Brad DeLong

Paparazzi Converge on Bloomberg.gov Head Bob Litan at the White House Correspondents Dinner

Getting the Most Out of Jonah Hill: Thursday Cousin Movie Weblogging

Seeing my cousin Philip Lord at his sister Annie's wedding last weekend reminded me that, last winter, on successive airplane flights I managed to see in rapid succession both the very good "Get Him to the Greek" and Phil's and his partner Chris Miller's "21 Jump Street". I was very impressed by how much more Phil and Chris had managed to get out of Jonah Hill and get onto the screen--even slightly more, I would argue, than Bennett Miller managed to get out of Jonah Hill in "Moneyball"…

Looking forward to their "Lego" movie next February, although The One Who Is alone knows what it could possibly be. And off the rematch all episodes of "Clone High"…

How Do We Say "Dragons Are Not Slaves" in Old Valyrian?

And we have an answer!:

Game of Thrones Linguist Interview Reveals High Valyrian Dragons, Wrong Khaleesis, and More:

Zaldrīzes buzdari iksos daor.

“A dragon is not a slave.”

Of note here: the word for dragon, zaldrīzes. Also, buzdari is stressed on the second syllable even though the a is not long because this isn’t actually a High Valyrian word: It’s an Astapori word that Dany is using on purpose. The High Valyrian word for slave is dohaeriros (whose root you may recognize), but the word they use in Astapor is buzdar, which has its roots in Ghiscari.

Thursday Movie Blogging: Theoden King May Be My Favorite Character in Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings"

The Return of the King Extended Edition Movie Script Scenes 29 to 32:

SOLDIER: What’s happening, where is he going?  I don’t understand.  (They disappear into the cleft between the rocks)  Lord Aragorn!  Why does he leave on the eve of battle?    GAMLING: He leaves because there is no hope.   THEODEN: He leaves because he must.    GAMLING: Too few have come.  We cannot defeat the armies of Mordor.    Theoden shakes his head.   THEODEN: No, we cannot. But we will meet them in battle nonetheless...

Tivoli Theatre, Kansas City

http://www.tivolikc.com/

Hoisted from the Archives: Classical Roots of "Winter's Bone"?

Brad DeLong : Classical Roots of "Winter's Bone"?: Am I the only person who saw "Winter's Bone" as a riff on Antigone?

It has a different beginning, true--her heroine's quest is launched by the appearance of Hermes Diaktoros in the form of the local sheriff. It has a different ending, true--we have Apollo Apotropaeos in the form of A-1 Bail Bonds arriving at the end as the deus ex machina. And it has a journey to the underworld called for by her duty to the family at the heart of her heroine's quest, but so (in a sense) does Antigone.

Other than that, it seemed to me a lot like Antigone vs. Kreon--if Kreon were a meth lord in rural Arkansas, that is.

And John Hawkes deserves a best supporting actor Oscar--if, that is, he is not in real life a psychopath meth-head...

And how the frack did John Hawkes not win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Teardrop? That is a travesty!

Hoisted from Comments: Thoughts on Lincoln

Brad DeLong: Kate Masur Works Remarkably Hard to See a Different "Lincoln" Than I Saw--and, I Would Argue, a Different "Lincoln" than Spielberg and Company Made:

Harold said...

Masur and Robin also saw Mrs. Keckly gazing up adoringly and gratefully at the Lincolns whereas the film saw her glaring angrily at the Lincolns and other white people and pointing out that she gave up her son as the Lincolns are frantically trying to prevent their own son from sacrificing himself.

J. Bradford DeLong said in reply to Harold...

Touché... Once again, the sense that they are trying much too hard to see a different movie than the one in front of their noses...

Ed B. said...

The structural problem here is the inability of history as a profession over the last thirty years to figure out how to deal with political activity, including political leadership. The mandate for rendering visible the effects of history made from below has been transformed into an incapacity to admit that political decisions made from "above" can 1) have positive effects 2) be made in any degree out of independent agency. The #1 flashpoint of these contradictions in the study of US history is surely the figure of Abraham Lincoln. Many historians so routinely seek ways to undermine the myth of Lincoln as Great Emancipator that they erase distinctions between him and the fifteen who proceeded him in the Presidency. Yet only Lincoln used the power of the federal government to promote emancipation, even before 1862. Any President could have sought emancipation in the District of Columbia. Only Lincoln did this. And that was only the beginning.

