Hollywood hates free-markets: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps edition

From Reason.tv:

Oliver Stone’s uber-villain Gordon Gekko is back in the new film, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, which (surprise!) features greedy capitalists behaving badly. It might remind you of Avatar, Mission Impossible 2 or roughly a zillion other films in which capitalists destroy the environment, concoct killer viruses, harvest organs, and cover up murder in order to feed their lust of profit. Even when capitalism isn’t the primary target, the representatives of commerce are often flat-out repulsive (think Jabba the Hutt).

Perhaps it’s ironic that Hollywood filmmakers practice what they preach against. Sure he palls around with socialist dictators Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, but there’s no doubt Oliver Stone hopes to rake in obscene profits with his new flick.

See also Alex Tabarrok’s Wall Street Journal op-ed:  Capitalism: Hollywood’s Miscast Villain – Why the film industry is so good at getting business wrong.

(via Christian Toto at Pajamas Media)

a movie genre I don’t like

I was considering seeing the movie Crash, so I went to mrqe.com to look at reviews and started to read the one my A.O. Scott in the New York Times. Now, I’m averse to this publication because of their assinine punctuation policy of using apostrophes for pluralizing acronyms such as DVD (“DVD’s). They do this because their headlines are in all caps, and god forbid, on the rare occasion a plural acronym would be in a headline (there’s only on UN, IRS, FBI, and CIA, and what about the more commom possessive form?), they throw in a lower case “s.” Idiots! (see my blogs from Nov. 30 and Dec 23 2003.)

As I was saying before ranting, here’s how Mr. Scott describes the genre (the Times also puts quotes around movie titles — I thought italics were appropriate):

What kind of movie is ”Crash”? It belongs to a genre that has been flourishing in recent years — at least in the esteem of critics — but that still lacks a name. A provisional list of examples might include ”Monster’s Ball,” ”House of Sand and Fog” and ”21 Grams.” In each of these films, as in ”Crash,” Americans from radically different backgrounds are brought together by a grim serendipity that forces them, or at least the audience, to acknowledge their essential connectedness.The look of these movies and the rough authenticity of their locations create an atmosphere of naturalism that is meant to give force to their rigorously pessimistic view of American life. The performances, often by some of the finest screen actors working today, have the dense texture and sober discipline that we associate with realism. But to classify these movies as realistic would be misleading, as the stories they tell are, in nearly every respect, preposterous, and they tend to be governed less by the spirit of observation than by superstition.

I made my decision upon reading the comparison to 21 Grams, which I disliked for pretty much the same reasons I disliked Leaving Las Vegas and Sideways: they are movies about about people I cannot admire. There must be more to it, though, but it’s a start.

Download thoughts.

On Wednesday I got into the lotus position in yoga class, and more importantly, I got out of it. So that’s progress. My trip back East for Thanksgiving was nice. My brother plays in a slow-pitch softball league that does not use a mat for the strike zone. Once a year I live with cable TV, where I can indulge in CSPAN’s Book-TV and The History Channel. Book-TV had the author of Know It All, who read the entire Encylopedia Brittanica. THe History Channel has a show called Conspiracy!, which is fun. The one about whether FDR knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor was pretty good.

I also saw the movie, The Incredibles, which was enjoyable, and it was nice to see the message that we should be proud of our virtues. Rather anti-egalitarian. Yet, the villian was pretty smart, himself.

Last night’s Objectivist meeting was fun – if debating the legitimacy of intellectual “property” is your idea of fun. On the topic of policy, I started reading The Economic Laws of Scienctific Research. The acknowledgements section was great, as Terrence Kealey, the author, mentioned his “enemies.” I should quote the passage. Hillarious.

To appreciate

Briefly: I saw The Magnetic Fields perform on Boulder campus. A good band, not rock-n-roll, and they don’t seem to like performing, but quite talented. The opening act, Darren Hanlon, was quite good. He reminded me of Jonathan Richman, and when I commented on this to the woman next to me, she said he’d held her when she was a baby, and that Jonathan Richman was in her father’s tai chi class. Woah. I asked her to marry me right there on the spot, but she said she was “gay.” How do I find ‘em? Anyway, I asked Hanlon about Richman, and he said he was a fan, and that he’d played his most “Jonathan-like” songs.

Tonight I saw The Life of Brian at the International Film Series. Funny, good commentary on bureaucracy, independent thinking, feminism, and religion. Also on video is the PBS special, They Made America, which I linked to the video section of my website.

