper analyzes a group of men and women who do not meet their spouses in school, are not sorted by education in the workplace, and whose earnings are not correlated with their years of education. Nevertheless, movie actors marry spouses with an education similar to their own. These findings suggest that male and female preferences alone induce considerable sorting on education in marriage and that men and women have very strong preferences for nonfinancial partner traits correlated with years of education.
Hat tip goes to Steve Sailer. And here is another paper by Bruze:
US middle aged men and women are earning in the order of 30 percent of their return to schooling through improved marital outcomes.
Why is there uniform pricing for movie tickets?
So how come we’re still stuck with $12 tickets for both blockbusters and indie flicks? A few theories:
1) Theaters do price discriminate already, kind of, but they do it with space. At the multiplex, not all theaters are alike. Bigger movies get more theaters with better technology. Smaller movies get older theaters with smaller screens.
2) You can’t consistently cut prices after a successful opening weekend. If people knew that ticket prices would fall after a big opening, many more would wait until the second or third weekend to see it, which would, ironically, destroy the meaning of opening weekends.
3) Price can repel as easily as it attracts, because it’s a signal of quality. If your a theater showing one movie for $6, one movie for $10, and another for $12, perhaps fewer people will see the $6 movie because they assume it’s garbage.
4) Cheaper tickets lead to higher policing costs. I’m a cheapskate, so I might buy a ticket to see cheap, cheap Iron Lady and sneak into Sherlock Holmes. This would create a fascinating incentive for art-house studios to release smaller, cheaper films the same weekend as blockbusters, knowing that thousands of canny consumers might buy fake tickets to their show to sneak into the more expensive blockbuster.
5) Price discrimination offers more opportunities for other movie theaters to steal each others’ audience. Once again, I’m very cheap, so I don’t mind taking the metro way across town to see Sherlock Holmes for significantly less money if one multiplex starts to mark up its blockbusters.
That is from Derek Thompson. A related research paper is here (pdf). I would rephrase the question to be a little more specific. Especially in the days of robust DVD sales, why did they not offer first weekend modest coupon bonuses — as distinct from price discounts — for the most popular movies? That would drive up attendance, without damaging the gross (as a lower p would), and boost “advertising” for the DVD and the subsequent foreign openings. Movie markets have changed a bit since then, but that to me is the biggest puzzle. I would expect some unpopular but cultish movies to have higher prices, not lower prices, much like Edward Elgar books.
Addendum: Here is my 2005 post on same, and Alex’s brother.
IP Feudalism and the Shrinking of the Public Domain
Creators of intellectual property used to be granted up to 56 years of monopoly before their works entered the public domain. Since the 1976 copyright act (which came into effect in 1978) copyright has been progressively lengthened so it now extends to the life of the author plus an additional 70 years, i.e. an author’s heirs now get significantly more monopoly power than an author did prior to 1978, truly a kind of IP feudalism.
It’s hard to believe that the extension of copyright for decades after an author’s death can appreciably increase artistic creation and innovation, thus the public has gained little from copyright extension. What has been lost?
If the pre-1976 law were still in place then as of Jan 1, 2012 the following books, movies and music would have entered the public domain (from the Center for the Study of the Public Domain):
- J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King, the final installment in his Lord of Rings trilogy
- The Family of Man, Edward Steichen’s book of photographs showing the diversity and universality of human experience
- Michihiko Hachiya’s Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 8–September 30, 1945, translated by Warner Wells, md
- Evelyn Waugh’s Officers and Gentlemen, the second book in his Sword of Honour trilogy
- C.S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew, the sixth volume his The Chronicles of Narnia
- Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
- Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee’s play about the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” Inherit the Wind
- Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity.
- Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers
- The Seven Year Itch, directed by Billy Wilder; starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell
- Lady and the Tramp, Walt Disney Productions’ classic animation
- Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly
- The thriller The Night of the Hunter, directed by Charles Laughton; starring Robert Mitchum and Shelley Winters
- Two of James Dean’s three major motion pictures: East of Eden, directed by Elia Kazan and co-starring Raymond Massey and Julie Harris; and Rebel Without a Cause, directed by Nicholas Ray and co-starring Natlie Woods, Sal Mineo, and Jim Backus
- Hollywood versions of major Broadway musicals such as Oklahoma! and Guys and Dolls
- Richard III, Laurence Olivier’s film version of the Shakespeare play, co-starring Claire Bloom, Cedric Hardwicke, Nicholas Hannen, Ralph Richardson, and John Gielgud
- Unchained Melody (Hy Zaret & Alex North)
- Ain’t That a Shame (Antoine “Fats” Domino and Dave Bartholomew)
- Blue Suede Shoes (Carl Perkins), Folsom Prison Blues (Johnny Cash)
- The Great Pretender (Buck Ram)
- Maybellene (Chuck Berry, Russ Fratto, & Alan Freed),
- Tutti Frutti (Richard Penniman (aka Little Richard)
Under the old law these works and many others could today have been read, seen and played at low cost throughout the world. Consumers have certainly lost from copyright extension. What about creators?
We typically frame copyright and patent strength as an issue between consumers and creators, with consumers assumed to favor weaker rules and creators stronger. But, as I discuss in Launching the Innovation Renaissance, that is the wrong frame. A vibrant public domain can be good for consumers and for creators.
Under the old law, the above works could not only have been consumed they could also at low cost and without requiring the express permission of the original copyright holder have been remixed, reworked and extended in new directions. Under the new regime, innovators will not be able to easily build on these works until 2051 and it could be well into the 22nd century before we get Star Wars prequels worthy of the name.
Marketing costs and tent poles
…The top seven highest-grossing movies of 2011 were all sequels…
The link is here.
Movies I enjoyed this year
Overall I’ve never been less interested in the Hollywood and indie releases, but this year had high peaks from abroad, some would call them the best movies of the year:
1. Incendies; a French-Canadian movie set mostly in Lebanon, with Greek themes.
2. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives, from Thailand.
3. Of Gods and Men.
4. Even the Rain, Spanish movie filmed in Bolivia.
5. Melancholia; I liked this one, even though I agree with all the negative things that have been said about it. See it on the big screen.
Presumably more Asian movies deserve to be on the list, but I won’t get to watch them until 2012.
Drive with Ryan Gosling had excellent moments and scenes. Moneyball was a good but not a great movie, but it was a great movie about business (which is rare), with real insight and sensitivity, here is one good treatment of some points.
The median release this year was for me ZMP at best, “not even trying to be good,” and I have no long history of being anti-Hollywood, quite the contrary.
*In Time* (spoilers about the macroeconomic model)
It is rare to see a movie with such a perfectly realized economic model, albeit one pulled from such exotic territory. Imagine a Keynes chapter 17 world where the “own rate of interest” on time — which can be borrowed and lent — rules the roost. Many people are at or near subsistence in their time endowments, and there are economies of scale in supply, so short rates on these loans are high. Those high rates choke off other investments and a version of TGS ensues. Medium-term rates, however, are negative in real terms. Carry around too much time and it will be stolen and you die. The economy has a strongly inverted yield curve and that discourages traditional financial intermediation and investment. Wealth continues to fall, which exacerbates security problems, in turning lowering the negative medium-term real rates even further. A downward spiral ensues. The only way to make money is to buy marginal security (for time endowments) and spend less on that security than you earn on short loans of time. More and more resources go into security, again exacerbating the inverted yield curve. The economics of producing security are also the fundamental source of market power in the economy. Market segmentation reigns and the marginal rates of substitution on time loans are not equated across different social classes.
The hero has read Kalecki (1943) and he operates under the assumption that a redistribution will prove isomorphic to an “Operation Twist” and restore full employment equilibrium, and positive economic growth, by fixing the inverted yield curve. But is that policy commitment credible? Does he have the support of the heroine? You have to watch the movie to find out…
In Time also raises questions about why we find time inequality more objectionable than money inequality. You also can interpret it as a model of a world where health care really works.
This is by no means a flawless film but conceptually it was stronger than I had been expecting. Kudos again to Andrew Niccol, Gattaca is a worthwhile movie too.
Here is Robin Hanson’s review, he liked it less than I did.
Silvestre Pantaleón trailer inglés
That is a forthcoming Jonathan Amith documentary on Nahua culture in the Rio Balsas region of Mexico. The trailer video is here; it is set in San Agustin Oapan, where I did the field work for my book Markets and Cultural Voices. Recently I saw the film at National Geographic and loved it, admittedly it is not for all tastes. I’ll let you all know when a DVD becomes available.
A brief description of the film is here.
