Category: Film

My brother, Nicholas Tabarrok, is the producer of the apocalyptic, biblically inspired, Left Behind movies. Left Behind – The World at War just opened in 3,200 screens across America.  Haven’t seen it at your local multiplex?  That’s because the executive producers opened the movie in churches, harking back to a model of movie distribution that used to be common in the 1950s.  The movie has also been released near-simultaneously on DVD.  Here’s a review of the DVD.

Left Behind — The World at War (Sony, $25): The third installment in the popular Christian-themed apocalyptic dramas based on the Left Behind
series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. Forgoing a theatrical
release, this latest edition was screened over the weekend at about
3,200 churches around the country.

This time, the Antichrist
(Gordon Currie), now the head of the world government, taints freshly
published Bibles with biological weapons. Lou Gossett Jr. plays the
U.S. president. Extra features include a "making of" documentary, a
surprisingly funny gag reel and enjoyable commentary with Currie and
producers Nicholas Tabarrok and Andrew van Heerden (who also co-wrote
the film).

Movies projected digitally are bright, and blemish-free. Yet they feel … odd.

Digital projection supplies a different experience than
photochemistry-based projection. The image is clear — eeriely so. But
it’s also less dense, less nuanced, and far less sensual than a
good-quality traditional film image. Digital projection seems to suit
thwacky-slammy pictures just fine. Action-adventure pix,
computer-animated films, blockbusters, and dumbo comedies should do
fine projected digitally. But quieter films, and especially films that
deal in mood, poetry, and tactility — movies like "Swimming Pool"
and "Last Tango in Paris" — would lose a lot. As far as I’ve been able
to tell, movies projected digitally don’t feel like what they’re sold
as: movies perfected. They feel like ultrabigscreen TV.

Here is the full discussion, which includes an analysis of the economics of digital conversion in the theater.  Comments are open.

Why don’t we have a convergence to immediately available video-on-demand?  Edward Jay Epstein blames Wal-Mart:

What has prevented the studios from closing the video window is simple: Wal-Mart. The company, which is the single biggest seller of DVDs, has made it clear that it does not want to compete with home delivery. Wal-Mart executives told Viacom’s home entertainment division in no uncertain terms that if any studio does away with the 45-day video window for a single title, they would risk losing access to Wal-Mart’s shelf space for all of its titles. Wal-Mart provided studios with more than one-third of their U.S. DVD revenue in 2004. In the face of Wal-Mart’s retail power, the studios have not dared (yet) to do away with the protective video window.

Read: Wal-Mart will lose this battle sooner or later.  Here is the full article, which contains much more about Cuban.

The Undercover Economist invited me to chat about bounty-hunters after a screening of Domino, the new film "about" Domino Harvey, upper-crust British fashion model turned LA bounty hunter.  Alas, I never met Domino although I did once meet her bail-bondsman boss.

Unfortunately, Domino is only nominally about Domino Harvey – we get the message early on when Domino throws a knife half-way through a car’s front windshield (nfw imo) and then does a lap-dance to get out of a Mexican standoff.  By the time Tom Waits shows up as an angel we are long aware that this ain’t no biopic.

Thus if you are searching for information on the real thing read my paper or watch Dog: The Bounty Hunter which at least is "reality television."  (By the way, long-time readers will know that my research on bounty hunters has gone beyond the armchair.  Nevertheless, I cannot hold a candle to the bravery of the Undercover Economist.)

I won’t complain about the movie too much, however, as Domino does have plenty of violence, rock and roll, and sex served up with verve and hyperkinetic style.  And any movie with Keira Knightley will not fail to hold my interest at least some of the time.

Director Stanley Kubrick, working on a movie in England, saw the review
when it was reprinted in a London Sunday newspaper, The Observer. He
contacted George, asking him to write a screenplay based on his book.

Kubrick and George got in touch with Schelling. Along with fellow
nuclear theorists Morton Halperin and William Kaufman, they sat around
for an afternoon and evening dealing with a quandary – Red Alert had
been written in 1958, before intercontinental ballistic missiles became
the primary delivery system for nuclear weapons, which changed the
plausibility of its scenario based on bombers.

"We had a hell of a time getting that damn war started," Schelling
says. "We finally decided that it couldn’t happen unless there was
somebody crazy in the Air Force. That’s when Kubrick and Peter George
decided they would have to do it as what they called a nightmare
comedy."

Schelling had been hoping for a serious movie. "The book was a
very serious study; there was nothing funny in it at all," he says.
But, like generations of moviegoers, he was not disappointed in the
result that came out in 1964.

"I was a little sorry they couldn’t do it without making it a black comedy, but I think it got the point across," he says.

