Smart movie, smart advertising, smart money.

The NYT:

The low-budget alien movie “District 9” was No. 1 at the weekend box office with an estimated $37 million in ticket sales, a stronger than expected result fueled by a quirky marketing campaign.

“District 9,” an R-rated social satire about a spacecraft that stalls over Johannesburg, cost only $30 million to make. Peter Jackson of “Lord of the Rings” fame was the driving force as a producer, and the 29-year-old Neill Blomkamp, whose previous feature experience is almost entirely confined to visual-effects work, was the director.

Even if they spent another $15m in advertising, by next Monday it will probably have made $60m. A nice return.

If my friends online are any indicator, the movie has a great word of mouth campaign in the making. I hope it’s just like Alive in Joburg, only longer.

Update: The movie is very, very smart. The anti-hero is fantastic. There are some flaws but the storytelling is like a splash of cold water. To date, it’s made $97m worldwide.

Second update: A very knowledgeable source estimates Sony spent at least $30m in domestic marketing.

movies & television/things

Opportunists and demagogues both trade in real events and real emotions.

They wouldn’t be called opportunists if they weren’t exploiting a real opportunity. Rick Perlstein via TPM:

So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers — these are “either” the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president — too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters’ signs — too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don’t understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can’t understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

Emphasis mine.

Reading through the comments (about 200 or so) you can find examples of both hysterical scattershot copy-paste tirades (not funny) as well as reasoned posts by conservatives who are genuinely disappointed because their own criticisms of left-identified hysteria have not been sufficiently validated by the press. One such poster cites Farrakhan’s loony numerological riff at the Million Man March in 1995 as an example of the “pass” the media gives to allies of the Democratic party. (The GOP’s totemic animal is an elephant, after all.)

Perlstein’s argument is canny enough to anticipate this line of rebuttal. The need to find equivalence is what keeps the public debate focused on the sideshow. It’s emotionally satisfying to vent but besides the point. Keeping track of slights and insults is for clans and families. Modern states have to keep track of justice, fairness and the common wealth. When politicians and journalists indulge emotions over reason, they do the public a disservice.

Because emotions are far easier to convey via video than ideas, our medium of choice favors drama over debate. We get the format we prefer but not necessarily the news we deserve.

Having strong feelings on a subject, doesn’t necessarily entail a good grasp of same. If the angry protesters cited by Perlstein were bringing up deficiencies in the proposed legislation (shortcuts, compromises, cooked numbers) it would be wrong to mistake their fervor for madness. But when a Medicare recipient charges that the government can’t be trusted to administer health care, or when a voter argues that, categorically, government can do no good, those aren’t arguments. Those are contradictions. And the only way to hold on to contradictory beliefs is to reject reason.

journalism/people

Little gifts.

In this complicated world we live in where consumer choices are felt to be political choices and vice versa, John Mackay’s op-ed on health care in the Wall Street Journal may have done more to “activate” credit card-carrying liberals than President Obama’s own PAC. Here’s Mackay on his constituents back in 2005:

“Let’s go down right now and count the Volvos in the parking lot,” he says, his face turning almost scarlet. “Many of our customers are so environmentally conscious they don’t even own cars.”

But most are well-educated. “The common link is education, not income,” Mackey says. “That correlates with income, but not perfectly.”

As for education level and voting preferences, here’s one slice from Gallup. More on health care from Gallup.

people

It’s just a technicality.

Ars Technica:

“Domain tasters” take advantage of a five-day domain name grace period to perform risk-free cybersquatting. Since ICANN upped the penalty for excessive cancellations, however, the practice has essentially disappeared.

As our economy becomes increasingly symbolic, the exploitation of technical loopholes becomes an ever more lucrative business. Consider the recent coverage of flash orders or high speed trading which are “useful only to traders who have computers powerful enough to act on the data within milliseconds.”

