Category: Film

Here’s a cool idea from a new Hollywood movie producer, a money back guarantee!

Nicholas Tabarrok is putting his money where his mouth is. The
producer from Toronto-based Darius Films is certain that audiences will
crack up during the screening of his oddball comedy Weirdsville, opening Friday, or he will refund their movie-ticket money come Monday morning.

Tabarrok tells Playback Daily it was a "spur of the moment" idea.

"It occurred to me that this is a common thing… If you buy a
product and you’re not satisfied, you get your money back… The same
principle [should apply] to film," he says.

Brilliant, innovative, incentive-compatible!  You’d think this guy had an economist for a brother or something.

The new Dylan biopic,  starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw – all as Bob Dylan – is starting to get some coverage.  As a lifelong Dylan fan, I’m excited to see the movie.  The film is currently doing the rounds of the film festivals, and is going into wider release slowly from September through March (depending on your country).

Early reports only whet my appetite:

1. A slew of trailers (both official and unofficial) on YouTube [HT: Cass Sunstein]
2. This is Not a Bob Dylan Movie: a beautifully-written essay in today’s NY Times magazine
3. A wrap-up of other reviews, from filmmaker Todd Haynes
4. Some extremely high variance early reviews.

An aside: From many hallway conversations, I can report that Dylan is a surprisingly popular artist among the econ gliterati.

Reason magazine, November issue (p.8), asked me to pick the three "best" and "most libertarian" movies of all time.  (Exactly how do those values get weighed against each other?  Like a good economist I sidestepped the aggregation issue and picked what I wanted to.)  My third selection was:

Battle Royale: Why do so few people know this 2000 Japanese cult classic?  The underlying political theme is that totalitarianism can end only in a war of all against all.  This classic of resistance and liberation shows how tyrannous circumstances degrade mankind.

Can you guess my other selections, including my fourth dark horse pick?

The critique is that some mothers mix dirty water with the dairy formula and give their kids diarrhea, from which some of these kids die.  (Yes I do know that breast milk has other health benefits for kids.)   But isn’t dehydration the major mechanism of death?  Forgive me for sounding flip, but shouldn’t Nestle be advertising its dairy products to mothers with kids with diarrhea, so then they wouldn’t die?  (Even dirty water is better to drink than doing nothing and usually it will save most lives, or so I have been told.)  Isn’t one way of looking at the problem that Nestle doesn’t have good enough ads?

Flipness aside, Clooney supposedly is not being paid for his role in the movie, so
his behavior raises a question for utilitarianism.  Should not a saint
work for evil causes, earn more money, and subsidize good causes with
the surplus?  I believe this depends on whether good or evil causes rely more on cash flow, whether good or evil causes invest resources more productively toward their good or evil ends, and the costs of mixing good and evil causes in terms of symbolic values.

Under what conditions will evil causes end up manned exclusively by good people?

Ten movies that were never made, and why not.  The Schwarznegger-Verhoeven Crusade intrigues me most.

Here is a recent piece on the attempt of Paramount and others to take on Bollywood on Indian turf.  Here is the longer version of what I wrote to the reporter:

I would be surprised if
the Hollywood effort were to succeed.  After all, *Bride and Prejudice*
was not beloved by most Indians.  Conscious efforts to mimic other
genres and styles usually fall flat; how many composers today try to
write in the style of Mozart, much less succeed?  The Hollywood giants
are very effective in making expensive, celebrity-laden movies and most
of all marketing them well.  I don’t expect this model to capture the
appealing idiosyncrasies of Bollywood production.  The Bollywood (and
other Indian regional) styles have sprung from what are by Hollywood
standards highly informal ventures, sometimes even with ties to the
Mafia, and deeply rooted in Indian cultural fantasies.  The power of those fantasies won’t survive further corporatization.

I’m
sure the Hollywood movies will attract a lot of attention at first,
especially in major Indian cities?  Who isn’t curious to see one’s
portrait painted by outsiders?  But will these films ever win over the
heart of the Indian countryside?  My best guess is "no."

It’s
not so unusual for American or globalized culture to bend to local
taste.  McDonald’s in India serves lamb burger and curry, not the
American Big Mac.  Indian pop music and Indian classical music remain
robust.  What is unusual is for Hollywood, or some other outside force,
to try to copy the native style so exactly.  And that is unusual for a
reason — it usually doesn’t work.  Cultural creativity is a delicate
force, requiring a very definite balance of elements.  Hollywood
probably cannot succeed where Bollywood already has gone.  By the time
Hollywood has a good copy, Bollywood will have moved on to something
just a bit different, and a bit more in touch with the Indian
population.  Who after all knows the Indian population better than
Bollywood?"

