Movie: Sarah's Key

A sad story of the holocaust in France. I did not know the history involved and was glad to learn it. While the NYT reviewer is correct about there being two movies in one, I thought the juxtaposition worked well at providing perspective on the problems middle class people face in developed countries.

Recommended.

Movie: X-men First Class

We actually saw X-Men: First Class a few weeks ago, but I have been slow to blog it. I was never a comic book guy growing up, and most of the deluge of comic-based movies over the past few years have come up a bit short, but this one is near the top of the distribution.

The "never again" sub-theme and the associated (and quite explicit - nothing is subtle in this movie) parallels the movie draws between the Jews and the mutants add a worthwhile serious tone to what is otherwise high quality fluff.

Recommended as summer fun.

Movie: The Trip

We saw the trip last week at the Michigan Theater. The basic idea is that two British comics go on a road trip through the north of England checking out highbrow restaurants (and, in one case, checking out the local talent as well).

The landscapes are gorgeous, the banter is clever, and watching the restaurant scenes is great fun. The movie was a bit more smarmy than I was expecting, though that was explained when I read the NYT review and discovered that it had been shown as a short TV series in the UK prior to being reedited for the screen. As best I can tell, much of the point of mass market TV is to make conventional people (who tend to be over-represented among TV viewers) feel good about being conventional, and that is precisely the aim of the smarminess here.

Both of the two main characters are apparently regulars on British TV, and Steve Coogan certainly looked familiar, though I could figure out from his imdb.com listing where I had seen him before. In any event, he is apparently best known for the character of Alan Partridge. Here is an example, with a nod to my friend Peter Dolton, who hails from Newcastle in the land of Geordie (pronounced "Jordy") accents:

Recommended, if you can handle a bit of smarm.

Movie: Captain America

Yet another comic book movie. I think the Marvel people should be worrying a bit about over-saturating their market.

This particular comic book movie one is fine but not extraordinary. I agree with the NYT reviewer's 15-year-old colleague who said that Captain America is better than Thor. Given the reviews I saw of Green Lantern, it is likely better than that as well.

Weakly recommended as summer fluff.

Movie: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt. 2

Impressive. The NYT agrees.

Now it is time to read the books.

Recommended.

Movie: Kung Fu Panda 2

We took one for the team, or rather for the kid, on this one, though she herself was remarkably fidgety throughout.

Reading the NYT review, which finds it too dark and not as much fun as the original, made me wonder how they choose which reviewer at the NYT reviews each movie, and why A.O. Scott ended up reviewing this one.

Probably better suited to older, male children.

Movie: Lincoln Lawyer

This was much better than I expected. The NYT - not A.O. Scott this time - does a better job than I could of expounding on the movie's virtues.

Recommended.

A scene I had forgotten

I did not remember this scene from Spinal Tap until reminded of it by Jeff Wooldridge (!) on Facebook today.

Embedding is disabled so you have to click through to see it. Short, funny and worth it.

Movie: Fast Five

We are in the midst of a very fluffy streak in terms of movies. Last night was Fast Five, which got picked mainly because it had a surprisingly positive rating on rotten tomatoes for an action movie.

The NYT - not A.O. Scott this time - does not share the enthusiasm and is, I think, too harsh. Fast Five is better than Pirates or Thor, though I, at least, would put it below Hanna, among the last four action movies we've seen.

As the NYT review suggests, Fast Five is really just Ocean's 11 gone to Brazil, with burlier guys, less humor, a dash of Brazilian beach (required, of course, to get the handprint of the bad guy in order to open the great big safe) and lots and lots of cars and chases.

Recommended for (very) mindless fun.

Movie: Thor

We saw Thor last week at the local Rave multiplex.

A.O. Scott's review is worth reading just to see him in full snark mode, but the movie was not quite as bad as he makes it out to be. I would say it is around the median of the various Marvel comic books turned movies.

Still, if you are choosing between them, I would pick Pirates just for Johnny Depp.

Aside: you know that raves are no longer cool when there is a chain of theaters named after them.

Old Woody Allen interviews

Bits from old 60 minutes interviews with Woody Allen. The editing is heavy-handed at the end but still very much worth watching.

Movie: Pirates of the Caribbean, On Stranger Tides

We saw the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie last night at a local multiplex. A.O. Scott at the New York Times says all I have to say, other than that the scene with mermaids, which one might better refer to as the "attack of the aquatic super-models" is pretty cool. This is very fluffy fluff, indeed. Oh, and the writing is a disaster.

Recommended for mindless fun and Johnny Depp.

Movie: Potiche

A fine (very) French fluff set (perfectly) in an airbrushed 1970s.

A. O. Scott gets it almost exactly right; I did not share his view that the movie went on a bit too long.

Recommended.

Movie: Hanna

Hanna is hip, stylish fun with very fine acting, engaging cinematography, some fine music and lots of scenes of Berlin's gritty underside.

It is (slightly) marred only by a couple of logical errors in the script, as when poor Hanna, who is scared by electricity and television in one scene, and lacks money for food in many others, wanders into an internet cafe in Berlin and does a bunch of research that indirectly helps fill in some of the background of the story.

