Category: Film

The new Hayao Miyazaki movie, Howl’s Moving Castle, debuted in Japan this week, even though the director had ostensibly retired.  Here is the official website.  I love every one of his films.  The best-known, Spirited Away, is in my view the least compelling; here is my favorite, Heisei Tanuki Ponpoko. In theory the entire set will be put out by Disney over the next few years, keep an eye out for them.  Here is one short essay on the director and his work.

The Incredibles is superb. It succeeds as an action-adventure film, a comedic spoof, and as social commentary. 

I’ve seen statistics that domestically produced films capture up to 95 percent of the Indian home market.  While I’ve always doubted the veracity of the numbers, there is no doubt that most Indians prefer Indian movies.  But might this change in the foreseeable future?

I see two reasons to be (relatively) pessimistic about Bollywood.  First, theaters in the wealthier suburbs show a higher percentage of Hollywood movies.  A look at the Delhi movie pages showed an English language presence of about one-third, although one of these movies (the fun Bride and Prejudice) was Indian in its cast and partly in style.  Removing that movie would bring the total Hollywood presence down to about a quarter.

If India continues to develop, the Hollywood style might find greater favor with the new middle class.  It is in the rural areas where Indian films capture the entire market, and of course development brings urbanization.

Second, movie traditions based upon music usually protect their home markets well against foreign competition.  Musicals don’t travel well abroad, and the production of music has long been more decentralized than the production of film.  But for how long will Indian film remain a dominant means of marketing Indian music?  Won’t radio, cassette players, CDs, MP3s, and other innovations capture an increasing share of the music market in India?  (Recall that in the U.S. movies often generated hit songs forty years ago, today they hardly ever do.)  And if music becomes less central to Indian movies, will those movies then prove more vulnerable to Hollywood or perhaps other external suppliers?

If Hollywood becomes more important within India, will cultural diversity go up or down?  Many Indians will have more choice but a national tradition would become weaker.  And Bollywood is not the entirety of Indian cinema.  Bollywood often outcompetes the more regional Indian issues, such as are filmed in Tamil.  If you were a small-scale regional Indian moviemaker, would you rather compete with Hollywood or Bollywood? 

The Indian entertainment industry at the beginning of the twenty-first century is worth $3.5 billion, a minor part of the global $300-billion entertainment industry. But it is the world’s biggest movie industry when it comes to production and viewership. The 1,000 feature films and 40,000 hours of TV programming and 5,000 music titles that the country produces are exported to seventy countries. Every day, 14 million Indians see a movie in one of 13,000 theaters; worldwide, a billion more people a year buy tickets to Indian movies than to Hollywood ones. Television is galloping in; the country has 60 million homes with TV, of which 28 million are cabled, bringing to city and hamlet alike a choice of around a hundred channels…Hollywood films make up barely 5 percent of the country’s market.

That is from Suketu Mehta’s excellent Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.

If you don’t already know Indian movies you should. Go to your local Indian grocery or spice market. Ask the proprietors which movies you should rent; most of the DVDs will have subtitles in English. Don’t think that Lagaan (or Satyajit Ray, for that matter) is the real thing, or that Blockbuster will do you any good.

Don’t be put off by the three hour length. Watch them in bits and parts. Cut to the songs. The use of color, cinematography, and orchestration of scenes will blow your mind. Allow yourself to be mesmerized. Compare them to your dreams at night, not to other movies you know, and pretend it is the only air-conditioned place in town.

Most Bollywood productions do not get bank loans; they are funded privately. The banks do not understand or trust Bollywood. The funds required for a production are huge, and a family in the industry may be working on several projects at once. The time between investment and return can be years if the film doesn’t do well. Who would have that amount of cash lying around? Only the underworld. The gangs are very happy to see black money turn into Technicolor dreams. A hit film can bring in a fourfold return on investment within the first four weeks of its release. So for the underworld, investing in films is one of the quickest ways to get a return on illegal investment. Without underworld financing, the Hindi film industry would collapse overnight. It would have to rely on financing from banks and shareholders, who do not share the cinematic taste of the dons. Their dreams would be nowhere near as extravagant, as violent, as passionate.

That is from Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.

It’s acceptable for consumers to use software that edits out nudity or bad language from a DVD movie — but they had better leave the commercials and promotional announcements in, according to legislation adopted by the House of Representatives this week.

Here is the full story.