My quick response on the Fed
I’ve been making my way to Toulouse and haven’t followed all of the details. Scott Sumner has many good posts on the topic, and I would put it thus: the Fed probably decided to do the best it could within political constraints and a framework of more or less stable prices. Which won’t do much good at all. Keep in mind:
1. The median voter hates price inflation. Don’t blame Bernanke.
2. Today price inflation will accelerate real wage erosion, or at least is perceived so, who wants to take credit for that?
3. Core CPI is already going up at a rate of two percent and 3.8 percent for the broader bundle, at least for the time being. Voters don’t know or care what is embedded in the TIPS spread, etc.
4. Some of the “inflationists” ignored supply-side factors and bottlenecks and didn’t see this price pressure coming. That has thrown their entire analysis into doubt, unjustly probably but nonetheless. In any case it is no longer the simple story where Q goes up first and only later does P rise.
5. If Ron Suskind is to be believed, our President seems not to know the difference between TFP and per hour labor productivity; in his defense a lot of economists don’t quite get that either.
6. The GOPers now send Bernanke epistolary romances.
7. Some people on Twitter were taking about “striking down Old Ben and having him come back stronger,” but a) Obi-Wan plain, flat out died, b) Obi-Wan’s younger prodigy, Luke, was a failure who relied on his dad and wouldn’t at the key moment listen to Old Ben and stay on the Dagobah system to invest in additional human capital (instead he read Caplan on the signaling model), and c) they never even made the final three movies of the planned nine, so we don’t know how it turned out with the unwinding of the fiscal stimulus on the Ewok world. People, next time get your facts straight!
Every now and then, you ought to conclude that what you see is what you get and that is because of the rules of the game. When it comes to further monetary stimulus, I’m not sure there’s so much more to say.
Contagion
Contagion, the Steven Soderberg film about a lethal virus that goes pandemic, succeeds well as a movie and very well as a warning. The movie is particularly good at explaining the science of contagion: how a virus can spread from hand to cup to lip, from Kowloon to Minneapolis to Calcutta, within a matter of days.
One of the few silver linings from the 9/11 and anthrax attacks is that we have invested some $50 billion in preparing for bio-terrorism. The headline project, Project Bioshield, was supposed to produce vaccines and treatments for anthrax, botulinum toxin, Ebola, and plague but that has not gone well. An unintended consequence of greater fear of bio-terrorism, however, has been a significant improvement in our ability to deal with natural attacks. In Contagion a U.S. general asks Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) of the CDC whether they could be looking at a weaponized agent. Cheever responds:
Someone doesn’t has to weaponize the bird flu. The birds are doing that.
That is exactly right. Fortunately, under the umbrella of bio-terrorism, we have invested in the public health system by building more bio-safety level 3 and 4 laboratories including the latest BSL3 at George Mason University, we have expanded the CDC and built up epidemic centers at the WHO and elsewhere and we have improved some local public health centers. Most importantly, a network of experts at the department of defense, the CDC, universities and private firms has been created. All of this has increased the speed at which we can respond to a natural or unnatural pandemic.
In 2009, as H1N1 was spreading rapidly, the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency asked Professor Ian Lipkin, the director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, to sequence the virus. Working non-stop and updating other geneticists hourly, Lipkin and his team were able to sequence the virus in 31 hours. (Professor Ian Sussman, played in the movie by Elliott Gould, is based on Lipkin.) As the movie explains, however, sequencing a virus is only the first step to developing a drug or vaccine and the latter steps are more difficult and more filled with paperwork and delay. In the case of H1N1 it took months to even get going on animal studies, in part because of the massive amount of paperwork that is required to work on animals. (Contagion also hints at the problems of bureaucracy which are notably solved in the movie by bravely ignoring the law.)
It’s common to hear today that the dangers of avian flu were exaggerated. I think that is a mistake. Keep in mind that H1N1 infected 15 to 30 percent of the U.S. population (including one of my sons). Fortunately, the death rate for H1N1 was much lower than feared. In contrast, H5N1 has killed more than half the people who have contracted it. Fortunately, the transmission rate for H5N1 was much lower than feared. In other words, we have been lucky not virtuous.
We are not wired to rationally prepare for small probability events, even when such events can be devastating on a world-wide scale. Contagion reminds us, visually and emotionally, that the most dangerous bird may be the black swan.