Saturday, November 24, 2012

Life pro-tip: don't pass up opportunities to buy striking and inexpensive postcards.  Worst case scenario, they get buried under a pile somewhere and you've wasted some money.  Best case scenario: it's *so* awesome that you have them.

Monday, November 12, 2012

Which movie to see?

We learn that our decisions as consumers matter.  We learn that we vote with our dollars.  We stop paying companies to erect factory farms, to enslave third-world children, or to lobby congress to loosen environmental restrictions.  Or, more likely, we become firm in our convictions that people ought to so moderate their consumption, even if we're not currently possessed of the fortitude to do it ourselves.

Okay, so those are some pretty morally lofty ways that we might govern our consumer habits.  But if you take  it as a general lesson that you vote, with your money, for the world you want to become actual, then there are other ways in which you might not realize that you are paying for the world to be a way that you wouldn't, if possessed of full information, choose for it to be.  Even if these ends-directed consumer habits carry with them little or no moral consequence, they still might fit the general recipe:  you have the power to tell some producer that you wish the world would be more this way than that way, and you will reward them financially if they modify their behavior to make the world more this way than that way.  I'm referring to the behavior of film studios.

Recently it's become the case that I watch a whole lot of movies in the theater.  A lot of the movies that I've been excited for recently have been giant studio hits, including Skyfall, Looper, The Hunger Games, Wreck-It Ralph and The Dark Knight.  A lot of the movies I've seen have been, though well known (and, by design, Oscar contenders)  not the same rakers in of hundreds of millions of dollars, for instance The Master, Beasts of the Southern Wild, and Seven Psychopaths.

I like the big studio hits, and I would be loathe to miss seeing them, especially since my interest in seeing movies is often to have my fingers in the pulse of a nationally shared consciousness.  But my aesthetico-political inclination (if I may be permitted a fancy sounding gerry-mandered word) is that the studios don't need any further encouragement to make movies like Skyfall and The Hunger Games.  They do need further encouragement to make the other sorts of movies.  So suppose I want to see Hunger Games and The Master equally, both are coming out this weekend, and I'm only going to see one.  How do I vote for the world I want to see with my dollar?  Easy...see The Master.  Done.  But what if I want to see both movies equally (or, at least, my desire to see both crosses some relevant threshold) and I have the time and money to see both?  How can I "vote" for The Master in the relevant sense without having my vote cancelled out by going and spending the same amount of money to see Hunger Games?  The answer boils down to: opening weekend. Movies' success is measured in how much money they bring in on opening weekend.  This is one of the reasons that movies that appeal to young teens are given such huge budgets, and why movie studios priorities are increasingly calibrated to the tastes of teens: teens flood the theaters on opening weekend. So if you want to send the studios a message that making The Master is economically worth their time, see it on the first day it comes out.  If two movies are coming out this weekend, and you plan to see both, but one of the movies is of a kind that you wish the studios would priortize more highly, then you should make a more concerted effort to see that movie during it's first several days, and feel free to put off the other movie into the coming week when you have the time.

This weekend Lincoln and The Sessions will both be coming out.  I don't have any sense that one of these is, as I put it, "of a type that I wish the studios would make more movies like this", but in the future if a movie has been produced by a smaller, more independent studio, or if the movie itself looks to be the kind of nuanced, investigative earnest attempt at perfectly exploiting the medium of film for artistic expression, then that's the movie I'm going to see on opening weekend.  I'll wait, dodging spoilers all the while, and see the Dark Night on the coming Wednesday.