Category: Film

Martha Bayles is one of my favorite cultural critics.  She is always to the point, writes for consumers rather than for other critics, and is intrigued rather than repelled by commercial culture.  I am pleased to see she has started a new cinema blog.  And while we are on the topic, here is Larry Ribstein’s blog on how business and capitalism are portrayed in the movies.

Watch the video here, courtesy of Jane Galt.

My own choice for best of 2004: Mazbool and Ab Tak Chhappan.  Best of 2003: Bhoot, Waisa Bhi Hota Hai Part II.  Bhoot is a ghost story, the others are gritty cop/mafia dramas.

All-time favorites:  Sholay, Bombay, Lagaan, Don, The Great Gambler, Mard, Suhaag, Amar Akbar Anthony, Satya, Company, Ganga ki Saugand, Kasam Suhag ki, Nagin, Umrao Jaan, Mera Gaon Mera Desh.  I admit soft spots for gangsters, Amitabh Bachchan, dacoit movies, Rekha, and camp.

Here is Larry’s home page.  Here are his on-line articles.  Here are his links on money and free banking.

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.