Category: Film

Over at Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux asks, “Suppose that a movie with exaggerations on a similar scale [to The Day After Tomorrow] were made by a free-market enthusiast. That movie might contain some of the following scenes:”

A ten-cent increase in the federal minimum wage casts millions of blacks and Hispanics into permanent unemployment and despair; all of the unemployed women scrape up pennies by offering themselves as prostitutes, while all of the unemployed men swarm to the suburbs to rape soccer-moms and then riot so violently in the cities that the Empire State building, the U.S. Capitol, the Sears Tower, and the Bank of America building all crash violently to the ground, killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians, including a kindly book-peddler specializing in works by and about Ayn Rand….

Cool movie. I hope Don options the rights.

The first German film to compete in Cannes in 11 years, it [The Edukators] tells the story of three idealistic youths who break into rich people’s villas and move around their furniture, leaving behind notes with messages such as: “You have too much money.”

Their aim is not to steal from the rich to give to the poor, but to make their targets question their privileges. When they are surprised by one of the homeowners, they kidnap him and are forced to put their ideals into practice.

“I’m really happy to present this film in the country where the word revolution was invented,” Weingartner told a news conference in this French Riviera resort.

As is often the case, the remainder of the story surpasses any comment I could offer:

Critics at Cannes clapped and cheered during scenes in which the kidnappers and their victim intelligently debate how youthful idealism eventually fades.

Weingartner avoids a simplistic ending, but leaves open the possibility that each of them is changed by the experience.

Here is the full story. Here is more information on the movie. Don’t forget that the alternative title of the film is “The Fat Years are Over.”

Troy, the movie version of Homer’s The Iliad, is out today. Here is one report, from the May 14 Entertainment Weekly:

While Pitt’s character got tweaked, the rest of The Iliad went pretty darn Hollywood. Briseis, a slave girl captured by the Greeks — speechless in Homer’s tale — becomes a royal priestess and love interest for Achilles…More notably, no gods interfere with battles in Troy. “I didn’t want them in,” says screenwriter Benioff.

The screenwriter notes that activist gods would make the movie too much like The Clash of the Titans. My rhetorical question for the day is why clashing polytheistic gods make for a less broadly saleable story than do human heroes. And does this help explain why monotheistic religions have been growing at the expense of polytheism for some time now?

Thanks to Yana for the pointer to the EW article.

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.