Category: Film

I thought this was a remarkable cinematic event.  But you need to know that the characters are supposed to be vacuous and annoying, and that the opening scene is supposed to be obnoxious and superficial.  The heroism is supposed to be thin.  (The whiney NYT review I read is, in retrospect, an embarrassment.)  And that the movie is supposed to make you feel physically nauseated.  You are in fact witnessing a disaster.  Most of all this is a movie about how the young’uns have no tools for moral discourse and that all they can do is utter banalities and take endless pictures of each other and record their lives for no apparent purpose.  I can’t recall any other movie that so completely devastates its intended demographic.  The integration of sound blips and flashing lights is brilliant.  The homage to the tanks attacking Godzilla is loving.  I didn’t even know how good this movie was until after the halfway point.  Bravo.

This movie, with its hints of Metamorphosis and Maya Deren, probably will stand as one of the best of the last ten years.  Of course it has a deeply economic theme: how much of the value of life stems from our ability to trade, and how much from our ability to play games of pure coordination?  Plus the French health care system is so good that all the nurses are beautiful and pay infinite attention to a single patient, or maybe that is just how French movies are made.

Glen Whitman asks a good question, Why are unions so powerful in the entertainment industry when unions
are generally weak and in decline in most other sectors of the economy?  (Tyler asked the same question several years ago.)

I went to the family expert, my brother the movie producer and he had this to say:

…unlike in most other unionized industries, it’s the INDIVIDUAL members of the unions in the entertainment industry that the management / owners want to work with. For example, Tom Cruise is a member of SAG, (I use him as an obvious example, but every other known actor is as well) and if the studios and producers want to make a film with Mr Cruise, and we all do, we have to come to terms with SAG. Similarly, Steven Spielberg is a member of the DGA, same issue. Though writers are not household names, it’s the same issue, there are specific individuals who the studios want to be writing their TV shows and screenplays.  It  doesn’t matter if Joe or John or Mary is stacking the boxes, flipping the burgers or ringing the cash registers so management can easily hire a non-union member to do the same job, in the film business we need to work with specific individuals who happen to be union members. Thus the power of those (comparatively) few empowers them all.

Combine with a bit of Hollywood leftism and the fact that the big names don’t lose much from unions and you have a very powerful cartel.  About the only way to break the cartel would be to turn the big names into owners – this has been done a few times but the stars earn so much anyway that even then the incentives to deviate are small.  You Tube can give is a
parade of amateurs but as soon as the amateurs become stars this
model suggests that they will be co-opted into the union framework.  Like my brother, I don’t see the power of Hollywood unions ending anytime soon. 

Here’s a mini-review of my brother’s movie Weirdsville. 

Weirdsville – a
dark and devilishly funny comedy about a pair of junkie crooks who
can’t seem to catch a break to save their lives. Throw in a couple
Satan worshipers, a band of vigilante little people and a pair of
curling stone wielding drug dealers and things get, well – considerably
weirder. The film is littered with fantastic offbeat and unexpected
moments that keep the laughs rolling. Moyle meanwhile, adds his
signature rock n’ roll flare and gives the film a cold, gritty feel
that keeps you on just enough of an edge. Definitely a trip worth
taking.

So who is complaining?  The Satanists!  Here is one email:

I would just like to voice my opinion and state that I do NOT appreciate the way you portray Satanism in the least. Using the same-old watered down mass-media version or not, it still tends to give us a bad name. I am not asking you to remove this movie or change anything on it, just think about it.

By the way, long-time readers of Marginal Revolution may be wondering whether the Satan worshipers in Weirdsville are a commentary on my brother’s previous blockbuster.

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.