It is easy to see how this differential treatment might be efficient. Sex-edited DVDs increase market value by giving some parents a choice. Yet at the same time ads in DVDs help fund new issues; if consumers found the ads too burdensome the DVD makers would leave them out (admittedly the marginal consumers may not represent the interests of the market as a whole, but this is a special case).

Yet many people — myself included — feels a twinge of disapproval, or perhaps even slight rage, on reading the quotation above. It reflects how our intuitions are programmed to reflect views about autonomy and control: “How come prudish moralists can remove artistically vital movie segments, but hip culture fiends cannot eliminate the offensive abominations known as commercials?”

The prudes gain control, the artists and film directors lose control over their product, and the culture fields are stuck with their initial level of control. It seems that only the “unworthy” gain autonomy, therefore the idea must be a bad one. Yet, as stated above, the policy probably maximizes economic value.

The bottom line: Our moral intuitions have only a very loose connection to long-run efficiency, especially when impersonal market forces are involved, and someone bears an annoying cost (i.e., commercials) in the short run.

Addendum: One of my readers cites the long-run elasticity of prudishness, in an attempt to reconcile our intuitions with efficiency. If edited DVDs lower the cost of being an (interfering) prude, they may not be so good after all.

Hong Kong produced many of the coolest movies of the 1980s and 1990s. But we have entered more troubling times:

…the mainland Chinese government passed an initiative called the Cooperative Economic Partnership Agreement. CEPA was basically a bone-toss to various Hong Kong industries–it offers them small tax breaks on their imports to the mainland. But to the Hong Kong film industry, CEPA offered more: the chance for Hong Kong films to be considered “local” (as opposed to foreign) for the purposes of mainland Chinese distribution. This is a big deal, because China imposes limits on foreign films–only about 25 are allowed in each year. On paper, at least, CEPA looks to be a lifesaver for Hong Kong film.

But there’s a catch–a big one–which Pang explained to me when we spoke in his office. “In order to get in with CEPA, one-third of your cast has to be mainland actors, and you have to have a mainland production partner. OK, but then, you have to submit your script to the Chinese censorship guy. And you submit your film after you make it. They have rules: You can’t make movies about ghosts. You can’t have sex. Forget about politics. And bad guys always have to lose; good guys must always win.”

Pang’s Men Suddenly in Black is about four errant husbands who go out on a yearly mission to get themselves laid. They romp through Hong Kong’s brothels and nightclubs, swapping juicy Cantonese double-entendres as they go. I’m shocked when Pang tells me that this film actually got screened in mainland China. “They dubbed it into Mandarin and just wrote new dialogue over the parts that were too heavy. Like when they were in the massage parlor in Mongkok, in the new version they were just someplace waiting for a friend. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”

Here is the full story.

Press coverage cites two reasons:

1. The MGM film library is extensive. It includes the James Bond franchise, the Pink Panther movies, and about 8,000 other titles. The new Sony/MGM group would own a substantial fraction of the color movies ever made in Hollywood; one source says half.

2. Sony will try to use its larger film library to become format king for the next generation of high resolution DVDs. But note that new movie issues, rather than the back catalog, may have greater influence on the new standard.

Note that Comcast is part of the deal as well:

Comcast is fresh from a defeat in its audacious bid to acquire Disney (and its Buena Vista studio) earlier this year. In addition to its distribution deal with Sony, it is also understood to have an option to acquire 20% of MGM for $300m. Both agreements underline the belief that drove the Disney bid: that owning content is essential to Comcast’s target of reaching 40m customers by 2006. Indeed, Comcast’s involvement is symptomatic of a broader trend in America’s media business: consolidation between those who make music, movies and television programmes, and those who distribute them, whether via broadcast networks or, increasingly, via cable, satellite and the internet.

I see two possible scenarios. Under the first, the current DVD gold mine will continue until it is displaced by some version of video on demand. Film owners will continue to reap the profits, but buying into film libraries late in the game should not bring extra-normal returns. Under the second scenario, DVD buying will dry up, just as CD buying for classical music has dried up. Once people build up the basic library they want, they buy at a much slower rate. Both DVDs and video on demand will become less profitable over time.

I’ll weight these two options at about 50-50 in terms of proportional relevance. But regardless of which view you hold, I would not want to be bidding for old film titles in a competitive environment.

Arresting images.

Hat tip to Kottke.org.

[The movie] is more than three hours long and explores the theories of a German philosopher while wending its way up a European river.

A challenging package, you might think, even by the relatively adventurous standards of a film festival audience.

Yet this film, called The Ister, has been playing to packed houses everywhere from Rotterdam to Sydney and Melbourne. Few people have seen anything like it before.

Made by a pair of Melburnians armed with little more than a digital camera and a sense of inquiry, The Ister is loosely based on a wartime lecture delivered by ex-Nazi Martin Heidegger on one of Germany’s most celebrated poets, Friedrich Holderlin, whose poem The Ister (an old Roman name for the Danube river) is another source of inspiration for the documentary.

It is a movie made with great care:

Ross [the filmmaker] was concerned that it be intellectually coherent.

“In the back of his mind was, ‘What if Jacques Derrida sees this?”‘ Barison says.

Here is the full story.

That is the subtitle of the film I saw last night in Mexico City. The title is “Un Dia sin Mexicanos” [A Day Without Mexicans]. The premise of this comedy is that all of the Hispanic residents of California suddenly disappear one day without any warning. Beds are empty, cars are left running, and so on. Not surprisingly, California falls apart.

There are few movies that accurately illustrate market economics and fewer yet that show a good understanding of the theory of comparative advantage. This is one of them, and it can be viewed as a truly libertarian film. I won’t offer any spoilers but the final message is cosmopolitan and explores the question of what it really means to be a Latino. Plus it offers rich insight into how the Mexicans feel they are viewed by Americans. The film does hit a few false notes and has some slow patches but much of it is quite hilarious. And most of the film is in English, if you ever (unlikely) have a chance to see it.

The movie is currently showing on more screens in Mexico City than any other, including “Yo, Robot”, starring Will Smith.

By the way, if you are wondering, the film was partially subsidized by the Mexican government.

No, not an open-air cinema, or a DVD player projecting onto a large screen, but rather a real movie theater:

Lagos is the biggest city in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa, but until recently it did not even have any cinemas.

Lagos now has its first multi-screen cinema complex – a rarity in Africa

That is all the more surprising given that Nigerians love watching films: the country is famous for its thriving and expanding home-video industry.

Now, however, that has all changed, thanks to the Silverbird Cinemas – an upmarket five-screen Cineplex in the heart of Victoria Island.

The project has faced numerous obstacles:

There were cinemas in Lagos in the 1960s, but they began going out of business in the 1970s – partly because of the difficulties of operating under military dictatorship.

Cinemas closed down across the country and today many are used as Pentecostal churches or Islamic education centres.

But even with Ben Murray-Bruce’s enthusiasm, this was not the easiest project to get off the ground.

Nigeria has an erratic power supply, which means that seven generators have been installed to make sure that the films do not stop mid-show and the air-conditioning does not break down.

Mr Murray-Bruce has also had to convince film distributors that it is safe to send prints to Lagos – a city already awash with pirated DVDs of top Hollywood films.

Here is the full story.

Think about this account next time you hear someone blame the small number of African films on Hollywood or Bollywood cultural imperialism.

Imagine that you are trapped on a mountain in the Peruvian Andes, your leg is broken in several places, you are severely dehydrated, bitterly cold, all alone…. and you can’t get this song by Bony M out of your head. You don’t even like the song. Now, that’s hell.

That’s one of the lighter moments in Touching the Void a harrowing, awe-inspiring, true-story of two climbers made into a great movie/documentary. Aside from the sheer entertainment value, very sheer in this case, the move has a lot to say about the diversity of preferences, the will to survive and believe it or not, how to achieve goals. Touching the Void also nicely disposes of that old canard about there being no atheists in foxholes. Highly recommended.

It’s late in the game to be blogging this, but I’ve just seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9-11. I was dragged to the movie, more or less against my will. I won’t review the film’s well-known problems with the facts. I was at least as disturbed by the implicit racism. For instance it portrayed the Saudis as vile connivers, in a manner reminiscent of 19th century racial propaganda. [N.B. I agree we should trust the Saudi government less, but this is not the point.] Even worse was the segment on the “Coalition of the Willing”; Costa Ricans for instance are shown as a primitive and laughable people who work with oxen.

Most of all the film shows an overall contempt for humanity. The American poor, supposedly the object of Moore’s concern, come across as stupid, inarticulate, and easily duped. The only idyllic paradise we ever see is Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, where all appears beautiful.

It is a sad day in Cannes and in the United States when a movie of this kind commands so much attention. There are many important and intelligent critiques of the foreign policy of the Bush Administration, but this is not one of them. On top of everything else, the film was outright boring, especially during the second half.