Category: Film

Movies I enjoyed this year

by  Tyler Cowen in

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)

by  Tyler Cowen in

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

by  Tyler Cowen in

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

by  Tyler Cowen in

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

by  Alex Tabarrok in

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.

Avian flu virus, from 3DScience.com.

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.

Movies about Christ or Christ-related themes

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Of Gods and Men.

2. Simon of the Desert.

3. The Last Temptation of Christ.

4. Apocalypto, and more here.

5. Black Narcissus (the most secular of the lot, and it’s about nuns).

6. Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew.

7. Léon Morin, Priest, by Jean-Pierre Melville.

All of these movies are underwatched these days.  There is also Winter Light.

Ridley Scott to make another Bladerunner movie

by  Tyler Cowen in

Ridley Scott is returning to his roots, revisiting his definitive — and beloved — cyberpunk film “Blade Runner,” for Alcon Entertainment, TheWrap has confirmed.

Filmmakers have not yet revealed whether the movie will be a prequel or a sequel to the original movie, according a statement by Alcon, who secured the rights to “Blade Runner” for prequels, sequels and other projects last March.

Here is the link.

*Cowboys and Aliens*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Most critics didn’t like it, but here is one of the better reviews.  I found it original, deeply and subtly funny, and multi-dimensional in its aspirations.  Film buffs will enjoy the nods and homages to High Noon, Shaka Zulu, The Searchers, Raiders of the Lost Ark, James Bond, Ray Harryhausen, Aliens, and many other movies.   There is running commentary on the Bible, the history of Spanish colonialism, contemporary U.S. foreign policy, the development of the American Western, and there is even a poke at the gold standard.  Not for everyone (you might just think it’s stupid), but it far exceeded my expectations.

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

by  Alex Tabarrok in

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, is a hallucinatory BBC documentary that hyperwarps across continents and through time to draw shadowy connections between Ayn Rand, Silicon Valley, the “rise of the machines”, anarchism, the financial crisis and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. (Need, I add and much more!?) Incongruous images and a surreal soundtrack give it a Lynchian feel. Not your usual documentary. Evaluated as a whole, it’s madness but delicious madness.  Here is the first episode.

http://youtu.be/Uz2j3BhL47c

FYI, especially interesting in the first episode is Loren Carpenter’s Pong experiment.  You can read more about that here.

*Midnight in Paris*

by  Tyler Cowen in

I don’t want to over-recommend this movie — it is good not great — but it is certainly enjoyable to watch.  It works because Owen Wilson self-consciously imitating Woody Allen, down to his shuffle and shoulder shrugs, is so absurd that it deflates the rest of the film down to the appropriately non-pretentious level, whether intentionally or not.

More importantly, the movie serves up some conceptual social science.  It focuses on why we so commonly overrate the cultures of previous eras and see them as golden ages.  It also asks the following question: if we somehow managed to meet the cultural titans of previous eras, how many of them would come across as blowhard hacks, if only because their own subsequent work has made their personae obsolete?  Gertrude Stein and Man Ray are the most impressive characters in the movie, even though (perhaps because?) they are the least well known of the figures paraded across the screen.  Hemingway and Picasso sink like stones and the viewer suddenly realizes that Allen sees Hemingway as his foil figure on issues of bravery and death.  He cannot be allowed to look like anything but a blathering fool.  (My view is that artistic creativity is sufficiently g-loaded that none of these people would seem anything less than extraordinarily impressive.)

Once again, this movie is Woody Allen wondering what other people think about him.  Ultimately the point of view of the main character and the director/moviemaker are the same.  You cannot say that about Larry David and that is why these superficially similar figures are very different and ought never to collaborate.