Category: Film

Here are the details.  It will be a trilogy.  Many millions will be invested.  Philosopher David Kelley is serving as consultant.  Angelina Jolie remains very interested in the Dagny Taggart role.  It will probably drive me further into the hands of Veronica Mars.

3000 Nigerian films, rentable in the United States (only), using the Netflix model.  You can learn more about Nollywood here.  Recommendations are welcome if you have them…

I’d like to see a film suggesting that you can be the boss without giving up your intellectual ideals, and that the alternative — rejecting power — has its corruptions, too.

That is David Denby, from the July 10 and 17 The New Yorker.

Imagine a beautiful, pseudo-nerdy and ultimately devious Anne Hathaway [Andy] receiving a job at a top fashion magazine, more or less by accident.  At first she is baffled and fails but soon she is dressing up to fit the role and climbing the ladder of social success, ruthlessly at times.  Her model and mentor is Miranda, the magazine’s editor, an empire-builder played by a commanding and sexier-than-ever Meryl Streep.  Andy is transformed by a taste of success and she abandons her boyfriend, friends, and father in her Hegelian quest to command the obedience of others.

Of course Andy is troubled along the way.  After all, but a few months ago she was editing the school newspaper at Northwestern and wearing frumpy (but oh so cute, to my eyes) sweaters.  I much prefer her size six to her later size four, and yes women really do look better without make-up.

The key moment and emotional center of the movie comes when Miranda [Meryl Streep] tells Andy [Anne Hathaway] that, contrary to her initial expectations, Andy reminds her very much of herself.  Andy runs out of the cab, supposedly rejecting the life of obsessive careerism, for [get this] a [low stress?] career of journalism. 

But does she reject the life of the Uebermensch?  Andy had distanced herself from her hot but low-status boyfriend.  She never gets back together with him, and we learn that they will live in separate cities.  We never see her boring loser friends again.  She had been rude to her dull dad [from Ohio] and is never seen making amends.  Wouldn’t a cornier movie have closed with a fading shot of Andy on the phone, smiling and saying "Hi, Dad, Happy Birthday!  I Love You!"  But this never happens.  She is too hard at work on her next feature story. 

In fact Andy is an irresistible She-Demon, every bit as powerful as the mentor she turned her back on.  Andy didn’t so much scorn Miranda as mimic her and pay homage to her.  Miranda [Meryl Streep] was right (is she ever wrong?): Andy is strong enough to be her own leader and build her own world.  That is why Andy had to leave the realm of Miranda; it was not big enough to fit two such ravenous and yes extremely sexy women.  If Camille Paglia reviewed this movie, she would find occasion to use the words "Gorgon" and "autochthonous."

Andy even rejects the famous free-lance writer ("Christian") whom she sleeps with for kicks ("I’ve run out of excuses" she says) and then unceremoniously abandons — "I’m not your baby!"  Having sniffed out her own capabilities, she is no longer content to play second fiddle in a relationship, no matter how handsome or successful the man.  She also tells this guy just how much she admires Miranda — Andy is quite sincere — and notes that Miranda’s behavior would be found totally acceptable and indeed admirable in a man.

And the poor little British girl Andy screwed over (and caused to be run over by a car, I might add, check the movie’s title) during her rise at the magazine?  She buys her off with a set of new clothes from Paris.  How Kantian of her.

Make no mistake about it, this is a movie about sheer power lust.  It is a movie of how that lust can be cloaked or shifted to another sphere but never denied.  Never bottled up.  Never stopped.  It is a delicious tale of social intrigue, ambition, class, and how much clothes really do matter.  And to take sweet Anne Hathaway — remember the wonderful but underrated Ella Enchanted?– and have her play Max Stirner — that is a mark of genius.

The movie has many other fine points, most of which were neglected by the film’s intended demographic.  Here is Michael Blowhard on Anne Hathaway.  Here is Wikipedia on the movie.

Here is my earlier post, a Straussian reading of Star Wars.  What will be next?

You know, the new Adam Sandler movie; try this site for the trailer.  The guy has a universal remote control device which he can use to Pause, Fast Forward, or Rewind reality, rather than TV.  How much would you pay for such an item?  And what would you do with it?

Of course you would use it to prevent accidents, such as car crashes.  You would likely die of old age.  I wouldn’t use fast forward much.  If you want more money, Pause could help you shuffle through confidential papers and garner inside information for trading (or are the papers glued to the desk and thus unreadable?). 

Voyeurism is another possibility, as explored by Nicholson Baker’s much-underrated The Fermata.  Here is one good excerpt from the book.  Here is a summary of the basic plot.

I will predict the movie argues that this device is more dangerous than useful and that Adam Sandler must give it up to find happiness with the ever-so-cute woman of his dreams.  Given self-constraint issues, I have yet to find a value-maximizing scenario for the device, can you?  Somewhere in here is a lesson about strong temporal complements and perhaps business cycles as well.

Here is my previous post The Macroeconomics of Superman.

Did you know about the new summer Superman film? 