Bloix said in reply to Ed B....

This comment captures my reaction to the Robin post much better than I was able to say it, even to myself.

J. Bradford DeLong said in reply to Ed B....

Nicely put...

You could have two different narrative lines running--the high-politics one, and the lived-experience one of how high politics shapes life on the ground and how what is happening on the ground shapes high politics. And Spielberg and company do do a little bit of that. Were I King of the World, I would have made them do considerably more...

Spencer Ackerman: Two Cheers for "Zero Dark Thirty"'s Torture Scenes

Spencer Ackerman:

Two Cheers for Zero Dark Thirty's Torture Scenes: [A] bloodied, disoriented and humiliated man… strapped to a wall with his pants around his ankles… having liquid forcibly poured down his throat… shoved into a box that could barely hold your stereo…. It’s enough to make you wretch. It’s arguably the best and most important part of the movie.

Kathryn Bigelow’s new film about the decade-long manhunt for Osama bin Laden begins with an unsparing, nauseating and frighteningly realistic look at how the CIA tortured many people and reaped very little intelligence…. The torture on display in the film occurs at the intersection of ignorance and brutality, while the vast, vast majority of the intelligence work that actually does lead to bin Laden’s downfall occurs after the torture has ended…. Bigelow is being presented as a torture apologist, and it’s a bum rap…. Bigelow instead presents a graphic presentation of what declassified CIA documents indicate the torture program really was….

Kate Masur Works Remarkably Hard to See a Different "Lincoln" Than I Saw--and, I Would Argue, a Different "Lincoln" than Spielberg and Company Made

Kate Masur, edited:

[T]he film gives us powerful scenes of black men as soldiers… [to] demonstrate that African-Americans participated in the struggle for abolition…. [A]n early scene shows two black soldiers talking with Lincoln and then, with two white soldiers, reciting the Gettysburg Address…. [T]his scene lays out some of the stakes and possibilities of that historical moment…. Another scene in which stoic black soldiers on horseback stare down the Confederate commissioners…. [T]he scene references the dramatic changes in Southern life that the Civil War would bring….

[T]he scenes that feature soldiers… the first one showing intense hand-to-hand combat and the later one in which the audience views, with Lincoln, scores of soldiers lying dead where they fell… frame the film’s central concern: political deliberations in Washington. Violence, suffering, and death on the battlefield remind us of the stakes of Lincoln’s decisions…

Kate Masur, unedited:

Some critics argue that the film gives us powerful scenes of black men as soldiers and that these sufficiently demonstrate that African-Americans participated in the struggle for abolition. It’s worth acknowledging that there are black Union soldiers in Lincoln, though frankly, it would have been egregious if Spielberg’s vision of the military conflict in the winter of 1865 had not included them. In an appealing example of artistic license, an early scene shows two black soldiers talking with Lincoln and then, with two white soldiers, reciting the Gettysburg Address. I like how this scene lays out some of the stakes and possibilities of that historical moment. And the black soldiers’ speaking parts are probably longer and certainly more interesting than any other lines delivered by black characters in the film.

Another scene in which stoic black soldiers on horseback stare down the Confederate commissioners suggests more, I think, about the commissioners’ horror at black enlistment in the Union army than it does about the soldiers’ own agency. But I appreciate how the scene references the dramatic changes in Southern life that the Civil War would bring.

Even so, the scenes that feature soldiers—including the first one showing intense hand-to-hand combat and the later one in which the audience views, with Lincoln, scores of soldiers lying dead where they fell—mainly function to frame the film’s central concern: political deliberations in Washington. Violence, suffering, and death on the battlefield remind us of the stakes of Lincoln’s decisions and help us understand why he was (according to the film) tempted by the possibility of forging peace without emancipation.