And right now on Charlie Rose, Nathan Myhrvold is on the show. He’s CEO & Managing Director, Intellectual Ventures and Former Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft Corporation. His new company is focused on invention, which ties to They Made America. He’s so creation oriented, which is great, and pointed out that people should be more scared of terrorism than nanotech. Good point.

Speaking of invention I met a Swarthmore graduate yesterday, Phil Wieser, a law professor at CU. He pointed me the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a think tank I might be interested in. I have some worries about living in DC, though. Still, the idea of fostering invention and advancing politial and ecomomic freedom — false dichotomy, really — does inspire me.

Final Destination (really?)

A friend tells me that “amateur” comes from the French “amore”, meaning “love.” This of course implies that professionals don’t love their work.

OK, what is the deal (Seinfeld whine) with the new movie “Final Destination 2″? I mean, wasn’t the first one final? That’s it. You’re there! So, in the first one, they did not make it or something? Har har.

Amateur, Nurse Betty

I mispelled the word “amateur” as “amature” in an e-mail. Interestingly, a certain section of the population mispells it the same way, as shown by Google search on “amature”. In good company I am.

Last night I saw a movie called Nurse Betty. Quite good, but again, movie makers have no clue about gun safety. The actors always have their fingers on the trigger, even when they are not ready to, or don’t want to, shoot! Where are the lawyers to sue them? (No, I don’t advocate such a lawsuit.)

On Spiderman (the movie)

I saw Spiderman, the movie, today on an airplane. A fine pick for an in-flight movie, as I would never have rented it, but I’m glad I saw it. OK, that opening song — I hated it, so I took the headphones off and stared out the window until that ended. Now I want to find out who the artist was so I can uh, complain better? Anyway, William Defoe was great as Green Goblin. I guess I’d heard that he played a villain in this movie, but from the first scene of him in the Rolls Royce, I knew he was bad. Except, I think that was the first scene of the movie after that opening song ended, so I wanted to turn up the volume. Instead, I changed the channel on my headset to an NPR-like interview. So the scene changes to the inside of the Rolls, and I hear this woman explaining how she got into reggae. That was confusing to say the least. Anyway, Defoe just looked evil.

What else…I loved the trite dialog, e.g., when the villain says to the hero: “We’re not so different, you and I.” There were times when I just laughed, but not at the movie, because I felt that the movie makers knew they were being silly. It is based on a comic book, after all, which were not always so silly before they were in effect censored.

There were two distictively post-September 11th scenes: One where the New Yorkers are throwing things at Green Goblin, and one says somethig like “In New York, if you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us!” The other was at the end, when Spiderman was perched at the American Flag.

Of course, as with any Hollywood movie, the power-hungry villian was once again a “businessman”, but in this case in the pockets of the military, and Peter Parker’s uncle says the usual line about corporate down-sizing and lay-offs. Perhaps more people should read Milton Friedman’s article about how corporations are contractually obligated to their share holders and boards of directors to maximize profits. I think that’s what he said. Still, I’m not quite settled on the limited liability issue, and the legal status of corporations. I scanned in the Friedman article, and meant to put it on-line, but it’s not there yet.

Back to the movie, I found it touching how much people do need heros. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing, but clearly in Spiderman there was a sense of how great it was that “someone is coming” to make it all better. That reminds me of two things. One, is what psychologist Nathaniel Branden wrote: “no one is coming to make life right or to ‘fix’ things.” There’s also my favorite Flaming Lips song, “Waitin’ for a Superman”. No one’s coming,…”it�s just too heavy for Superman to lift.”

I’m still wondering about what Green Goblin said about the public’s turning on Spiderman, or any hero. Maybe there’s truth to it, or he’s just trying to bring him to the Dark Side.

Americana

Went trap shooting a few weeks ago. Pretty cool. I hit one on my first shot. Then it started to hurt, the recoil, that is.

Last week I saw my first Marilyn Monroe movie, Some Like it Hot. Well done.

Fourth of July went well. I wore a black arm band to mourn the death of freedom. People liked that, surprisingly. Or maybe they liked that freedom was dead. But I brought a few copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (sent to Campus Libertarians by the Cato Institute. Someone else started passing them out, and listened to him read the Declaration aloud. Nice. Some good discussion, too.

audience saves Episode I

I saw the new Star Wars movie last night after a losing effort in a softball game.

The best part of the movie was when Aniken says to Amidala: “I am in so much pain…I want to know if you are suffering as much as I am.” A woman from the back of the theater says: “I am!”, and everyone laughs and applauds. Surely the same thing has happened with other audiences.