Category: Film

Two movies I forgot to tell you about

by  Tyler Cowen in

The first is Are You There, God?: It’s Me Margaret.  In addition to being a good movie, it is pro-American, pro-family, pro-religious tolerance, pro-suburbs, and even pro-New Jersey, none of it done pedantically or with excess self-consciousness.

The second is Polite Society, a British comedy-action-Pakistani marriage film, with a South Asian kinetic feel but ultimately in the Western moviemaking tradition.  One Pakistani younger sister is trying to stop the older sister from getting married, and she persists past a reasonable point.  The whole plot only makes sense if you realize the younger sister has been sexually abused (is it a spoiler if your reader/viewer might not have seen the point in the first place?).  Ultimately this movie is about the very limited range of options facing Pakistani women in British society, even with Western comforts and pseudo-freedoms.

Both are recommended.

At the Helm, Kirk or Spock? The Pros and Cons of Charismatic Leadership

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is a new paper (AEA gate) by the very smart Benjamin Hermalin, here is the abstract:

Charismatic leaders are often desired. At the same time, experience, especially with demagogues, as well as social science studies, raise doubts about such leaders. This paper offers explanations for charismatic leadership’s “mixed report card.” It offers insights into why and when charismatic leadership can be effective; which, when, and why certain groups will prefer more to less charismatic leaders; and how being more charismatic can make leaders worse in other dimensions, particularly causing them to work less hard on their followers’ behalf.

And here is one important part of the model:

…a charismatic leader can get away with concealing bad news without triggering overly pessimistic beliefs.

I like the paper, but isn’t Spock super-charismatic, and all these women want to sleep with him?  And isn’t there a long article about all the terrible decisions and advice stemming from Spock in various Star Trek episodes?

Matt Yglesias on movies vs. TV

by  Tyler Cowen in

But I’ve gotten really disgruntled with the “prestige TV” landscape and am trying to redirect my content consumption accordingly. One thing that makes movies really great in my view is that before they shoot a movie, they write a screenplay and the screenplay has an end. Both the screenwriter and other people have read that screenplay all the way from beginning to end and they’ve tweaked and changed it and gotten it into a position where they are ready to start production. Then after a movie is filmed, the editor and director work with the footage and come up with a complete movie that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. They then ship the movie out, and it’s screened by critics who watch the entire movie before writing their review.

This does not guarantee that every movie that comes out is good. But it does guarantee that if someone tells you “‘The Menu’ is good,” they are evaluating a completed product…

By contrast, TV shows have this quasi-improvisational quality where the showrunners are constantly needing to come up with new balls to toss into the air. In old-fashioned non-prestigious “adventure of the week”-type shows, this actually works fine because the writers are not building up tension or setting unexplored plots in motion. But as serialized TV storytelling has gotten more and more common, we’re more and more often asked to show patience through early episodes or to try to find things intriguing with no ability to know whether any of it will pay off. Creators often have no idea where they’re going with the story.

Back in HBO’s heyday, the tradeoff was that The Sopranos and The Wire got to paint on a giant canvas and tell stories that are just too capacious for the movie format. But eventually networks got tired of spending that kind of money and cut back the sizes of the casts to something more normal for television.

That is from his Friday mailbag ($).  The bottom line is that, like Matt, you should watch more movies and less TV.

My excellent Conversation with Tom Holland

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the transcript, audio, and video.  Here is part of the summary:

Historian Tom Holland joined Tyler to discuss in what ways his Christianity is influenced by Lord Byron, how the Book of Revelation precipitated a revolutionary tradition, which book of the Bible is most foundational for Western liberalism, the political differences between Paul and Jesus, why America is more pro-technology than Europe, why Herodotus is his favorite writer, why the Greeks and Persians didn’t industrialize despite having advanced technology, how he feels about devolution in the United Kingdom and the potential of Irish unification, what existential problem the Church of England faces, how the music of Ennio Morricone helps him write for a popular audience, why Jurassic Park is his favorite movie, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Which Gospel do you view as most foundational for Western liberalism and why?