As the political scientist Corey Robin wrote, this film de-centers Lincoln, giving us a cacophony of voices on the subject of abolition, but almost every one of those voices belongs to a white person. It is because the movie’s dramatic tension focuses on civilian life in general and on politics in particular that its creators’ failure to imagine the activities of black civilians is so disappointing.

Fly, You Fools!

Lucasfilm Acquired by Disney

Lucasfilm Acquired by Disney:

DeLong Smackdown Watch: Star Trek "Mirror, Mirror" Weblogging

Mccue:

That's [not the agonizer. That's] the agony booth.

The agonizer is a small device which individuals carry for immediate discipline (Spock uses that on the transporter tech after the beam-up which transposes the landing party from one dimension to the other). It's immediate effects are unpleasant but not fatal.

The agony booth is used on Chekov for his attempt to kill Kirk, and is typically used until death (Kirk orders Chekov's release).

The Technological Level of Westeros

Matthew Yglesias gives his view of the level of technology in A Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire.

I say that immortality via ice-zombiehood is an impressive technology that would really lower Medicare cost growth…

Eschaton: Netflixed

Duncan Black: Netflixed:

I don't think this piece on Netflix makes clear the real point: absent a different legal regime, streaming video might be the future of how people watch rental videos generally, but it's pretty obvious that there is no successful business model for subscription streaming that isn't essentially owned by the content makers. Well, unless net neutrality goes away and the cable cos get to throw their monopoly weight around in this area.

Streaming might kill Netflix DVD-by-mail eventually, but Netflix won't fix that problem with streaming. They'll never make money there.

The Avengers Trailer...

Hobbit Spoilers

Quickbeam:

DID WE SAY MASSIVE SPOILERS?! Yes, we did.... Tuesday's unspooling of 10 minutes of THE HOBBIT at CinemaCon took the place quite by surprise....

Aaron Bady is horrified as he contemplates another innocent soul approaching the end of Battlestar Galactica… https://twitter.com/#!/zunguzungu/status/193808433420582912

From "Moonstruck"

"It saves money, because it costs money..."

--Loretta Castorini's father, the plumber, in "Moonstruck"

Trying to Function on Chocolate-Covered Espresso Beans...

That is all.

"21 Jump Street" grossed $36.3 million its first weekend...

My Cousin Phil Lord's "21 Jump Street" Is the Best Movie I Have Seen This Year...

…and judging by the previews I don't see a better one on the horizon.

Rotten Tomatoes Has Decided What "21 Jump Street" Is

Goldman Sachs: No Longer Long-Term Greedy?

Lisa Pollack: FT Alphaville » Bankers versus bitching rights, a graphical representation:

---

The Daily Mash - Why I am leaving the Empire, by Darth Vader:

TODAY is my last day at the Empire.

'I no longer have the pride, or the belief'

After almost 12 years, first as a summer intern, then in the Death Star and now in London, I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its massive, genocidal space machines. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

To put the problem in the simplest terms, throttling people with your mind continues to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making people dead.

The Empire is one of the galaxy's largest and most important oppressive regimes and it is too integral to galactic murder to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of Yoda College that I can no longer in good conscience point menacingly and say that I identify with what it stands for.

For more than a decade I recruited and mentored candidates, some of whom were my secret children, through our gruelling interview process. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program in detecting strange disturbances in the Force for the 80 younglings who made the cut.

I knew it was time to leave when I realised I could no longer speak to these students inside their heads and tell them what a great place this was to work.

How did we get here? The Empire changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and killing your former mentor with a light sabre. Today, if you make enough money you will be promoted into a position of influence, even if you have a disturbing lack of faith.

What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm's 'axes', which is Empire-speak for persuading your clients to invest in 'prime-quality' residential building plots on Alderaan that don't exist and have not existed since we blew it up. b) 'Hunt Elephants'. In English: get your clients - some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren't - to tempt their friends to Cloud City and then betray them. c) Hand over rebel smugglers to an incredibly fat gangster.

