Category: Film
One account of what political elections are for
From David Brooks's new blog:
What do you do after your party wins an election? In a forthcoming study for the journal Computers in Human Behavior, Patrick Markey and Charlotte Markey compared Internet searches in red and blue states after the 2006 and 2010 elections. They found that the number of searchers for pornography was much higher right after the 2010 election (a big G.O.P. year) than after 2006 (a big Democratic year). Conversely, people in blue states searched for porn at much higher rates after 2006 than after 2010. One explanation is this: After winning a vicarious status competition, people (predominantly men, I guess) tend to seek out pornography.
And David's new book is here.
Sentences of the Day
Michael Kinsley on Movie Math.
Richardson says that the film and TV subsidy has brought "nearly $4 billion into our economy over eight years" and has created 10,000 jobs. By "our," he means New Mexico. He says every state should emulate this success.
I do hope MR readers will find this amusing.
*Things to Come* (spoilers for an old movie in this post)
This Alexander Korda adaption of H.G. Wells was in 1936 perhaps the most visually spectacular movie of its time. It looks like the first thirty, black and white minutes of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, yet few people watch the movie today, in part because the actors shout at each other.
A world war starts in 1940 and lasts through the 1970s, fought with barbed wire and Art Deco tanks. A pandemic wipes out half the human race. Technology shuts down and for a while airplanes are a rarity. Afterwards, a highly productive reign of science is established, enforced by air power ("Wings Over the World"). It is centered in Basra, Iraq and we see bombers and drones from Iraq take over England, enforcing a "brotherhood of efficiency, and a freemasonry of science." There is no talk of ethics. Eventually the world comes to resemble a Westin atrium and lobby. Life expectancy goes up, but for hairstylists a cost disease still operates. In 2036 they are facing not a Medicare cost crisis but rather preparing the first trip to the moon.
It is noted that man is "conquering nature" and creating a "white world" and no one seems to flinch; Wells favored eugenics. Everyone becomes increasingly bug-eyed and a Luddite rebellion arises, although it seems to be barked down at the end of the movie.
The distinction between "a good movie" and "a movie which is good to watch" has never been more salient.
Things to Come is on Amazon here and on Wikipedia here. Some stills and commentary are here. Here is an NYT review from 1936: "probably as solid a prophecy as any."
*Secret Sunshine*
This 2007 Korean film is one of my favorite movies of the last few years. It is brutal. Here is a review which avoids spoilers, after that it's hard to say more. There are some copies on Amazon, if you have a region-neutral DVD player. It has not yet come to Netflix.
The *Atlas Shrugged* movie trailer
Via Allison Kasic and Chris F. Masse, here it is. Apart looking like a bad movie, I found this jarring. It should be in black and white, or muted colors, with the palate and overall look of a Visconti film. It has some Art Deco architecture (good), but signs of the modern world intrude at the wrong moments. It should not have high-speed rail (will this confuse conservatives? Did those governors end up cutting Medicaid and coughing up the money?) and it should not postulate unrealistic speeds for freight trains. It should not have 2011 cars and Dagny Taggart should not look like a mousy actress imitating Nicole Kidman playing a local news reporter. "If you double cross me, I will destroy you" doesn't ring true. Hank Rearden's line about only wanting to earn money comes across as either a parody of Gordon Gecko or as something worthy of Gecko's parody. To be properly post-Wall Street, Rearden must somehow contain and yet leapfrog over Oliver Stone's vision; a pretty boy look will not suffice.
My favorite things Egypt
1. Novel: I like all of the Mahfouz I have read, but the Cairo Trilogy is the obvious pick. Here is a very useful list of someone's favorite Egyptian authors and novels.
2. Musical CD: The Music of Islam, vol.1: Al-Qahirah, Classical Music of Cairo, Egypt. The opening sweep of this is a stunner, and it shows both the Islamic and European influences on Egyptian music. Musicians of the Nile are a good group, there is Hamza El Din, and there is plenty of rai. What else? I can't say I actually enjoy listening to Um Kalthoum, but her voice and phrasing are impressive.