HOLLAND: I think that that is a treacherous question to ask because it implies that there would be a coherent line of descent from any one text that can be traced like that. I think that the line of descent that leads from the Gospels and from the New Testament and from the Bible and, indeed, from the entire corpus of early Christian texts to modern liberalism is too confused, too much of a swirl of influences for us to trace it back to a particular text.

If I had to choose any one book from the Bible, it wouldn’t be a Gospel. It would probably be Paul’s Letter to the Galatians because Paul’s Letter to the Galatians contains the famous verse that there is no Jew or Greek, there is no slave or free, there is no man or woman in Christ. In a way, that text — even if you bracket out and remove the “in Christ” from it — that idea that, properly, there should be no discrimination between people of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, based on gender, based on class, remains pretty foundational for liberalism to this day.

I think that liberalism, in so many ways, is a secularized rendering of that extraordinary verse. But I think it’s almost impossible to avoid metaphor when thinking about what the relationship is of these biblical texts, these biblical verses to the present day. I variously compared Paul, in particular in his letters and his writings, rather unoriginally, to an acorn from which a mighty oak grows.

But I think actually, more appropriately, of a depth charge released beneath the vast fabric of classical civilization. And the ripples, the reverberations of it are faint to begin with, and they become louder and louder and more and more disruptive. Those echoes from that depth charge continue to reverberate to this day.

And:

COWEN: In Genesis and Exodus, why does the older son so frequently catch it hard?

HOLLAND: Well, I’m an elder son.

COWEN: I know. Your brother’s younger, and he’s a historian.

HOLLAND: My brother is younger. It’s a question on which I’ve often pondered, because I was going to church.

COWEN: What do you expect from your brother?

HOLLAND: The truth is, I have no idea. I don’t know. I’ve often worried about it.

Quite a good CWT.

My Conversation with Glenn Loury

by  Tyler Cowen in

Moving throughout, here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the summary:

Economist and public intellectual Glenn Loury joined Tyler to discuss the soundtrack of Glenn’s life, Glenn’s early career in theoretical economics, his favorite Thomas Schelling story, the best place to raise a family in the US, the seeming worsening mental health issues among undergraduates, what he learned about himself while writing his memoir, what his right-wing fans most misunderstand about race, the key difference he has with John McWhorter, his evolving relationship with Christianity, the lasting influence of his late wife, his favorite novels and movies, how well he thinks he will face death, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: What’s your favorite Thomas Schelling story?

LOURY: [laughs] This is a story about me as much as it is about Tom Schelling. The year is 1984. I’ve been at Harvard for two years. I’m appointed a professor of economics and of Afro-American studies, and I’m having a crisis of confidence, thinking I’m never going to write another paper worth reading again.

Tom is a friend. He helped to recruit me because he was on the committee that Henry Rosovsky, the famous and powerful dean of the college of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, who hired me — the committee that Rosovsky put together to try to find someone who could fill the position that I was hired into: professor of economics and of Afro-American Studies. They said Afro-American in those years.

Tom was my connection. He’s the guy who called me up when I was sitting at Michigan in Ann Arbor in early ’82, and said, “Do you think you might be interested in a job out here?” He had helped to recruit me.

So, I had this crisis of confidence. “Am I ever going to write another paper? I’m never going to write another paper.” I’m saying this to Tom, and he’s sitting, sober, listening, nodding, and suddenly starts laughing, and he can’t stop, and the laughing becomes uncontrollable. I am completely flummoxed by this. What the hell is he laughing at? What’s so funny? I just told him something I wouldn’t even tell my wife, which is, I was afraid I was a failure, that it was an imposter syndrome situation, that I could never measure up.