When I was a first-year analyst I didn't know where the bathroom was, or how to tie my shoelaces telepathically. I was taught to be concerned with learning the ropes, finding out what a protocol droid was and putting my helmet on properly so people could not see my badly damaged head.

My proudest moments in life - the pod race, being lured over to the Dark Side and winning a bronze medal for mind control ping-pong at the Midi-Chlorian Games - known as the Jedi Olympics - have all come through hard work, with no shortcuts.

The Empire today has become too much about shortcuts and not enough about remote strangulation. It just doesn’t feel right to me anymore.

I hope this can be a wake-up call. Make killing people in terrifying and unstoppable ways the focal point of your business again. Without it you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much non-existent Alderaan real estate they sell. And get the culture right again, so people want to make millions of voices cry out in terror before being suddenly silenced.

21 Jump Street Did Well at SXSW...

Jonathan Poritsky:

21 Jump Street is Sorta Kinda Worth Seeing: Here’s the deal: everyone laughed (and not in the good way) when they heard that Jonah Hill’s 21 Jump Street reboot would have its premiere at SXSW four days before its nationwide rollout. This is a fest for indies, goddamit! We’re hear to see heart-rending tales about reuniting with lost parents or putting puppies to sleep; quirky romances and gore-tastic slashers. But a bro-mantic reboot? Gimme a break.

Turns out it was a brilliant move by Columbia Pictures’ marketing department because this crowd is absolutely smitten with the film, and we’re telling the world about it. Sorry, starving filmmaker who maxed out three credit cards over six years to get here, we’re going to cover the glossy Hollywood picture because, well, it’s good!

The best way to explain what makes the film such a charmer is with an anecdote Jonah Hill shared at the Q & A after the premiere. He recounted his agent calling him up years ago to suggest turning the forgotten television series into a movie. His response was something to the effect of, “That’s the stupidest fucking idea I’ve ever heard.” That cavalier attitude runs deep throughout the irreverent comedy. There is even a line of dialogue in there that admits the powers that be have run out of ideas….

Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller smoothly enter the world of live-action filmmaking (their last film was Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs). It’s perhaps no surpise that the guys who violently rained oversized steak dinners on unsuspecting Atlantic islanders would make a film filled to the brim with excess. It is, in a word, ridiculous. There are out of place explosions, talking ice-cream cones, and deaths and dismemberments that will have you rolling in the aisles, and you’ll quickly lose count of the expletives….

I often wonder whether or not we find much to love in a film like this because the bar has been lowered so far that anything that makes us titter is worthy of praise. But you know what? F--- that. I laughed my ass off at 21 Jump Street and the Austin crowd loved it too. It’s about damn time someone cheered us up at the movies.

Walter Jon Williams on "The Eagle"

Walter Jon Williams watches movies:

Reviews Too Late: The Eagle: I finally got around to seeing The Eagle, which was one of two films released in 2011 that dealt with the disappearance of Legio IX Hispania north of Hadrian’s Wall sometime around 117 CE….This is by far the better of the two films, in part because it’s based on Rosemary Sutcliffe’s The Eagle of the Ninth…. Channing Tatum stars as Marcus Flavius Aquila…. Marcus hears that the eagle of the Ninth Legion is being held as a trophy north of Hadrian’s Wall, and decides to go with Esca to find the eagle and retrieve it, along with his family honor.  As I recall, Marcus-of-the-novel disguised himself as a Greek ophthalmologist or something, which made a kind of sense.  Marcus-of-the-movie is really, really thick, so he goes north disguised as Marcus Flavius Aquila.

After many adventures in which Marcus demonstrates his (a) courage, and (b) general lack of brains…. And then there’s the ending, which I won’t give away.

The film’s greatest strength is also its weakness, in that it makes no concession to modern values.  Marcus is a freakin’ Roman, and nothing else.  He likes gladiator shows.  He is a sincere devotee of Mithras, to whom he prays not to disgrace his unit.  He has no problem with slavery, so long as he’s not the slave.  He’s a member of the master race who is there to kill the enemies of his people and to redeem his father’s name, and he has no respect whatever for the value of human life, particularly British life.  The brutalities of the Roman conquest are not at all minimized or glossed over.