The quickening pace of this game of cops and robbers is not, however, what should concern us. It’s the new players who are joining. Players whose involvement may change the rules of the game permanently and not necessarily in our favor.

Consider the incredible but all too real Storm botnet which has exploited loopholes in the Windows operating system to create a criminal network of roughly 500,000 slave computers.

At face value, deriving power from a technicality is nothing new. Arcane scrolls and their elite interpreters gave ancient kingdoms as much stability as swords and soldiers – if not more. (See imperial cult, apostolic succession or the satire Dead Souls.) What is new is the complexity of our code and the ways in which our society is organizing around “black boxes.”

Unlike Dr. Frankenstein’s ignoble monster, Asimov’s noble creations or Rossum’s rebellious robots, what makes the automated processes with which we must now contend so awesome is not that they amplify some flaw or virtue of human society but that they will increasingly exploit what we do not – or cannot – know about ourselves. They are becoming a new kind of parasite.

In previous fiction, the narrative ends when the monster (noble or not) teaches us something about ourselves. This is not by chance: the word monster is derived from the Latin monstro for “showing” – as in to “demonstrate” or render intelligible. Tomorrow’s monsters may not be able to teach us anything about ourselves though they could certainly end up teaching us a lesson we’ll never forget.

ideas/people/things

Fingernails on a blackboard, muffled and distant.

I hear the sound of fingernails on a blackboard, muffled and distant when I hear someone say “utilize” when they could so much more easily say “use.”

For example: “Let’s utilize the time” instead of “let’s use the time.” There’s no need for it:

The best use for “utilize” is to mean “make use of”: “Ryan utilized his laptop in the library mainly as a pillow to rest his head on.” In most contexts, “use” is simpler and clearer. Many readers consider “utilize” pretentious.

Indeed. In the greater scheme of things, this is very unimportant. But, in the greatest scheme of things, nothing matters. Not even poetry.

ideas

Who benefits from government insurance?

It’s been years since I watched Sunday morning talk shows. Maybe as many 20 years. So I’d not had the fortune of hearing wickedly smart demagogues like Newt Gingrich peddling his wares. But I did this morning, thanks to the global DVR that is YouTube.

Gingrich and his allies are selling a pretty interesting lie. Government is bad for the economy. Only companies can create wealth. What Gingrich knows, of course, is that government is a very important player in the economy. In particular, the government is tremendously important for shifting risks:

The explanation for the range of use of cost-plus contracts is the same as that for the existence of insurance companies; it is profitable for all concerned that risks be shifted to the agency best able to bear them through its wealth and its ability to pool risks. The government, above all economic agencies, fits this description…

The possibility of shifting risks, of insurance in the broadest sense, permits individuals to engage in risky activities which they would not otherwise undertake…[A]t any moment society is faced with a set of possible new projects which are on the average profitable, though one cannot know for sure which particular projects will succeed and which will fail. If risks cannot be shifted, then very possibly none of the projects will be undertaken; if they can be, the each individual investor, by diversification, can be fairly sure of a positive outcome, and society will be better off by the increased production. – Ken Arrow, “Insurance, Risk, and Resource Allocation”

All sorts of industries and corporations have profited from government insurance. Consistently. For decades. Whether directly or indirectly, Gingrich and his fellow travelers work for clients who greatly value their ability to shift risks to the government.

His public rhetoric, then, is a form of misdirection. When he tells the middle class family: “Don’t look to government to improve your economic standing,” he neglects to mention that he would reserve this service for his clients, exclusively. He is not trying to eliminate government services, he is trying to eliminate the competition for government services.

This is what the revolving door between government and K Street is all about. It’s why someone like Dick Cheney is comfortable gliding between the White House and Halliburton and back. It’s also one of the many reasons why the “debate” around health insurance is so fascinating.

ideas/people

One plate or two? Kolbert on what drives obesity.