Everybody in the faculty meeting at Harvard’s economics department in 1982 was famous. Everybody. I was six years out of graduate school, and I didn’t know if I could fit in. He’s laughing, and I couldn’t get it. After a while, he regains his composure, and he says, “You think you’re the only one? This place is full of neurotics hiding behind their secretaries and their 10-foot oak doors, fearing the dreaded question, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ Why don’t you just put your head down and do your work? Believe me, everything will be okay.” That was Tom Schelling.

COWEN: He was great. I still miss him.

And the final question:

COWEN: Very last question. Do you think you will do a good job facing death?

Interesting and revealing throughout.

Cinematic markets in everything

by  Tyler Cowen in

AMC Theatres is changing the way it charges for seats.

America’s largest movie chain announced that the prices of a ticket will now be based on seat location, meaning seats in the front will be cheaper while more desirable seats in the middle will now cost more. The ticket pricing initiative, called Sightline at AMC, will roll out at all of its roughly 1,000 movie theaters by the end of the year.

Three pricing tiers will soon be offered. For example, the highest-end “Preferred” tier are in the middle of the theaters and will be priced at a “slight premium” compared to its “Standard” tier, which the theater chains says will remain the most common choice and will be sold for the “traditional cost of a ticket.” The third tier is called “Value,” which are seats in the front row of theaters and will cost less than than its “Standard” tier.

Broadway and music concerts do this, so why not movie theaters?  Here is the full story, via Natasha.

Rewatching *A.I* (minor spoilers)

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes, the 2001 Spielberg movie.  Some parts drag, but mostly it has held up very well.  I was struck by how Girardian it is.  A few points struck me:

1. The robots will be Girardian, whether we like it or not.

2. To the extent we can solve the alignment problem, we do so by torturing the A.I.’s and placing them in situations where they cannot possibly be content.

3. The robots work effectively, but the ChatGPT equivalent in the movie is quite buggy.

4. People are morally superficial, and they love others for what they do for them, not for their own sake.  It is the robots who engage with the human beings for sex who learn this truth.

5. The hardest thing to predict is what the A.I.’s will learn from us, and that will make some of them unique and also difficult to manage.

Best movies of 2022

by  Tyler Cowen in

The Lost Daughter, TV but still good, a movie of sorts, based on Ferrante.

Belle, spectacular Japanese anime.

Licorice Pizza, a good normal movie, captured California well.

Compartment Number Six, with a new meaning after the war of course.

Memoria

Petit Maman, French, short, plays mind games with you, profound.

The Quiet Girl (Irish)

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

Vesper, Lithuanian, dreamy, Tarkovsky influence but faster-paced, an underrated movie this year.

Tár, really quite good and interesting.

Decision to Leave, Korean crime drama with Hitchcockian twists and inspirations.

The Disciple

The Fabelmans, Ignore the cloying preview.

Saint Omer, French-Senegalese courtroom drama.

Clytaemnestra, Korean movie, one hour long.

EO, Polish movie about a donkey, better than you think.

Overall an abysmal year for Hollywood, a pretty good year for the movies. I haven’t yet seen Oppenheimer or Bardo, so their absence on the list should not be taken as a negative signal.

*Avatar: The Way of Water*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Eh.  The sequence of the last hour is quite good, but there is not enough “movie” packed into what came before.  The villains are cartoonish, and the protagonists feel like “generic aliens.”  Dramatic tension is weak throughout.  Cinematic references include to The Poseidon Adventure, Titanic, Frankenstein vs. the Wolf Man, Waterworld, Return of the Jedi, Whale Rider (do the Maori feel ripped off at all?), and other films.

Did I mention that the main plot line concerns doxxing?  You can sit around and debate which of the characters would have been suspended from Twitter or not.

The theater was perhaps one-third full on a Friday evening, and most of the tickets seem to have been sold two days earlier when I first booked and reserved the seats.

How many more of these are coming down the pike?