And above all, Marcus cares about honor, and not much else.

Honor, honor, honor.  A lesser movie would give him a girlfriend or something, but this one is entirely about military and masculine virtues.

For this reason it’s rather hard for a modern viewer to warm up to Marcus.  He’s so uncompromisingly of his own time, and he stands in complete contrast to our own.

Mind, I think this is a good thing in a historical film.  The movie does a good job of showing why Marcus thinks the way he does, and it demonstrates his virtues as well as what a modern audience would consider his flaws…

21 Jump Street Gets Its First Non-Positive Review--Out of 22. No Longer a Perfect Rotten Tomatoes Score...

Andrew L. Urban:

Urban Cinefile 21 JUMP STREET: Cannibals continue to roam in Hollywood (Hollowood?); their latest victim is a police procedural TV series from the 80s, in which young cops investigated crimes in high schools and colleges. Turning it into a juvenile cop comedy has been less than successful, even though there are some good lines, a few well conceived scenes and an underlying buddy movie beating heart. Too immature and juvenile in its taste to appeal outside a narrow 18 - 24 demographic, 21 Jump Street is a cacophony of high school humour, smeared on with endless expletives and genital references (not too funny, either)….

I do acknowledge that some will find it amusing for its crassness and the exploits of the two hapless gorks Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum). There are some fine comedic ideas swirling about, but they fail to overcome the laborious nature of the storytelling. Worst of all, with everything up for comedic grabs, there is no sense of reality to intrude on the story or characters - although Jonah Hill does make a reasonably tangible character out of Schmidt, an overweight, good hearted, soft centred and insecure young man with inbuilt adolescence….

21 Jump Street [is] the movie we had to have when the TV series should have been enough. There is also a surprise best discovered for yourself.

Louise Keller:

Jumping on the bandwagon of revamping old TV shows, this big screen version of the show from the late 80s/early 90s that is mostly remembered as being a springboard for Johnny Depp's career, is a slap-dash buddy movie with a puerile streak…. The humour is pretty lame, so leave your brain at the door, but there are some funny juxtapositions - like the stretch limo chase scene and the madcap sequence in which Hill, dressed like Peter Pan and Tatum, dressed like a chemical equation are making their escape from a gang of bikies…. It's not funny enough, inventive enough, or entertaining enough to make a difference, but the idea that the two unlikely buddies rub off on each other positively is not all bad.

The Extremely Sharp David Edelstein Likes My Cousin Phil Lord's "21 Jump Street" Movie...

David Edelstein:

New York Magazine Movie Review: Centered on youthful cops working undercover in high schools, the eighties Fox TV series 21 Jump Street had a gritty vibe (Fox was new and looking to distinguish itself from the big three networks) and scripts that were painfully earnest, with Johnny Depp groping his way toward a standard Method juvenile career before cultivating late-Brando-style weirdness.

The movie, starring Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum, spoofs the series and plays the premise for laughs. It has a bad, slapstick first act but by midpoint becomes strangely compelling, tapping into the fantasy of reliving one’s high-school years (which did a number on us all) and getting it right. After adjusting to the Zeitgeist zigs and zags of the seven years since they graduated, fat Jonah earns a place with the popular kids and develops self-esteem, while dumb hunk Channing settles in with the science nerds and learns to tap phones. It’s an agreeable shambles. The best scenes feature an anti-bullying environmentalist drug dealer played by Dave Franco, who’s like a cross between his weirdo brother James and fifties Method neurotics like Montgomery Clift. I can’t wait for his next movie.

