Category: Film

Idiocracy

Made by the director of
Office Space, this politically incorrect dystopian comedy portrays a future where dysgenics
have made everyone a moron.  It should appeal to those who enjoy
watching stupid people behave stupidly, not to those who demand
legitimate filmmaking.  In other words, it’s pretty damn funny.  There
are some classic lines, like "Welcome to Costco, I love you."  DVD only.

How to appreciate Shakespeare

…right now, at this very moment, one can see more great Shakespeare, one can find more transformative Shakespearean experiences, from what is already on film even in the form of tape or DVD on a television screen than the average person, even the average critic, will see on stage in a life time.

That is from Ron Rosenbaum’s generally quite good The Shakespeare Wars.  His list:

1. Orson Welles, Chimes at Midnight [TC: also Welles’s best movie]
2. Peter Brook, King Lear
3. Richard III, with Laurence Olivier
4. Hamlet, with Richard Burton

To this list I would add Welles’s Othello and — more controversially — Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Haitian voodoo scenes and all; Rosembaum is more positive than negative about that one, but it doesn’t make his list.

Apocalypto, part II

The Stations themselves are usually a series of 14 pictures or sculptures depicting the following scenes:

    1. Jesus is condemned to death

Apoc: Jaguar Paw captured by cultists.

    2. Jesus receives the cross

Apoc: JP tied to slave line.

    3. The first fall

Apoc: First fall (guy forced to rise without help)

    4. Jesus meets His Mother

Apoc: Testicle-eater sees his mother-in-law?

    5. Simon of Cyrene carries the cross

Group saves wounded guy at end of slave line.

    6. Veronica wipes Jesus’ face with her veil

???

    7. The second fall

???

    8. Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem

Mayan women laugh at the guys getting painted blue.

    9. The third fall

???

   10. Jesus is stripped of His garments

???

   11. Crucifixion: Jesus is nailed to the cross

Brought up to top of pyramid.

   12. Jesus dies on the cross

Eclipse saves JP.

   13. Jesus’ body removed from the cross (Pieta)

JP sent back down the pyramid.

   14. Jesus is laid in the tomb

???

Overall, amazing parallelism.

And then in a later email:

…Jaguar Paw definitely returns to save his wife and sons on the third
day.

Right on.  But for the last few Stations, I see a deliberate non-parallel with the Christian story.  I view the film as concerned with Islam as much as the Mayans.  It replays the (supposed) Islamic "myth" that Jesus climbed down off the cross, saved by a miracle, and joined his wife and kid to live in India (to complicate matters, only a minority of Muslims believe this, but many quasi-informed Christians think this is a very common Muslim view).  Gibson’s movie is saying "OK, let’s say that happened.  Jaguar Paw makes a miraculous escape.  But earthly triumph is still no means of salvation and it cannot replace the Christian notion of sacrifice; you can run but you can’t hide.  The plague is coming.  The Spanish ships are coming.  God is coming.  We must throw ourselves on God’s mercy.  Islam is no good, salvation lies only in Christ."

I also wonder if all that throat-slitting was not a reference to Daniel Pearl and various jihad-based webcam assassinations.

Pretty intense vision.  Gibson is repugnant, and his approach is distant from my own worldview, but I am still thinking about his splendid movie.

Negative real rates of return, part II

Apocalypto, yes storage costs for goods are positive in the movie.  The film is about theology; virtually frame-by-frame it is commentary on Passion of the Christ, the Bible, or both.  Call it mishnah, if you wish; the reviews I read didn’t get this at all.  The movie’s central question is what the idea of a miracle, or salvation, can mean in a non-Christian world.  I found it remarkable, but I can’t imagine it drawing many viewers beyond the curious, the omnivorous, the Mayan, and the deeply committed.

Here is my previous post on negative rates of return.  Comments are open, but if you wish to simply complain about Mel Gibson, please use this old space.

Addendum: Here are reviews.

The Queen

One of the few must-see movies of the year.  In addition to its dramatic virtues and superb acting (read Matt’s review), it offers economics, public choice, and political philosophy.  The moviemakers appear to understand Thomas Schelling on focal points and convention, "showing that you care" theories of signaling, David Hume on public opinion, and Michael Oakeshott on tradition, among many other ideas.

Do violent movies cause violent crime?

No, at least not in the short run.  Rambo gets the bad guys off the streets.  And for a while they even seem to calm down:

What is the short-run impact of media violence on crime?  Laboratory experiments in psychology find that exposure to media violence increases aggression.  In this paper, we provide field evidence on this question.  We exploit variation in violence of blockbuster movies between 1995 and 2002, and study the effect on same-day assaults.  We find that violent crime decreases on days with higher theater audiences for violent movies.  The effect is mostly driven by incapacitation: between 6PM and 12AM, an increase of one million in the audience for violent movies reduces violent crime by 1.5 to 2 percent.  After the exposure to the movie, between 12AM and 6AM, crime is still reduced but the effect is smaller and less robust.  We obtain similar, but noisier, results using data on DVD and VHS rentals.  Overall, we find no evidence of a temporary surge in violent crime due to exposure to movie violence.  Rather, our estimates suggest that in the short-run violent movies deter over 200 assaults daily.  We discuss the endogeneity of releases.  Potential interpretations for our results include a cathartic effect of movies, displacement of crime, and decrease in alcohol consumption.  The differences with the experimental results may be due to experimental procedures, or to sorting into violent movies.  Our design does not allow us to estimate long-run effects.

Here is the full paper.

When should we consume culture in small, sequential bits?

I almost always read novels in bits.  That is, I put the book down for a few times before finishing it.