Here is the full article (brief registration required), thanks to Paul Jeanne for the pointer.  And if you have nothing better to do, try to imagine how the works of other Nobel Laureates might have given rise to movies.

Jacqueline Passey, now living in Costa Rica, offers up the scoop.  Yes I know about DVD sales, but those figures do not count marketing costs, which for a typical Hollywood movie run about $30 million.

View this remixed trailer, courtesy of www.geekpress.com; on my computer it took a little while to load.

For real.  If this movie succeeds commercially, further good ones will be made.  See it.  Dan Drezner has a round-up of insightful reactions.  Here is Julian Sanchez. 

Addendum: Scroll down Alina Stefanescu for much more, including Joss Whedon’s endorsement of Stephen Sondheim as the greatest living genius.

I used to feel that seeing the previews was better, on the average night, than seeing the movie to follow.  I would have paid the $6.00, or whatever, just to watch twenty minutes of previews.  Today I am considering forsaking previews altogether.  The economist in me wonders why:

1. Internet reviews make previews less important for judging whether I want to see a movie at all.

2. Current previews are more likely to spoil the money and give away the good bits in advance.  The goal of a preview today is to get you to go at all.  It doesn’t matter if the preview ends up spoiling the movie for you, since word of mouth is today worth less.  Movies make more of their money in the first week than in previous times.  Earlier previews took greater care to preserve the quality of your moviegoing experience.

3. The pre-movie warm-ups, including commercials, have become longer.  Filmgoers are treated as a captive audience.  At my local theater I can show up seventeen minutes late and miss nothing.

4. I am older and presumably harder to satisfy in most regards, although the value of good chocolate ice cream has not declined.

1. The movie is a "space oddity."

2. It feels like a TV production, even on the big screen.

3. It won’t take off without a big marketing push.

4. The cast has good chemistry and the movie has a strong human
dimension.  Yet by now many of the premises appear less than fresh.

5. The movie’s colors are dark and unappealing and the score is mediocre.

Variety reviews are usually reliable.  Unlike most
newspapers and magazines, they do not offer an aggregated and confusing
"weighted average" assessment of both quality and popularity.  Written
for insiders, the periodical tells you how good the movie is, how
popular it will be, which countries will like it (sometimes), and how
it will do on DVD.

If you are lost, here is background information on Serenity.  If you saw the movie on its brief early release, don’t put any spoilers in the comments.

…in China, where government regulations severely limit distribution and piracy is common, Hollywood studios took in a grand total of $1.5 million (slightly more than one-tenth of a penny per capita) from theaters in the first quarter of 2005.

Here is the full analysis, which rebuts the myth that Hollywood makes all of its money in foreign markets.

That is favorite, not "best," and the years are approximate:

1965 – something like Bambi, whatever

1969 – Them!, The Blob

1971 – Frankenstein vs. the Wolfman, with a nod to Ghidrah, The Three-Headed Monster

1973 – Diamonds are Forever

1977 – Star Wars

1980 – The Empire Strikes Back

1985 – The Magic Flute (the Bergman version)

1990 – Smiles of a Summer Night

1993 – Persona

1997 – Stalker

2003 – Scenes from a Marriage

I’m not going to tag anyone, but of course you are welcome to try your hand at this…

OK, Sith is now the tenth highest grossing film of all time, and probably headed toward number seven.  But Wall Street is bearish on film stocks; on Monday Dreamworks shares fell more than 13%.  The big fear is that DVD sales are falling, as Shrek 2 bombed in this market.  Hollywood box office has been down for nineteen weeks out of twenty, and believe me Harry Potter won’t do Johnny Depp and Tim Burton any favors.  Daniel Gross opined that Hollywood is the next Detroit.  Others see a big mystery in falling receipts.  Yet others blame blue-state bigotry.  I will offer a few more fundamental hypotheses:

1. Hollywood cannot control its marketing costs or star salaries.  The growing importance of DVDs increases the "needle in the haystack" problem for any single film and thus locks studios into more marketing, creating a vicious spiral.

2. TV is now so much better, and offers artists greater creative freedom.  Why watch movies?

3. The Internet is outcompeting cinema, whether at the multiplex or on DVD.

4. Big TV screens are keeping people at home, which lowers box office receipts.  This also hurts the long-term prospects of many DVDs.

5. The demand for DVDs has fallen because movie lovers have completed their core collections, just as the demands for classical CDs have fallen.

5. The demand for DVDs was due to fall in any case.  Forget the collectors, you buy DVDs to have a stock on hand so you don’t have to run out to the video store on short notice.  Now everyone has a stock.  Stocks must be replenished every now and then, but there is no longer a large new cohort simultaneously building up a stock from scratch.

The bottom line: These trends do not appear reversible in the short run.  It is not just that this year’s movies mostly stink.