Not a bad review start:

And Stephen Salto says that my cousin Phil Lord and his buddy Chris Miller are really, really good at this "directing" s---:

SXSW ’12 Review: “21 Jump Street” Plays Like Gangbusters: None of this should probably work as well as it does, but the chemistry between Hill and Tatum is arguably even more palpable than when Hill partnered with Michael Cera in “Superbad” and Lord and Miller, who last directed “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,” bring the same kind of energy and enthusiasm that made the animated film such a welcome surprise. Though Ice Cube regales in saying the “F-word” more than he ever did in N.W.A. as the duo’s commanding officer and there’s politically incorrect gags at every turn, the humor is refreshingly mischievous rather than mean-spirited with two actors at its center who appear to genuinely like each other and are somewhat in awe of what the other is capable of.

The film is also generous to its supporting cast, giving Cube a chance to remind audiences who he was before all those family-friendly movies and allows nice character beats for its younger cast including Brie Larson as Schmidt’s eventual object of affection, Dave Franco as the drug ring’s front and Dax Flame as Jenko’s lab partner. Every character in the film has an extra bit of dimension, which shouldn’t come as a surprise for anyone who followed the directors’ previous work in television on such shows as “Clone High” and the early years of “How I Met Your Mother.” But it’s especially impressive within the world “21 Jump Street” exists in, a place that acknowledges its ridiculous origins by being more ridiculous and taking tropes of any number of genres – action, comedy – and twisting them just slightly for maximum effect.

What keeps the characters grounded, even as the muscle-bound Tatum struts around in shirts that read “Beauty is Boring” and Cube’s Captain Dickson tells his charges to “embrace your stereotypes,” is the affection the creative team has for everyone and everything on screen. With the beats of each character and plot point worked out so thoroughly, every scene is as potentially explosive, either in hysterics or otherwise, because it somehow finds a very relatable core, be it an epic car chase where Jenko and Schmidt have to drive a driver’s ed car with two steering wheels or the more subtle way the two forge relationships inside the school. Sure, references to “Glee” and Robert Downey Jr.’s drug years may not hold up quite as well in 20 years, but in an era of disposable pop culture, “21 Jump Street” is anything but, likely to be namechecked for a lot longer.

My Cousin Phil Lord's Movie, "21 Jump Street", Premiers in a Week...

It is rated. R, and it is not a technical R--but it is very very funny...

How Does the Cat Survive Alien?

70 Years of Technological Progress in Making Fun of Dictatorial Regimes

Something Is Very Wrong with Netflix

I think this is a serious "sell" signal:

Watch at Your Own Risk...

The Star Wars Holiday Special With The Original 1978 Commercials (FULL MOVIE) - YouTube

---

Wikipedia:

The Star Wars Holiday Special: The Star Wars Holiday Special is a 1978 American television special set in the Star Wars galaxy. It was one of the first official Star Wars spin-offs, and was directed by Steve Binder. The show was broadcast in its entirety only once, in the United States and Canada, November 17, 1978, on the U.S. television network CBS from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm, Eastern Standard Time (EST), and on the Canadian television network CTV from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm, Eastern Standard Time.

In the storyline that ties the special together, Chewbacca and Han Solo visit Kashyyyk, Chewbacca's home world, to celebrate Life Day. Along the way they are pursued by agents of the Galactic Empire, who are searching for members of the Rebel Alliance on the planet. The special introduces three members of Chewbacca's family: his father Itchy, his wife Malla, and his son Lumpy (Later retconned to Attichitcuk, Mallatobuck, and Lumpawarrump, respectively).

During the special, scenes also take place in outer space and in spacecraft including the Millennium Falcon and an Imperial Star Destroyer. The variety-show segments and cartoon introduce a few other locales, such as a cantina on the desert planet of Tatooine and a gooey, reddish ocean planet known as Panna.

The program also features many other Star Wars characters, including Luke Skywalker, C-3PO, R2-D2, Darth Vader, Han Solo and Princess Leia Organa (who sings the film's "theme song", set to the music of John Williams' Star Wars theme, near the end). The program includes stock footage from Star Wars,[2] and also features a cartoon produced by Toronto-based Nelvana that officially introduces the bounty hunter Boba Fett.

The special is notorious for its negative reception. Anthony Daniels, in a documentary promoting the worldwide tour of Star Wars: In Concert, notes with a laugh that the Star Wars universe includes "The horrible Holiday Special that nobody talks about". George Lucas did not have significant involvement with the film's production, and was unhappy with the results. David Acomba, a classmate of Lucas' at USC film school, had been selected to direct the special, but he chose to leave the project, a decision supported by Lucas.