I rarely watch movies in bits.  That just seems wrong.  But, assuming we are watching on DVD, why?  Why do pauses ruin a movie but not a book?  I can think of a few hypotheses:

1. Movies manipulate our neurophysiology over a two-hour time horizon.  If we restart in the middle after a two-day pause, we are not worked up in the right manner.

2. Most books are longer than most movies, but there is otherwise no good reason for the difference in our consumption pattern.

3. We like the idea that we are "reading Camus," and thus we wish to stretch it out.  Few people get comparable status or feel-good values from watching movies and thus there is no need to prolong that experience.

4. We don’t actually like reading enough to keep on paying attention for so many hours in a row.

The ever-wise Natasha notes that we are mostly likely to read action novels — such as The da Vinci Code
— straight through without pause.  But action movies are the easiest to
watch in bits.  Ever try just a half hour of Jackie Chan?  Wonderful.  But breaking up a good drama is criminal.

Your thoughts?

Why Paramount dumped Tom Cruise

Mr. De Vany and W. David Walls, an economist at the University of
Calgary, took those factors into account.  Looking across a sample of
more than 2,000 movies exhibited between 1985 and 1996, they found that
only seven actors and actresses – Tom Hanks, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock, Jodie Foster, Jim Carrey, Barbra Streisand and Robin Williams – had a positive impact on the box office, mostly in the first few weeks of a film’s release.

In the same study, two directors, Steven Spielberg and Oliver Stone also pushed up a movie’s revenue.  But Winona Ryder, Sharon Stone and Val Kilmer
were associated with a smaller box-office revenue.  No other star had
any statistically significant impact at all.  So what are stars for?  By
helping a movie open – attracting lots of people in to see a movie in
the first few days before the buzz about whether it’s good or bad is
widely known – stars can set a floor for revenues, said Mr. De Vany.

Here is the full story, on the new economics of cinema. 

I am a bit closer to an efficient markets view on this question.  Stars don’t matter much per se.  But many stars — or their agents — are good at picking the right movies to star in.  Other more critical inputs, including good scripts and marketing expenditures, follow these stars around.  The value of the star drops out of the regression, but the star was still the key certifier to get the quality put into the movie in the first place.

Addendum: Here is Art DeVany’s blog, and here is Art on beer and pizza.

The Lady in the Water

It is probably the best movie this summer.  It creates its own world and draws you in.  Forget the bad reviews from writers who do not take obscure Catholic theological debates seriously (well…theology is not my cup of tea either, but I will pretend for the movie’s sake.  If you can accept the Jedi…).  The absurd parts of the film, like the descent of the monkeys, are supposed to be absurd.  It is about the miracle (yes miracle, as in miraculous) of the incarnation, the fact that anyone can be special, our stumbles toward the truth, the apparent arbitrariness of earthly justice, and most of all that we have no choice but to believe in something "absurd."  The strongest connection, of course, is to The Book of Job and then to Lewis’s Narnia.  The film also has a first-rate sense of humor, which is increasingly rare in Hollywood today.

Here is one good (Christian) review.  It is no surprise that the Catholic Kelly Jane Torrance also liked it.  Yet the movie bombed.  It is sad to think that Hollywood is about to neuter one of America’s most accomplished and original filmmakers.

Harry was Correct

Harry: You realize of course that we could never be friends.
Sally: Why not?
Harry: What I’m saying is – and this is not a come-on in any
way, shape or form – is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex
part always gets in the way.
Sally: That’s not true. I have a number of men friends and
there is no sex involved.
Harry: No you don’t.
Sally: Yes I do.
Harry: No you don’t.
Sally: Yes I do.
Harry: You only think you do.
Sally: You say I’m having sex with these men without my
knowledge?
Harry: No, what I’m saying is they all WANT to have sex with
you.
Sally: They do not.
Harry: Do too.
Sally: They do not.
Harry: Do too.
Sally: How do you know?
Harry: Because no man can be friends with a woman that he
finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.
Sally: So, you’re saying that a man can be friends with a
woman he finds unattractive?
Harry: No. You pretty much want to nail ’em too.
Sally: What if THEY don’t want to have sex with YOU?
Harry: Doesn’t matter because the sex thing is already out
there so the friendship is ultimately doomed and that is the end of the story.
Sally: Well, I guess we’re not going to be friends then.
Harry: I guess not.
Sally: That’s too bad. You were the only person I knew in New York.

Here’s an abstract from a recent meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (no online paper that I could find):

Getting Both Sides of the Story: Sexual Attraction and Sexual Events
Between Opposite-Sex Friends

Matteson, Lindsay K. (University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire,
[email protected]); Gragg, Brittany I.; Stocco, Corey S.; Bleske-Rechek, April

Debate exists on whether opposite-sex friends experience sexual
attraction to one another and, if so, whether that attraction adds
spice or strife to the friendship. Little systematic research,
however, has evaluated these questions; and existing studies have not
asked for both friends’ perspectives. In the current study, 89 pairs
of young adult opposite-sex friends (mean friendship duration = 2
years) reported on their friendship. Men reported more sexual
attraction to their friends than did women, and this sex difference
endured after controlling for men’s greater sexual unrestrictedness.
Approximately 25% of friendship pairs had romantically kissed, and
over 10% had "fooled around." Attraction to friend was not related to
friendship duration, and sexual events occurred at various time
points in the friendship, suggesting that attraction to friends isn’t
something that is "overcome" with time. We discuss our findings in
the context of mainstream literature suggesting that opposite-sex
friendships are inherently platonic.