Elizabeth Kolbert paraphrasing Brian Wansink:

[People] have no idea how much they want to eat, or, once they have eaten, how much they’ve consumed. Instead, they rely on external cues, like portion size, to tell them when to stop. The result is that as French-fry bags get bigger, so, too, do the French-fry eaters.

The entire essay – a digest of recent literature on why obesity is increasing in American and around the world – is excellent.

people

politics

Echoes of secret dealings on energy policy:

But I also care about democracy, and the deal between Big Pharma and the White House frankly worries me. It’s bad enough when industry lobbyists extract concessions from members of Congress, which happens all the time. But when an industry gets secret concessions out of the White House in return for a promise to lend the industry’s support to a key piece of legislation, we’re in big trouble. That’s called extortion: An industry is using its capacity to threaten or prevent legislation as a means of altering that legislation for its own benefit. And it’s doing so at the highest reaches of our government, in the office of the President.

people

first bleg: employment law and h.r. metrics

Perhaps, a question for a labor lawyer: if a company claims its human resources department is so good that employees don’t need a union, can that claim be tested? Are there standardized polls? Surveys?

And if such surveys are required of employers with more than, say, 150 employees, are those results a matter of public record if the company receives or has received government subsidies or is a government contractor?

ideas/people

movies

Movies are uniquely able to transport the viewer into another person’s life – to see the world from an alien point of view. The excellent movie Blame it on Fidel (2006) is set in 1970s France and shows a world cleft by the brutal monoliths of fascism and communism; a time when the third way, liberal democracy, was too often overshadowed. Most importantly, it presents this cataclysmic world through the eyes of a confident eight year-old girl; the kind of protagonist we seldom get. The drama is emotionally trying, the action very well-paced and the characters developed with great subtlety. A must see movie for every Cuban-American – at least.

ideas/movies & television/people/things

Cultural studies as vocational training for debasing culture

Nancy Franklin:

Even more than the reality shows on other networks, the ones on VH1 appear to be saying, “My, aren’t blond bimbos and undereducated minority people amusing?” No one has ever been able to tell me what he or she liked about these shows, beyond laughing at the people in them, In an interview in the New York Observer a couple of years ago, [Michael] Hirschorn, [who was VH1’s head of programming from 2001 to 2008 and] who went to Harvard and has a master’s degree in comparative literature form Columbia, was for a time the editor of the music magazine Spin, and writes about culture for The Atlantic, said that he grew up in a self-consciously culture home where the only TV he was allowed to watch was Jacques Cousteau and “Masterpiece Theater.” Like Scarlett O;Hara, filled with life-affirming resolve at the end of the Civil War, he rose up from teh poverty of middle-class standards, stared at the ratings numbers twinkling in the heavens, shouted, “As God is my witness, I’ll never be tasteful again!,” and set fire to his parents’ beige public-television tote bag.

The zealotry of the converted is well-documented. We’re all familiar with “selling out.” But the detail that caught my eye is Hirschorn’s academic background.

In the last three years, I’ve met more than a few people in marketing with advanced degrees in the humanities. Which makes me wonder if the disciplines now lumped together as “critical studies” aren’t vocational training for an information economy. That is, when they are drained of irony. Or drowned in it.

(And I’m also guilty as charged.)

ideas

Beware of minorities with disproportionate political power

In California, minorities have hijacked the government and are hell-bent on driving the economy into the ground. Here’s The Economist:

California has been suffering serial budget crises, the latest of which was resolved last month in a rather desperate deal between the governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the legislature. It contained huge cuts, including $2 billion lopped from higher education. The UC alone has lost a cumulative $813m of state funding in the last fiscal year and the current one, a cut of 20%. The second-tier California State University (Cal State), with 23 campuses the largest in the country, and the third-tier community colleges have also been clobbered.

The minority group responsible for this mess? The state’s Republicans concentrated in rural areas and a few affluent exurbs like Orange County. Their weapon: the state’s obsolete super-majority requirement for passing a budget.