The Star Wars Holiday Special has never been re-telecast or officially released on home video. It has therefore become the stuff of cultural legend, due to the “underground” quality of its existence, originally being viewed and distributed in off-air recordings made from its original telecast by fans, which were later adapted to content-sharing websites via the Internet….

[…]

The Star Wars Holiday Special has received a large amount of criticism, both from Star Wars fans and the general public. David Hofstede, author of What Were They Thinking?: The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History, ranked the holiday special at number one, calling it "the worst two hours of television ever."…

At one Australian fan convention, [George Lucas] reportedly said[4] "If I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every copy of that show and smash it." In an online chat with fans, he reportedly said: "The Holiday Special does not represent my vision for Star Wars." In an interview with Maxim in May 2002, Maxim asked the question, "Any plans for a Special Edition of the Holiday Special?" In response, Lucas said, "Right. That's one of those things that happened, and I just have to live with it."…

Harrison Ford… said nothing, but looked away and shook his head nervously, then saying he had no memory of it whatsoever and it, therefore, "doesn't exist."…

Carrie Fisher… said… she shows it at parties, "mainly at the end of the night when she wants people to leave."…

A commercial for Robot Chicken: Star Wars featured George Lucas, voicing himself, speaking to his therapist. In the therapy session, Lucas expresses his disdain for the special by screaming "I hate it!" repeatedly. Lucas then confesses that he fears the Robot Chicken: Star Wars special will be worse….

The special features four songs. The first, "This Minute Now," is sung by Diahann Carroll. It starts off with a Busby Berkeley-esque swimming/dance number featuring busty Wookiee-women, but may be best remembered for the bizarre monologue which follows. Carroll — who is supposed to be an image created by a virtual-reality machine — tells Chewbacca's father, Itchy, that she is his "fantasy" and suggestively invites him to "experience" her. Oddly, both the setup and Attichitcuk's actions (button pressing) presage a subplot in the 1983 film Brainstorm, in which a virtual reality device is misused….

The Star Wars Holiday Special was mostly forgotten after its only airing in 1978, until sometime in the early-to-mid-1990s when individuals came forward and offered original videotape recordings of the TV airing. These have since been duplicated and reduplicated so that most copies of the special available today are based on second to sixth generation VHS dubs…

Econ 1: Movies

Should I make the Econ 1 students watch movies?

• Inside Job
• Margin Call
• On the Waterfront

What else?

Insane Serial Killers with Benefits?

That is not an appropriate closing credits song, guys…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDTZ7iX4vTQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJS-wWqVAyk

Happy Halloween...

Via Tor.com:

Hoisted from Comments: The Armadillos of Castle Dracula

ME: What is the significance of the armadillos underfoot at Castle Dracula?

DAMANOID:

The armadillos are a sign of status. According to folklore, vampires are obliged to sleep in contact with the soil of their native land. Unfortunately, grave earth tends to attract worms, burrowing insects and other invertebrates. While Dracula may be Lord of the Undead, he is no more comfortable waking up with his nose full of beetle larvae than any living person would be.

As it happens, these are exactly the sort of vermin that comprise the armadillo's specialized diet. An armadillo's keen sense of smell can detect invertebrates buried up to a foot deep in the ground. Moreover, armadillos have a much reduced, anteater-like dentition; so there is no danger of the vampire being inadvertently gnawed on as the armadillo sweeps the crypt clean of worms and maggots. It's a marvelous example of symbiosis, or would be if both participants were technically alive.

In the past, only the wealthiest of vampire nobility could afford to transport armadillos from the New World to eastern Europe. Vampire peasants were sadly accustomed to rising from the grave each night with all their available orifices infested by earthworms and millipedes. This is yet another reason why vampire peasants have been historically eschewed by romantic fiction.