3. Non-fiction book, about: Max Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious. Few cities have a book this good. There is also Dream Palace of the Arabs and Tom Segev's 1967. Which again is the really good book on the 1973 War?
4. Movie, set in: Cairo Time. This recent Canadian film avoids cliche, brings modern Cairo to life, and is an alternative to many schlocky (but sometimes good) alternatives, such as The Mummy, Death on the Nile, Exodus, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and so on. There is Agora. Egyptian cinema surely has masterpieces but I do not know them. If you're wondering, for books, I could not finish Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings.
5. Favorite food: I was impressed by the seafood restaurants on the promenade in Alexandria. Food in Cairo did not thrill me, though I never had a bad meal there.
6. Philosopher: Must I say Plotinus? I don't find him especially readable.
7. City: I enjoyed Alexandria, but I can't say I liked Cairo beyond the museum (much better than any Egyptian collection outside of Egypt) and the major mosques. The Sphinx bored me. The air pollution prevented me from walking for more than an hour and there was cement, cement. and more cement. The ride between Cairo and Alexandria was one of the ugliest, most uninspiring journeys of my life. The Egyptians were nice to me but I never had the sense that anything beautiful was being done with the country. Let's hope that changes.
8. Opera, about: Philip Glass, Akhnaten. But wait, there's also Aida, with Callas. And there's Handel's Israel in Egypt. Handel set a lot of his operas in Egypt, including Berenice and Giulio Cesare.
Diane Rehm is Egyptian-American but I don't know her show. The new biography of Cleopatra is smooth but the narratives made me suspicious. Was Euclid Egyptian?
What are the highest prices for video art?
Bill Viola's Eternal Return sold for $712,452 in 2000. The rest of the top ten is all by Viola, Nam June Paik, Matthew Barney, and Bruce Nauman, with the #10 work going for $234,814. I like video art, but to buy it…to me that is one very expensive movie ticket. I did, however, shell out for a Netflix subscription, so at the margin I can watch Black Narcissus for nothing.
The data are from the new and interesting book Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market, by Noah Horowitz.
Request for movie opinions
From DL, a loyal MR reader and correspondent and link sender: "Mine [request] would be: what movies have you seen recently and were they good or not? I have recently seen Black Swan, The King's Speech, The Fighter, Rabbit Hole, Casino Jack and Somewhere."
I wrote: "Aronofsky's *Black Swan* = *Red Shoes* + *Repulsion* + Cronenberg + Tchaikovsky + something else too." Overwrought, but I liked it. The King's Speech was an extremely well done hammy manipulation, tugging on all the right strings and targeting the American soft spot for Brits. True Grit suggests the Coen brothers are more superficial than they seem, rather than the contrary; rewatch the original for a better time. The rest remain below my watch threshold for now, though Somewhere is due to come to Fairfax. Even good movies about boxing I don't seem able to enjoy. Political biopics I never like.
Important 2010 movies that weren’t released in most of the USA
These are the ones that are popping up most often on the "Best of 2010" lists, although some of them have earlier formal release dates, often because of Cannes. Most of these have been shown only in New York and Los Angeles, but they all are likely to appear on Netflix and some are there already.
1. Valhalla Rising, an English-language but Danish production about early Scandinavian visitors to the New World. It's violent and arty at the same time and it was one of my favorite movies of the year.
2. Vengeance: a good mix of French noir and Hong Kong action drama, with a dose of Memento, starring Johnny Halladay and set in Hong Kong and Macau.
3. Everyone Else (Alle Anderen): A German chronicle of a dysfunctional relationship between two young people on vacation, standing in for a story about Germany itself. It asks whether the intelligent, indecisive Germans are simply aspiring to become thoughtless jerks. A strong film, with a dose of Roissy.