What is particularly egregious is how this political minority deflects criticism for its kamikaze politics by…wait for it…pointing the finger at racial and ethnic minorities. Check out the comments that accompany The Economist piece. It’s par for the course.

(via Bowen Chung.)

people

why the wii is a necessary progression in virtual interfaces

Ana was just raising the volume on our boombox. She could have held down the button (it’s the chiclet variety) but instead she clicked the button repeatedly, rocking a little back and forth with each click, until she reached the desired volume.

She was using her body as a metric. She was also compensating for a crappy interface. This boombox lacks a visual display of the volume. Moreover, a chiclet button is nowhere near as precise or handy as an old-fashioned dial.

We have the expression “too big for one’s britches” meaning someone whose sense of self is out of proportion with their reality; namely their physical reality. In the virtual world, it’s all too easy to lose track of the proportions that have helped our civilization advance. (See da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man for example.)

The Nintendo Wii, among other new interfaces, may help restore the human body to its helpful role in our play and work.

ideas/people/things

The NYT sells aged cheese, not fresh milk

In a now famous exchange, the Daily Show stumped a New York Times editor by pointing out that all the news fit to print is old news:

Daily Show: Why is aged news better than real news?
New York Times: I’ve never heard that term before…[and] not necessarily.

DS: Tell me one thing in there that happened today.
NYT: Nothing here happened today but there are several things that didn’t happen yesterday.

DS: So it’s even older.
NYT: It depends on your perspective.

I hope I’m never interviewed by the Daily Show because I would surely implode. that said, the NYT editor was defending the wrong position.

He could have answered: “Why is aged milk better than fresh milk? Because it’s cheese. We live in a marketplace and a culture where both cheese and milk are desired. The NYT is in the business of selling aged cheese not fresh milk.”

Cheese is complex, dense and nutritious. Milk is great for cereal and coffee. One can be a meal in and of itself, the other an ingredient.

ideas

are you what you search?

via Andy Baio, a Reddit user claims to have extracted the search history of the murderer in Pennsylvania. If it’s not a hoax, it’s a very selective excerpt that includes: age of consent laws, photos of a “public housing ghetto” and Peggy Morrison costumes.

this ongoing crowd-sourced exegetic shrink session is pleasurable for its participants in large part because it exploits the hope that our technology is now good enough to render a mind transparent.

it’s not.

our inability to make sense of bad deeds – or, even, perhaps, of madness – is not from a wont of materials. some of the most atrocious misdeeds in our history are very well documented. what stands in the way of knowing the “why” is not a technical limitation nor a lack of data. it’s impossible to make sense of a logic that we deem immoral because our reason is intimately tied to our morality. as it should be.

in other words: we can’t stop trying but we should also be certain that we can never succeed.

related: the guilty pleasures of this latest exegesis are discussed in this thread on MetaFilter. from 2008, an essay titled Suffering Souls in the New Yorker: “Dr. Kent Kiehl uses MRI technology to scan prison inmates for signs of pyschopathy in the hope of discovering a treatment.” In 1994, serial killer John Wayne Gacy’s brain was dissected after his execution – it was deemed normal. in 16th century Padua, the public dissection of criminals was entertainment, albeit not entirely for moralistic reasons.

finally, here are the Google searches I made to write this entry: exegesis, standard operation procedure movie, brain dissected to understand crime, dissection crime brain 19th century, public dissections as theater, dissection john wayne gacy. i guess those aren’t very damning. unless the crime of which i’m accused is being a geek. in which case: nolo contendere.

ideas/people

science

I was thinking of just how advanced our human sciences are when I thought about China: 1,330,044,544 people in one nation. That’s an impressive degree of social organization. It’s hard enough to get a family of five to agree on a movie or a team of rowers to move in the same direction.

(Yes, there is brutal repression. Not all the techniques developed by the human sciences are just. Nor are all technologies we’ve created productive.)

related: exactly one year ago, I had a similar realization about power in China.

ideas/people