Category: Film

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.

Incubus is a 1965 horror film that was filmed in Esperanto and starred William Shatner.

Via Jason Kottke.  The first link includes a pretty amazing trailer for the film.

Mix a South Korean Erlkonig into Godzilla, with a good dash of comic relief and anti-authoritarian satire.  This is not a movie for everyone, but if you are even thinking of going you must.  Here is Wikipedia.  Here are reviews.  Here is the trailer.  It’s the biggest grossing movie in Korea, ever.

The audience is too supportive, and we perform better in front of strangers or even a hostile crowd.  Here is further explanation.

That’s the new German movie with the rave reviews and the foreign language film Oscar, but don’t be fooled.  The movie is technically excellent, but not thoughtful.  It is part of a more general, and disturbing, trend in contemporary German culture to whitewash the past.  The film shows many small acts of defiance against the Stasi, as if to redeem an otherwise sorry East German record.  Last year — fortunately I cannot remember the title — we were shown the German martyrs against the Nazis. 

Don’t economists emphasize the marginal unit?  Can’t we have at least one movie about small acts of defiance?  In principle yes, but characters implausibly discover the brotherhood of man and viewers are fed uplifting final homilies, a’la Schindler.  Natasha, who lived with her equivalent of the Stasi for many years, had a similar reaction of partial disgust and incredulity.

My friends consider me a cultural Germanophile (I could do "My Favorite Things German" for weeks), but I tend to be a cynic about the blacker historical episodes in the German past.  I used to hate the slow, tortuous, and pretentious Nazi-Angst movies of Fassbinder and his ilk, but they’ve aged surprisingly well, and they came much closer to striking the appropriate tone.

Addendum: Here is one good review (spoilers); by the way if you know the Hong Kong original, Infernal Affairs, you’ll find The Departed almost impossible to watch.  I walked out.

A loyal MR reader mailed me a copy of his movie, Burning Annie.  A depressed college guy fails in love and lust because he obsesses over the pessimistic Woody Allen movie Annie Hall.  (You can put it in your Netflix queue, and it plays in NYC 2/7, here are reviews).  He refuses to tell bed-ready, nubile young women that he loves them, or even likes them, because he is unwilling to make himself vulnerable and open to rejection.  I wonder how much truth-telling stems from this motive. 

I liked the special effects, of course, but on the whole
the film [a Schwarznegger movie] bored me.  Like many of these American
films, it had one good idea and clung to it so hard that it seemed poor
in emotion and range.  The scenes seemed flat because even in the most
dramatic moments the American actors spoke quietly to each other, as if
they were discussing the price of onions.  And there were no songs.
Finally, ultimately, most American films were sparse and unrealistic,
and didn’t interest me very much.

That is from one character in Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games, my early pick for novel of the year.

Otherwise I am learning just how good a writer Roberto Bolaño
can be, I see Bogota women run into the men’s room to avoid even a
slight line at the ladies room, and I’ve figured out how to eat well
here, it is fundamentally a baking culture.