The NYT review does not do it justice, and reminds me again that I wish A.O. Scott would do all of their reviews.

If you are in the mood for some high-end Hollywood thriller fun, Hanna is recommended.

Movie: Atlas Shrugged, Part 1

As it turned out, the movie at the multiplex that best fit our schedule was Atlas Shrugged, Part I. As noted yesterday, the critics and the audiences differ here: as I write, the tomato meter based on the critics sits at 6% out of 100 while that based on the viewers sits at 85% out of 100. I suspect that this may be the only movie ever to get 6% out of 100 at which the majority of the audience, at least at the theater we went to, applauded at the end of the movie.

A big part of the problem on both ends is that neither the critics nor the audience is really judging the movie as a movie. Instead, they are expressing their support or disdain for the political viewpoints of Ayn Rand (something many of the critics, I suspect, know only in parody).

Another big part of the problem, and I say this knowing that it is quite a statement indeed, is that the movie is much, much less well written than the book. Yes, Ayn Rand is hardly Jane Austen or even Charles Dickens, but she is a reasonable writer of genre fiction. In contrast, the writing in the movie is just plain awful.

Here is Roger Ebert's review from the Chicago Sun-Times. It is clear that he doesn't like Ayn Rand's political views, but he still gives a pretty good summary of what is not right with this movie. It was made on the cheap, with weak writing, sometimes mediocre acting and a very low budget. Hence all the landscape shots and soap opera interiors.

My own view is that this was an opportunity missed and missed badly. I do not agree with much of Ayn's philosophy - I support altruism the way I define it, I don't care for her atheism, and I prefer my rationalism to her romanticism. But one could have made a really great movie that mocked those in politics and in the broader cultural world who pander to envy and sloth and who denigrate achievement while elevating mediocrity. Ayn Rand mocks such people in her books with icy enthusiasm; in the movie the corresponding characters come off as simply drones playing their parts in the great beltway pork machine, and thus more banal than evil. Also, Ayn's attacks were aimed directly at the people and ideas of her time. One of her later books contains a chapter that pairs similar quotations from JFK and Hitler, for example. There is none of that in the movie. The bad guys are generic and boring. The only one you really hate at the end of the movie is Hank Rearden's ball-busting wife and you hate her not for her philosophy, as Ayn would have wanted, but just for treating her husband so poorly.

So, if you have read the book, it is worth going to see what they do with it. If not, take a pass.

Atlas Shrugged reviews

I don't think I've ever seen a bigger divergence between the ratings of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes and the ratings of the viewers than the one for Atlas Shrugged, Part I. The problem, of course, is that the critics' ratings are biased downward for political reasons while the viewers' ratings are biased up due to self-selection on political views. In formal jargon, this means that the "true" rating is only set-identified, and the set is a big one. Put somewhat less technically, the two sets of ratings bound the truth and in this case, as in so many others, the bounds are too wide to be informative.

Movie: White Material

A lush, thoughtful, and indirectly violent study of civilization slipping away in French colonial Africa.

The NYT review captures it well.

This will surely be in my top five for the year.

Recommended.

Movie: Rango

Rango is good, quirky fun.

The excellent A.O. Scott review in the New York Times has the perfect summary:

... the spirit is closer to those old Bugs Bunny cartoons in which Bugs would cross paths with real movie stars or perform Wagnerian opera.

Exactly!

I should note that the adults in our family enjoyed it more than the four-year old, who got a bit fidgety at times.

Recommended.

More on film subsidies

1. A reason interview with filmmaker Joe Gressis (the video directly above).

2. NYT on states cutting film subsidies.

3. Scandals with film subsidies in Iowa.

4. CBPP (never thought I'd link to them) on film subsidies, but it looks like a reasonable survey.

Seeing what is missing

The chair of Michigan's theater and drama department has an unfortunate editorial in annarbor.com today in which she illustrates the (very) common problem of being able to see the direct effects of a policy but not the indirect effects.

Yes, Michigan's film subsidies lead to more employment in the film industry in Michigan. That is the direct effect. They also have at least two indirect effects. First, they reduce employment in the film industry in other states (and countries too, but let's not even go there). Now, in most policy discussions the welfare of individuals outside the US border is set to zero; in the case of the film subsidy, the geographic limits of our concern with others are apparently narrower, and coincide with the state boundaries of Michigan. Why should people inside those boundaries matter more for policy than those outside it?

More directly, the policy costs money, and that money comes from taxes. Those taxes have effects too. They raise the price of other types of economic activity in the state and thereby reduce the amount of those activities. They also distort behavior - income taxes, for example, decrease the relative price of leisure - and reduce welfare through that channel as well. Where are these other effects in Prof. Lindsay's editorial? They are invisible. Part of the value of learning economics is learning to see these indirect effects and to take account of them when advocating policies and making decisions.

For sure, It is hard to oppose policies that transfer money from others to us. Our self-interest rebels. I love theater and movies and give generously to support both in Ann Arbor. It is hard to argue against transfers that prop up my preferred leisure time activities.

But the film subsidies are not good policy. That shadowy and somewhat conspiratorial "other motive" that Prof. Lindsay refers to at the end of her piece is just economic efficiency, nothing more.