The ones I have not seen (not yet on Netflix) are:
4. Enter the Void, French, bombastic, receives very mixed reviews.
5. The Strange Case of Angelica, Portuguese, by a 102-year-old director. I am likely to see this movie today.
6. Vincere, a Mussolini love story, has that been done before?
7. No One Knows About Persian Cats: The rock scene in Iran, by Bahman Ghobadi, who did the excellent "A Time for Drunken Horses."
8. Monsters: Northern Mexico, immigration, and visiting space aliens in a UK production; most people seem to like this one.
9. Secret Sunshine: A long Korean drama from 2007, which receives very strong reviews.
*Inside Job*
Nick writes to me:
I'm an undergrad math/Econ double major and aspiring economist. I also read your blog (amongst others) daily. You said today that "Inside Job" was "half very good and half terrible." Critical reviews are widespread, but prominent economists haven't said much. I was wondering if you could expound on your terse critique in an email or blog post.
It's been a while since I've seen the movie, but here goes. The best parts are on excess leverage, the political economy of the crisis, and the attitudes of the economics profession. Overall it is remarkable how much economics is in the movie, even though some of it is quite bad. The visuals and pacing are excellent and many scenes deserve kudos.
The worst parts are the misunderstandings of deregulation. Glass-Steagall repeal was not a major factor, much of the sector remained highly regulated, and there is no mention of the failure to oversee the shadow banking system. The entire discussion has more misses than hits. The smirky association of major bankers with expensive NYC prostitutes (on one hand based on very little evidence, on the other hand probably true) was inexcusable. There is talk of "predatory lending," but it is not mentioned that many borrowers committed felonies, or were complicit in felonies ("on the form, put down any income you would like"). Most generally, there is virtually no understanding of the complexity of the dilemmas involving in either public service or in running a major corporation.
Overall, the movie's smug moralizing makes me wonder: is this a condescending posture, spooned out with contempt to an audience regarded, one way or another, as inferior and undeserving of better? Or are the moviemakers actually so juvenile and/or so ignorant of the Western tradition — from Thucydides to Montaigne to Pascal to Shakespeare to Ibsen to FILL IN THE BLANK — that they themselves accept the very same simplistic moral portrait? If so, most of all I feel sorry for how much of life's complexities they are missing and how impoverished their reading and moviegoing and theatregoing must be.
Do you remember the scene in Hamlet, where Hamlet tries to judge the King by enacting a pantomime play in front of him, to see how the King would respond to a work of art? I think of that often.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
I find it increasingly hard to resist the notion that he is the most enduring director of our time. I've now seen Syndromes and a Century (the best place to start), Blissfully Yours, and Tropical Malady and wish to rewatch them all. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (not yet on DVD) won the Golden Palm at Cannes this year. Themes of his movies include dreams, medicine and its authority relationships, sex and eroticism, homosexuality, the nature of cinema itself, memory, sudden fractures of reality, surrealism, and the modernization of Thailand. [Insert Dancing About Architecture cliche here.] You could frame most of the shots from these movies and turn them into stunning photographs. The plot structure is stronger than it appears at first. These movies also have notable (though quiet) soundscapes, as you would find in a Tarkovsky film.
If you expect to disagree, try then the excellent Ong Bak.
For the original pointer to Apichatpong Weerasethakul, I thank Andrew Hazlett. Here is an MP3 on pronouncing his name properly.
Ideas Behind Their Time
We are all familiar with ideas said to be ahead of their time, Babbage’s analytical engine and da Vinci’s helicopter are classic examples. We are also familiar with ideas “of their time,” ideas that were “in the air” and thus were often simultaneously discovered such as the telephone, calculus, evolution, and color photography. What is less commented on is the third possibility, ideas that could have been discovered much earlier but which were not, ideas behind their time.
Experimental economics was an idea behind its time. Experimental economics could have been invented by Adam Smith, it could have been invented by Ricardo or Marshall or Samuelson but it wasn’t. Experimental economics didn’t takeoff until the 1960s when Vernon Smith picked it up and ran with it (Vernon was not the first experimental economist but he was early).