Let’s say we had an altruistic and incorruptible Superman, how should he allocate his efforts to improve the macroeconomy?  He is really strong, he can fly very fast, leap tall buildings at a single bound, has incredible vision, and somehow he is immune from Einstein’s theory of relativity and time dilation at near-light speeds (his most impressive achievement, if you ask me).

Yes he should save the world from evil madmen, but fighting ordinary crime hardly appears worth his trouble.  Criminals seek pure transfers, and Superman’s policing doesn’t lower our (inefficient) investments in locks enough to make a difference in the growth rate.  It’s about as silly as having Superman sub in for FedEx when the skies get crowded over Memphis.

And should his alter ego, Clark Kent, really be a photographer for a daily newspaper?  At least that guy is contributing to a reproducible output; he must have read Sherwin Rosen’s paper.

Darfur and the like aside, I have a few nominations for what Superman should do:

1. Become a research scientist.

2. Collect data for the Fed.

3. Fly around and tell people — politely but very pointedly — when they should accept lower nominal wages.

4. Perform amazing stunts on TV, become a big celebrity, and then preach the virtues of economic literacy; this is Dan Klein’s suggestion.

Your thoughts?  Your answer suggests much about where you see leveraged returns in today’s world.  By the way, here is the first edition of the Superman comicbook.

Screenings of Colin Farrell’s latest film will be accompanied by a series of smells at a cinema in Japan.

Seven fragrances will waft from machines under back row seats during historical adventure The New World [TC: much underrated, but you need the big screen].

A floral smell will accompany love scenes, with a mixture of peppermint and rosemary for tear-jerking moments.

Cinemas across the country will be able to download
programmes to control various sequences of fragrances for other
upcoming films.

Illegal downloading and competition from the small screen will encourage further moves into live experiences which cannot be replicated at home.  Anyone up for a live voodoo ceremony?  Note, however, that a programmable home version provides "aromatheraphy" for work or horoscope readings.  Here is the story.

Brad just doesn’t know right-wing agitprop.  My friends walked out, but I exited the theater, pumped my fist in the air and shouted, Wolverines!  (That’s when I first knew I was a rather odd Canadian – perhaps this was destiny.)

Comments are open if you have any idea what I am talking about – this will provide a test of Ben Domenech’s thesis.  My apologies if you are utterly mystified.

Jared Rhoads has taken the Road to Serfdom cartoons and made them into a really elegant movie with music, ala Ken Burns.  Check it out!

Addendum: Jared also writes regularly the Lucidicus Project.

A lot of people have argued that DVDs, home theater, and the shrinking time from big screen to DVD sales are spelling doom for the movie theater business.  Michael Campbell, CEO of Regal, the nation’s largest chain of theaters, has some smart things to say in response.  I particularly like his first response which shows a keen appreciation of market inter-dependencies, "general equilibrium" in econ-speak.

I think DVD’s have been the savior of not only the studio model but
have been beneficial to theater owners, too, because it funnels more
money back into the studios, which in turn fuels higher production
budgets, greater numbers of films, and so on.

We have seen the
window shrink from an average of about six months between theatrical to
video 10 years ago to about four and a half months today. Some
compression of that window over time is justified, or has been
justified at least in the past, because we generate our piece of the
pie at the box office much quicker today than we did a decade ago.

People
who run the studios are smart people, and I think they realize the
tremendous value of having that theatrical launch pad. And I don’t
think that’s going to change. They make films to be released on the big
screen.

Hollywood controls system, not fixed but rigged to favor picture with greatest elasticity of profits with respect to favorable publicity.  Too many people won’t see BBM, plus fear that Hollywood looks out of touch, Crash!

OK, I missed the first thirty minutes and heard the rest in a blurry Mexican dub.  My question remains: What does scarcity mean in a fantasy film?

If you are a Queen with an ice palace and a magic sword, why do you use (hire?) two lumbering polar bears to pull your chariot?  Especially in the temperate climate of New Zealand.  If a lion can be reincarnated, is the rest of the plot all for show or a test?  Just how do resources get allocated? 

Perhaps it is faith which is scarce in fantasy stories.  As stocks of faith rise and fall, other complementary resources, including the power of your weapons, are reallocated accordingly by the principles of the imaginary world. 

That seems to imply that fantasy films cannot operate under the game-theoretic assumption of "common knowledge."  People must disagree about the true model governing the world, otherwise greater faith yields no relative advantage.

Are fantasy movies what economic models would look more like if we took the absence of common knowledge more seriously?  (Yes there are stylized models of non-common knowledge in the specialized literature but the notion is kept under check; the game-theoretic results we use typically are built on common knowledge assumptions.)  Keep in mind that, above a certain level of subsistence, much of your welfare springs from your inner stories and narratives, not from concrete goods and services.  Your real advantage in life, if you are born sufficiently wealthy, is your ability to tell yourself beneficial stories.

If the lion stands in for Christ, who stands in for Roger Douglas?

Alex once suggested to me that computer games were blurring the differences between models, novels, and films.

In other words, I enjoyed it.

Addendum: If you wish to explore these issues, I will soon put my paper on them on-line.  In the meantime, watch The Princess Bride, one of my favorite movies and a useful source of inspiration.