Category: Film
Make Loans, Not War
Bump it up to full screen for best viewing.
Intercontinental Ballistic Microfinance from Kiva Microfunds on Vimeo.
Movies about Christ or Christ-related themes
1. Of Gods and Men.
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
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.
*A Handbook of Cultural Economics*, second edition
The editor is Ruth Towse and the Amazon link to this now-definitive edition is here. Contributors include William Baumol, David Throsby, Mark Blaug, yours truly (“Creative Economy”), Dick Netzer, Ruth Towse, Orley Ashenfelter, Michael Rushton, William Landes, and other luminaries from the field.
*Cowboys and Aliens*
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.
Silent film you love
John Holbo offers up some recommendations, and the comments section is especially good. I’ll recommend Fritz Lang’s Siegfried, Buston Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr., Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Docks of New York, for a start, assuming you already know Chaplin and Eisenstein. And don’t forget Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Dovzhenko, from further away. Your ideas?
All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace
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*
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.
Libertarian vs. existentialist notions of freedom
Also known as Existential Star Wars. Pretty awesome, this is the funniest thing I’ve seen all year. For the pointer I thank Xavier, via Yana.
Keynes vs. Hayek, round II
Londenio’s four questions
This was his request:
1. How should I explore the German New Cinema (Herzog, Fassbinder, Wenders, etc.) ?
2. If I liked Benedict Anderson’s *Imagined Communities*, what should I read next?
3. Who is the Douglas Hofstadter of Economics?
4. What is the first non-personal question you would ask if you were to wake up from a 10-year-long coma?
Answers:
1. Herzog’s Nosferatu, Kaspar Hauser, und Little Dieter (German-language version only, and a very underrated movie) are my favorites from this tradition, which past Herzog I do not much admire or enjoy. Not long ago I saw Herzog’s early documentary How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck?, 44 minutes on Netflix streaming, highly recommended, mostly it is footage of auctioneers talking really really fast, and percussively, to a partly Amish audience.
There is Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, but Fassbinder films I do not enjoy. Try also the TV serial Heimat, which properly can be considered cinematic.
2. Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures, by me.
3. If you mix together Kenneth Boulding, G.L.S. Shackle, and Nassim Taleb, you might get an economics approximation of Hofstadter.
4. Are there major wars going on and how bad are they?
Tyrone’s top ten favorite movies
That was a request from Nick L. My (longer) list is on my home page, scroll down a bit. Tyrone of course is my long-lost brother and evil twin. His list, in no particular order, is:
Pee Wee’s Big Adventure
Idiocracy
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Showgirls
Wild Things
Ella Enchanted
The Cable Guy, Ace Ventura, The Nutty Professor
Booty Call
Flash Gordon
Pasolini’s Teorema
*Godzilla on My Mind*
The author is William Tsutsui and the subtitle is Fifty Years of the King of Monsters. Excerpt:
Gojira (1984), echoing its predecessor of thirty years before, also aspired to a sober message, this time about the threat of nuclear brinksmanship and the dangeres of atomic energy in all its forms. Drawing on public insecurity…the new Godzilla was intended as a cinematic wake-up call. “We wanted to show how easily a [nuclear] accident could occur today,” Tanaka remarked, “but vivid images of nuclear war are taboo…Gojira (1984) is not particularly subtle in its sermonizing, depicting the monster gutting a Japanese nuclear power plant and scarfing down a Russian submarine….And as in the original Gojira, helpless, peaceful Japan, caught between the two Cold War goliaths, emerges as the innocent, morally superior victim.
Recommended. The Godzilla movies, by the way, are recommended too. Most of them are good and I am not just referring to the obvious choices here.
Why American movies won’t die
Here is a well-linked to article about how American movies are dying in terms of quality. Ross Douthat comments. Most of the arguments are correct, namely that too many big budget movies require a “tent pole” in terms of a connection to a comic book, a famous book (Harry Potter), a TV show, and so on. But the article is still too pessimistic. Here are three reasons why movie quality should survive, albeit with some cyclical fluctuations:
1. The more centrist and mainstream the big budget movies get, the more opportunities are created in the niches.
2. Due mainly to digital editing, the costs of movie production and editing are falling. That favors innovation. Marketing costs are rising, due to an increasing scarcity of attention, and that favors blockbusters Still, this latter factor has self-correcting elements, as mentioned above, and many forms of marketing (e.g., the internet) are cheaper than buying network TV ads. The cost story is complicated, but it should not over the longer run penalize quality.
3. The U.S. population is aging and this will push movies away from some of their more juvenile shortcomings.
Is this our future the culture that is Japan markets in everything?
Since he was "discovered" in 1996, Tokuda has emerged as a major player in Japan's emerging adult movie genre known as "elder porn." He says he has appeared in more than 350 films such as "Prohibited Nursing" and "Maniac Training of Lolitas." In these scripts, Tokuda always gets the girl.
The films play upon well-documented Japanese male fantasies. In each, Tokuda plays a gray-haired master of sex who teaches his ways to an assortment of young nurses and secretaries. Whips and sex aides often factor in the plotlines.
Tokuda is 76 years old and he makes an average of one film a week. It is estimated that "elder porn" now accounts for one-fifth of the Japanese adult film sector.
The article is here and for the pointer I thank Daniel Lippman.