(Economics, and perhaps social science in general, seems behind its time compared say with political science.)
A lot of the papers in say experimental social psychology published today could have been written a thousand years ago so psychology is behind its time. More generally, random clinical trials are way behind their time. An alternative history in which Aristotle or one of his students extolled the virtue of randomization and testing does not seem impossible and yet it would have changed the world.
Technology can also be behind its time. View morphing (“bullet time”) could have been used much more frequently well before The Matrix in 1999 (you simply need multiple cameras from different angles triggered at the same time and then inserted into a film) but despite some historical precedents the innovation didn’t happen.
Ideas behind their time may be harder to discover than other ideas–“if this is so great why hasn’t it been done before”? is an attack on ideas behind their time that other innovations do not have to meet. Is this why social innovations are often behind their time?
What other ideas were behind their time? Are some types of ideas more likely to be behind their time than others? Why?
Addendum: See Jason Crawford on Why did it take so long to invent X?
Assorted links
1. Taiwanese bride marries herself.
2. Victor Menaldo has a blog; he is the researcher behind the myth of the resource curse and "rainfall and democracy."
4. Who is the most important avant-garde filmmaker? After Warhol, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brekhage, Kenneth Anger, and Maya Deren top the NYT citation list.
Why Has TV Replaced Movies as Elite Entertainment?
Edward Jay Epstein, The Hollywood Economist, has a good post on the economics of movies and television and how this has contributed to a role reversal:
Once upon a time, over a generation ago, The television set was commonly called the “boob tube” and looked down on by elites as a purveyors of mind-numbing entertainment. Movie theaters, on the other hand, were con sidered a venue for, if not art, more sophisticated dramas and comedies. Not any more. The multiplexes are now primarily a venue for comic-book inspired action and fantasy movies, whereas television, especially the pay and cable channels, is increasingly becoming a venue for character-driven adult programs, such as The Wire, Mad Men, and Boardwalk Empire.
Why? Epstein’s explanation is the rise of Pay-TV. You can understand what has happened with some microeconomics. Advertising supported television wants to maximize the number of eyeballs but that often means appealing to the lowest common denominator (this is especially true when there are just three television stations). The programming that maximizes eyeballs does not necessarily maximize consumer surplus.
See the diagram.
Pay-TV changes the economics by encouraging the production of high consumer-surplus television because with Pay-TV there is at least some potential for trading off eyeballs for greater revenue. In addition, as more channels become available, lowest common denominator television is eaten away by targetted skimming. Thus, in one way or another, Pay-TV has come to dominate television.
The movies, however, have become more reliant on large audiences–at least relative to television. Note that even though the movies are not free, a large chunk of the revenue is generated by concessions–thus the movie model is actually closer to a maximizing mouths model than it might first appear (see also my brother’s comments on how flat movie pricing makes it difficult for indie films to compete). Finally, the rise of international audiences for movies has fed a lowest common denominator strategy (everyone appreciates when stuffs blows up real good). As a result, the movies have moved down the quality chain and television has moved up.
Hat tip: Tyler.
*Wall Street II*
It was not a great movie but it was better than I had been expecting and I am glad to have seen it. Moral hazard was explained — well, and using that term – numerous times. The central role of leverage behind the crisis was stressed, as were the political economy elements. The movie was chock full of economics, to a remarkable degree, albeit in an unbalanced fashion, especially when it came to explaining "speculation." The film very well captured the feeling of sick dismay which unfolded with the events of the financial crisis. As an inside joke, they had a wonderful silent stand-in for Geithner. In this movie men don't seem to care about women very much, not even for sex. The Charlie Sheen cameo was my favorite moment, as it rewrites one's understanding of the first Wall Street movie and raises broader questions about the motivations of "good" people. The female lead was flat; I suspect this was poor execution although a Straussian reading will attribute that to a brilliant savaging of her character. I wished for a different ending. A comparison with the parent film shows that New York has become less interesting.