Alyssa Rosenberg Finds "Pretty Much the Best Thing Ever"

Alyssa Rosenberg:

ThinkProgress: "Well, it’s Friday Saturday and this is pretty much the best thing ever:

Sean Bean's Deaths

That Man Knows How to Die : Lawyers, Guns & Money:

Thomas á Becket Gives All He Has to the Poor

Changing social roles. From the 1964 movie of Jean Anouilh's "Becket", starring Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole:

Thomas à Becket Gives All He Has to the Poor

Happy Bastile Day

‪From "Casablanca"

Plot Device

Plot Device from Red Giant on Vimeo.

Stokes on Antigone in the Ozarks

Reflections on Winter's Bone, which I thought was a better movie than The King's Speech:

Stokes: Winter’s Bone, Film Noir, and Feminism | Overthinking It: Oh man, more people should have seen this movie.  But I can understand why it didn’t exactly storm the box office.  The story follows the trials and tribulations of Ree Dolly, a seventeen year old girl who has to care for her borderline-catatonic mother and her two young siblings (a twelve year old brother, Sonny, and a six year old sister, Ashlee), after their career-criminal father, Jessup, skips bail.... Ree embarks on a journey through the meth-addled, poverty stricken landscape of the Missouri Ozarks....

Daniel Davies Comes Terribly Close to Winning the Entire Internet...

He writes:

I saw "Black Swan" after reading the book, and I must say, Nicholas Taleb must be wondering what the hell happened in development.

Special Award for Best Use of Einstein's Principle of Relativistic Equivalence in a Motion Picture

Inception (2010):

My Econ 1 Students Speak on the Truly Important Issues...

A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far Far Away...

Courtesy of Stubby the Rocket...

Classical Roots of "Winter's Bone"?

Am I the only person who saw "Winter's Bone" as a riff on Antigone?

It has a different beginning, true--her heroine's quest is launched by the appearance of Hermes Diaktoros in the form of the local sheriff. It has a different ending, true--we have Apollo Apotropaeos in the form of A-1 Bail Bonds arriving at the end as the deus ex machina. And it has a journey to the underworld called for by her duty to the family at the heart of her heroine's quest, but so (in a sense) does Antigone.

Other than that, it seemed to me a lot like Antigone vs. Kreon--if Kreon were a meth lord in rural Missouri, that is.

And John Hawkes deserves a best supporting actor Oscar--if, that is, he is not in real life a psychopath meth-head...

Meth Culture in Missouri

Winter's Bone, highly recommended...

GET AWAY FROM HER YOU BITCH!!: The Last 45 Minutes of "Aliens" Are a Really Good Movie...

...how much worse would they be if I did not have the memory of having watched the first 90 minutes to draw on?

For Paul Krugman, as Well as for Lloyd Blankfein, It Will Be The Longest Day

Two harmonic convergence quotes:

Lloyd Blankfein: You're getting out of a Mercedes to go to the New York Federal Reserve. You're not getting out of a Higgins boat on Omaha Beach...

Paul Krugman: In... The Longest Day... a German general... preparing for a war game in which he will play the American commander. He tells his aide that he plans to surprise everyone by landing, not at Calais, but in Normandy.... Then, when the invasion begins, he mutters, “Normandy! How stupid of me! Now you know how some of us felt as the current crisis unfolded.... U.S. external debt, although large, is overwhelmingly dollar-denominated. So America didn’t seem vulnerable to a third-generation currency crisis. No worries, then, right? Yet the logic of the models... a vicious circle of deleveraging could arise as easily on the asset side as on the liability side, as noted in Krugman (2002). It should have been easy to put the evidence of a mammoth housing bubble together with the concepts of third-generation crisis theory to see how a nasty deleveraging cycle could occur without the “original sin” of dependence on foreign-currency debt. Sadly, almost nobody – certainly not yours truly – put the pieces together. Even those of us who diagnosed that housing bubble correctly failed to foresee the financial implosion that would follow. Normandy! How stupid of me!...

I know what movie I am going to watch tonight...

Happy Wookie Life Day, Everyone!!

The Star Wars Holiday Special: