Category: Film

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.

Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.

Chuck Norris frequently donates blood to the Red Cross. Just not his own.

Chuck Norris’s tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.

Read more on the cult here.  There are more sayings.  Here is my favorite photo of Chuck.  How about this dictum?

There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live.

Thanks to Yana for the pointer.

Peter Jackson sure knows how to construct a brontosaurus chase.  Folks, this one is headed for seriously big box office, in part because we see less of Naomi Watts than we did of the pre-Hays Code Fay Wray, or for that matter Jessica Lange in 1976.

Are DVDs the New Political Pamphlets?

Cronicas, just out on DVD.  Will you be impressed if I call it "the best Ecuadorean movie I have ever seen"?

There is a slew of new Bollywood releases on Netflix, read more here.  Here is my previous post on Bollywood.  Here are Larry White’s recommendations.

Thanks to N. Singh for the pointer, and comments are open for recommendations.

Leonardo DiCaprio is to play a man with a particular gift for reading body language in the forthcoming adaptation of Blink, Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller about how people make snap decisions. The writer-director will be Stephen Gaghan, who won an Oscar for his screenplay of 2000’s drug trade film Traffic. "[Gaghan] came to me out of the blue," Gladwell told trade magazine Variety. ‘He thought there was something in the book that was a movie. We took one chapter from the book and fashioned a story out of it. But most of it is something we dreamt up together."

Thanks to http://kottke.org, now touring Asia, for the pointer.  Here is updated information on a previous installment in this series.  So who will star in Freakonomics?

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).