Category: Film

The Cannes film festival starts this week, despite a threatened labor disruption. Yesterday I learned that the term Asia Extreme, the hot style in world cinema right now, has been copyrighted. “Asia Extreme” movies view John Woo as a quaint forefather and go much further in terms of throwing the book away. Are you interested? I’ll recommend Battle Royale for horrific Hobbesian violence, and The Audition for shocking sexual drama. Both are Japanese, and neither is for the fainthearted. But if you feel jaded by most movies, a bit bored, and are looking for something conceptual, this is definitely the next step.

1. “Between January and mid-March this year, Americans spent $1.78 billion at the box office. But in the same period they spent $4.8 billion…to buy and rent DVD’s and videocassettes.”

2. “There’s not a sector of the entertainment industry to which DVD is not a significant, if not the dominant, contributor of revenue…”

3. Nowadays “basically the movies are commercials for the DVDs.”

4. “What no one knows is how long the windfall will last…”

5. “…in five years when you can download a movie as fast as a song, that will go away.”

Here is the full story. Here is my earlier post on the boom in DVD revenue. Here is a related post on the decline of the audience for television programs. Here is an article on the future of Netflix.com. Here is an article on the new paper DVD, yes you read that correctly.

The new cinema in the Norwegian town of Kautokeino is somewhat out of the ordinary. Not only is it entirely made out of snow – it is a drive-in. For snowmobiles.

“We always wanted to create a different film experience,” explains Anne Lajla Utsi, the leader of the Kautokeino Sami film festival.

“As far as we know, this is a world first.”

Here is the full story.

And that’s not all. You sit on reindeer skins, you can buy reindeer meat and hot drinks at the snack stand (no ice cream!), and yes the screen is made of snow also.

Can’t sing? Not even good enough for your twenty best friends? Mimic your favorite actor. If you can do a scene from Zoolander “on the fly,” you are especially well suited to this hot new trend.

1. The Best Picture award winners have a median rank of ninth at the box office for the relevant year.

2. The pictures with Best Actor winners have a median rank of nineteenth.

3. The Best Actress award movies have a median rank of thirty-two, in other words these movies tend to be niche pictures, not big hits. Women don’t get the best starring roles in the hits.

4. Big studio blockbusters won Best Picture awards for many decades, The English Patient broke this pattern in 1996.

5. Over the last two decades, the Golden Globe “Best Picture – Drama” winner matches with the Best Picture winner 70 percent of the time.

6. Rob Schneider has applied to be a voter on the Academy Awards; to this date he has been refused. Mike Myers and Martin Lawrence are allowed to vote. Most of the voters are within the movie business and many have close links to the films under consideration.

The economist in me: I would design the awards to maximize the profits of the movie industry. Winning a major award boosts a picture’s box office appeal. So ideally the awards should go to the pictures with the highest elasticities of appeal, with respect to the award. This will be correlated with absolute levels of popularity, but not exactly. Might an older demographic see Return of the King holding a Best Picture award, but not otherwise? In contrast, most people won’t see a horror movie no matter what, so horror films are unlikely to win Best Picture awards.

The very existence of the awards encourages box office as well. The time leading up to the awards should be full of debate, controversy, and suspense. Award winners should not be too predictable. Furthermore the winning picture should reflect glory on the awards, rather than draining reputation. Historical spectaculars, or pictures with a high-brow element, are ideal. The awards should maximize profits over time, not just year-by-year.

Some of the awards should be given to indies, or to other minor players in the film industry. For the awards process to have maximum impact, it should command maximum legitimacy and loyalty from all points of view. Don’t let anyone feel totally left out.

Nor should you let controversial black singers bare their breasts at your mainstream audience.

Let voters receive gifts and special favors from directors and movie studios. This process of “bribery” will allow the final voting outcome to maximize profit, albeit with some uncertainty around the edges.

Did I mention that the award should make America look good? Cold Mountain, which was “outsourced” and filmed in Romania, was not a good candidate this year and indeed it was slighted in the nominations process.

That is how I would maximize profits with the award.

Hey, isn’t this what they have done?

Addendum: Read Alex on the Academy Awards.

South Korean movies have grown increasingly popular, and South Korea may be dismantling its screen quota system, one of the world’s most rigid. Here is the story, which offers useful links. Here is a previous MR post critical of screen quotas. If you would like to watch a captivating South Korean movie, I recommend the action spy flick Shiri.

The stars of Seinfeld have made a deal that will allow the release of DVDs of the series. Jerry Seinfeld’s three costars had been complaining because they had been cut out of royalty payments for the series. “I’m not ashamed to talk numbers. I [Jason Alexander, or George Costanza] would say in the years that we’ve been in syndication, Julia, Michael and I have probably individually seen about a quarter of a million dollars out of residuals, whereas our brethren have seen hundreds of millions of dollars. Seinfeld has a profit of over a billion dollars.”

Got those numbers? That’s one billion for the Seinfeld show, co-stars less than one million total.

My take: Seinfeld himself and co-creator Larry David reap a big share of the residual rights. The co-stars were cut out from the beginning, and it is standard practice that actors receive nothing from the sale of DVD rights.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The poor deserve special attention because of their low standard of living in absolute terms. But I have nothing against inequality per se.

Here is the full story, which also sheds light on envy and pride as core human causes of wage and price stickiness.

Addendum: A reader, Robert Schwartz, cites Forbes on “Elaine’s” father, Gerard Louis-Dreyfus, who is worth $2.9 billion.

Yes I know that merchandising is driving cinematic receipts more than ever before. Still I, the supposedly cynical economist, was just a wee bit surprised to see this.

Two years ago, every one of Phnom Penh’s 33 cinemas lay disused. In the 1960s, Cambodian-made films were famous across Asia, and movie-going was a national obsession. But cinema culture was one of the many victims of the genocidal Khmer Rouge of 1975-79 and the two decades of civil war and Vietnamese occupation that followed.

N.B.: Hollywood is not the only reason why cinema is struggling in many locales.

Today, however, Phnom Penh is in the midst of a cinematic boom. Theaters are opening or reopening across the country. The last eighteen months have brought nine new cinemas. A ticket costs about a dollar, the same as per capita daily income.

And what is the most popular genre, by far? Horror films.

The quotation is from “Phnom Penh’s New Rage,” The Financial Times, Saturday, February 14. Here is an account from The Cambodian Times.

Cambodia, of course, provided one of the more extreme examples of government support for the arts. Prince Sihanouk produced, directed, and wrote the musical scores for twenty-eight movies. He was often scriptwriter and star as well. So if the print says “Director’s Cut,” I’m sure they mean it.

I once took a seminar on film from Roger Ebert and he said “A movie is not what it is about, it is about how it is about it.” Bear this in mind when I recommend, Spellbound, a movie “about” the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee championship. It’s also about immigration, ambition, IQ, poverty, high school and the pressures of competition. Brilliantly edited and fascinating on many levels the film’s only weakness is the pointlessness of the core activity. But that too is part of the point.

Spellbound is just now out on DVD. Hat tip to Craig Newmark whose earlier recommendation I followed.