My Conversation with John Adams

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio and transcript, here is part of the episode summary:

He joined Tyler to discuss why architects have it easier than opera composers, what drew him to the story of Antony and Cleopatra, why he prefers great popular music to the classical tradition, the “memory spaces” he uses to compose, the role of Christianity in his work, the anxiety of influence, the unusual life of Charles Ives, the relationship between the availability and appreciation of music, how contemporary music got a bad rap, his favorite Bob Dylan album, why he doesn’t think San Francisco was crucial to his success, why he doesn’t believe classical music is dead or even dying, his fascination with Oppenheimer, the problem with film composing, his letter to Leonard Bernstein, what he’s doing next, and more.

And here is an excerpt:

COWEN: How do you avoid what Harold Bloom called the anxiety of influence?

ADAMS: Harold Bloom was a very great literary critic, sometimes a little bit of a windbag, but his writings on Coleridge and Shelley, and especially on Shakespeare, were very important to me. He had a phrase that he coined, the anxiety of influence, which is interesting because he himself was not a creator. He was a critic, but he intuited that we creators, whether we’re painters or novelists or filmmakers or composers — that we live, so to speak, under the shadow of the greats that preceded us.

If you’re a poet, you’ve got all this great literature behind you, whether it’s Shakespeare or Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson. And likewise for me, I’ve got really heavyweight predecessors in Beethoven, in Bach, in Mahler, in Stravinsky. Maybe that’s what he meant, just the anxiety of, is what I do even comparable with this great art? Another thing is, if I have an idea, has somebody already thought of it before? Those are the neurotic aspects of my life, but I’m no different than anybody else. We just have to deal with those concerns.

COWEN: Are you more afraid of Mozart or of Charles Ives?

ADAMS: [laughs] I’m not afraid of either of them. I love them. I obviously love Mozart more than Charles Ives. Charles Ives is a very, very unusual figure. He was almost completely unknown in most of the 20th century until Leonard Bernstein, who was very glamorous and very well known — Bernstein brought him to the public notice, and he coined this idea that Charles Ives was the Abraham Lincoln of music. Of course, Americans love something they can grasp onto like, “Oh, yes, I can relate to that. He’s the Abraham Lincoln of music.”

Charles Ives was a hermit. He worked during the day in an insurance firm, at which he was very successful, but spent his weekends and his summer vacations composing. His work is very sentimental, also very avant-garde for its time. I’ve conducted quite a few of his pieces. They are not, I have to admit, 100 percent satisfying, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that Ives never heard these pieces, or hardly ever heard them.

When you’re composing, you have to hear something and then realize, “Oh, that works and that doesn’t.” I think the fact that Ives — maybe he was just born before his time. He was born in Connecticut in the 1870s, and America at that time just was still a very raw country and not ready for a classical experimental composer.

COWEN: You seem to understand everything in music, from Indian ragas to popular songs, classical music, jazz. Do you ever worry that you have too many influences?

Recommended.

*The Fabelmans*

by  Tyler Cowen in

From the preview I feared it might be unwatchable, but it far exceeded expectations.  This story of Spielberg’s own childhood life (a risky premise for a sentimentalist!) is one of the best Spielberg movies, one of the best movies about America “back then,” and one of the best movies about the power of cinema itself.

It shows the corniness and earnestness of the 1950s and 1960s, and how that awfulness also fed into a uniquely American form of creativity and productivity.  (It also supports my notion that “no one back then really was funny.”)  It is a very good movie about families.  And a very good movie about different parts of America, namely New Jersey, Arizona, and California.

It is fun to look for all the visual references to other Spielberg films, such as the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, which by the way is one of his finest achievements.

The performances and cinematography are excellent, even for a Spielberg movie.

The worst Spielberg movies are the big grossers, such as E.T., Jurassic Park, and the Indiana Jones Temple of Doom take.  Jaws is here an exception.  The best Spielberg movies are the oddball nutters, such as A.I., Duel, Sugarland Express, Minority Report, and the Director’s Cut of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Spielberg is now close to commercially irrelevant, and I am pleased to see he is using that to his advantage.  Recommended.