Category: Film

Bruce Willis has been awarded France’s highest cultural honor. Mr. Willis, 50, was formally inducted yesterday into the French Order of Arts and Letters. The French culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, said the award paid tribute to an actor whose work "epitomizes the strength of American cinema, the power of the emotions that he invites us to share on the world’s screens, and the sturdy personalities of his legendary characters." Mr. Willis, 50, who was in France to promote his latest movie, "Hostage," said that the honor "proves that film has no borders and that we all belong to the same artistic community." Mr. Donnedieu de Vabres said that the actor’s roles could not be reduced to a simple struggle between good and evil, yet he added, "You really have killed a lot of bad guys."

Here is the link.  Here are some poets with rest stops named after them. 

1. Da Ali G Show: The Complete First Season.  Is there a more powerful comic genius at work today?  This British would-be gangsta rapper has at least four hilarious personae; Yana’s favorite is Funkyzeit mit Bruno, a gay Austrian fashion designer.  Or imagine a funnier Howard Stern interviewing Newt Gingrich, Dick Thornburgh, Ed Meese, and Reed Irvine.  His repeated portrayal of a hapless Kazakh man seeking sex has drawn repeated protests from the embassy; it is now what the country is known for.

2. Laibach: The Videos. Laibach was one of the leading Slovenian punk rock metal industrial fascist-mocking groups of the 1990s (the sentence is not a joke).  Their Let it Be album redoes the Beatles, and their "Across the Universe" is my favorite Beatles cover, with Joe Cocker as a close second.  But note: their Nazi-Wagnerian jackboots reconstruction of "Get Back" will send most of you running away.

3. Goodbye Dragon Inn, The first line of dialogue does not come until about halfway through this 80-minute movie.  And much of the film is you watching other people watching a movie, how is that for meta?  It is about the passing of the old Taiwan, the transitory nature of observation, the power of the image, and the fundamental sillness of watching a movie through.  Not since Tarkovsky has a director used sound and silence so effectively, nor is anyone so good with restroom scenes.  It is a help, not a spoiler, to tell you that the two old men are also (much younger) characters in the movie on the screen.  Tsai Ming-Liang is one of the world’s seminal directors and this is one of his leading entries.  Short enough to endure, even if this is not your cup of tea, and maybe you will love it as I did.

Well, not the same price in all cases.  Before 6 p.m. is cheaper, there are numerous dollar theaters, and not all films allow for discount coupons.  Nonetheless a multiplex will charge the same ($9.50 in my case) for the number one movie and for a flop.  Nor is the price more expensive for Saturday night, or during the summer when demand is higher.  Can any economic model predict these results?  Here are a few observations:

1. Theater owners are trying to maximize profit across all screens.  Spillover demand, from people who can’t get in to see their first choice, is a significant source of revenue.  You don’t want markets to clear on a screen-by-screen basis.

2. Low prices encourage queuing, which attracts the young and hardy.  Those same customers are most likely to spread the virtues of movies by word of mouth.  A theater might rather have a young customer than an old customer.

3. Lines for a popular film are one way of generating valuable publicity.

4. A priori, I would have expected the number one movie to sell cheaper, not more expensive.  Moviemakers wish to generate snowball effects for potential hits.  (For purposes of comparison, it reflects commercial prestige to have your books sell for a low rather than high price.)  This also predicts movies will be cheaper in early stages of their run, which does not generally seem to be true.

5. Maybe the whole theatrical thing is a shadowplay for popcorn sales and advertising for a subsequent DVD release.  The theater owner, on his side, may not care so much about getting the profit-maximizing price right.  So he invests in consumer good will by offering a flat price across all films. 

6. The emergence of strict uniform pricing across movies appeared in the early 1970s; it is sometimes suggested that Paramount insisted upon such pricing (illegally) for the release of The Godfather.  (The 1948 Paramount decision limited the involvement of the distributor in pricing decisions, but there is pressure nonetheless.)

7. Variable pricing would divert movie demand to weekdays, which would make it harder for a film to be number one at the box office for its opening weekend.  And since a top  movie will sell out in any case, why bother lowering the price for Saturday night?

8. With differential prices you might buy a ticket for a cheaper movie and walk into the more expensive movie.

You could ask related questions about why restaurants do not tack on a surcharge for Saturday nights, although I find this practice is becoming more common.  As far as the movies go, I will put the most weight on #7.  And I have turned on the comments section…

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.