Here is one obituary, here is Wikipedia.  His six-hour Scenes from a Marriage is probably my favorite movie, ever (in the more common abridged version only the first installment makes sense, but it is still a knockout).  The Seventh Seal is his most overrated movie; Wild Strawberries and Fanny and Alexander are also famous but not his best stuff.  The dreamy Persona is the next one to try, or at 83 minutes probably the best introduction to his work.  Winter Light is splendid on a big screen.  Smiles of a Summer Night was my favorite movie in my thirties.  The hilarious Devil’s Eye — a take-off on Faust and Don Giovanni — is the most underrated.  At least twenty of his movies are worth seeing, just dig in and keep going.  I am still sorry I never saw his theatrical production of A Winter’s Tale when it came to NYC.

Robin Hanson (who else?) writes:

…teen romp movies tend to portray parents and teachers as inept,
clueless, sexually repressed, but ready to help when help is wanted. 
If so, teens should realize that parents and teachers probably know
more, are more sexually satisfied, but less available to help, than
teens realize.  We should be able to find hundreds of other applications, such as using the standard biases of science fiction.

Even in hard times, Haitians go to the movies.  Now they’re also making them in record numbers – about 10 feature films a year – rivaling Cuba as the Caribbean’s biggest movie producer and often outselling better-financed imports.

Here is much more.  Here is part of the story:

The arrival of inexpensive digital video cameras and editing equipment opened the door to budding Haitian filmmakers, lowering production cost from hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to about $40,000 – money that typically comes from private sponsors or local investors who receive a percentage of the film’s earnings.

Haitian immigrants to the U.S. support the market as well.  Here is the Haiti Internet Movie Database.

I often ponder how much meaning a single moment can have; a related question is whether it matters if this single moment is connected to many years of complementary life experiences.  Meditations on the nature of marriage and also identity remain favorite topics of mine.  The morally complex Canadian drama Away From Her concerns the evolution of Alzheimer’s in a woman and her husband’s reactions.  It is one of the best movies I have seen, ever, though it is hard to say more without spoiling the surprises.  It is guaranteed to make you cry, and I’m not referring to the ending.  For the wonks it even has some bits on health care policy.

Here is more information.  And if you are interested in Alzheimer’s, John Bayley’s Elegy for Iris is one of my favorite books.

This humorous and philosophical film — strongly recommended — also offers an implicit market failure argument: raising children is the main thing that goes on in a marriage, yet few of us choose life partners on that basis.  The film suggests that a random allocation might be better than selecting a partner on the grounds of smarts, common interests, attractiveness, how good he or she makes us feel, and so on.

I can think of a few hypotheses:

1. Common interests in life are correlated with common philosophies of child-rearing, so all is well in the marriage market.

2. High-status men and attractive women are also best at raising children, so seek those sorts of partners in any case.

3. Forget what your utility function seems to be telling you, seek a partner who is willing to do all the dirty work when it comes to kids.  Seek submission.  This is worth way more than you at first think.

4. Common interests hinder effective child-rearing, since it means the partners have more to lose when children take over their lives.  Opt for a low expectations marriage.

5. We should require prospective marriage partners to play sophisticated computer games, mimicking the familial struggles they will later face.  In the limiting case, dating should be replaced by joint kid-raising sessions, using small and unruly robots if necessary (the film in fact portrays this).

6. Judith Harris was right, genes matter but not how you raise your kids.  Marry whomever you want, following nature’s dictates, and neglect the little buggers that result, it doesn’t matter.

None of these hypotheses, in my view, replace the default option of simple market failure.  And yes this is one of the biggest institutional failures in the entire world.

For every dollar received in global (non-Austrian) box office by Austrian films, 28 dollars are spent on film subsidies. 

Scroll through this document to page four for comprehensive — and scary — EU figures.  Only the Czech Republic and Poland, both of which have very low subsidies, have ratios under one.  France and Denmark, two of the more successful European film-producing countries, have ratios between three and four, meaning that four dollars are spent to produce one dollar of overseas revenue.

It is remarkably difficult to make movies that people in other countries wish to see, and it is not obvious that film subsidies are helping matters.

I bet that if the Sandman and Spiderman could have just gotten away
from their positional stances (“I need to take money” and “I need to
catch crooks” respectively), to their underlying interests (“I need to
help my little girl” and “Dude, I’m all about helping the people”),
they could have found some common ground.  There was opportunity there,
and it could have saved a lot of expensive plate glass and I-beams and
cars being thrown about.

I do think the Sandman didn’t open
his mind to lot of options that became available to him when he got
particle-ized.  I understand that you do what you know, and he had
conceptualized himself as a thief and a fugitive.  Maybe those were his
most lucrative options when he was a man, but as Sandman, I don’t think
he had to be an outlaw to make a ton of money.  Considering his
strength and versatility, I bet any construction firm would have hired
him in a flash.

Here is more.  Here is my earlier post, The Macroeconomics of Superman.

Lucas will make two more live-action films set in everyone’s favorite galaxy far, far away.  These films will likely be an hour each, and will air on television, though he doesn’t know on what channel (The Sci-Fi network?).  Says Lucas of the films, "they won’t have members of the Skywalker family as characters.  They will be other people of that milieu."

Here is one report.  The episodes are supposed to be set between installments III and IV and they are scheduled for 2009.