Category Archives: Entertainment

Argument: New England neighborhoods attract movies because they have character and don’t have McMansions

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A columnist in Swampscott, Massachusetts argues New England neighborhoods have a sense of place, don’t have many McMansions, and therefore attract filmmakers:

If you’ve ever traveled outside New England, you begin to notice that most of the rest of the country looks a lot alike. Rapid development on a budget lends itself to a landscape of boxy stores in strip malls and cookie cutter homes. Some of these cookie cutter homes are “McMansions,” and very nice to live in, but even so their exteriors are unmemorable, duplicated a million times over.

New England—Swampscott—looks different.  Neighborhoods have personalities. The roads curve in unpredictable ways.  Houses don’t all look alike. I happen to like the intricate purple paint on a certain home on Paradise Road, but we all have our favorites…

Yet there is true value in this difference.  Part of the reason that Massachusetts has attracted so many movies is because of our location—place matters.  Grown-Ups 2 is here because Swampscott looks like a typical New England town, and New England is a good brand, a marketable brand.

And crucial to the New England brand is a community’s willingness to embrace its historic past, to pay attention to its older buildings, and to, in short, care about the way something looks. A quick drive through the Olmstead District will remind all of us how lucky we are that the Mudges had the foresight to hire someone so talented to lay it out, that the town pays to upkeep the greens, and that the homeowners in the area now take such pride in their property.

New England does indeed have its own style and character though plenty of other places in the United States have historic preservation districts that are intended to save older buildings.

There is an interesting implication here that McMansions developed in places with less character. This would be intriguing to track: did the term first arise in Sunbelt locations or in more historic communities that felt threatened by new, big, mass produced homes?

I also wonder how many movies actually do film in New England compared to other locations. According to the Massachusetts Film Office, five films are in production or have recently finished filming. Like many other places, Massachusetts offers incentives for filmmakers:

Massachusetts provides filmmakers with a highly competitive package of tax incentives: a 25% production credit, a 25% payroll credit, and a sales tax exemption.

Any project that spends more than $50,000 in Massachusetts qualifies for the payroll credit and sales tax exemption. Spending more than 50% of total budget or filming at least 50% of the principal photography days in Massachusetts makes the project eligible for the production credit.

Quick Review: the Sherlock Holmes stories

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One of my reading projects this summer was to read all of the Sherlock Holmes short stories (56) and novels (4). I enjoyed reading these classics and here are a few thoughts about the well-known detective and his sidekick Watson:

1. I don’t read a lot of mysteries but I can see that more recent detectives (books, TV, movies) have hints of Holmes. Holmes is the classic scientific detective, reasoning his way through tough cases. There has to be a line from Holmes to Hercule Poirot to Adrian Monk. Of course, Holmes’ emphasis on science also emerges as the larger society moves more toward a belief of science and progress.

2. I’m not sure that I like Sherlock Holmes in the end and I’m not sure Doyle wanted people to like him but rather wanted people to be impressed by him. Holmes certainly has a sharp mind but he is given to mood swings, using opium, and rarely shows a non-scientific side. For example, there are a few points in the later stories where Watson seems thrilled that Holmes reveals some warm feelings for his companion. Holmes is a sort of modern renaissance man but is a limited person.

3. Even with the presence of Professor Moriarty, there was one big difference with recent stories: there is a lack of a major villain. Indeed, Holmes does a lot of one-off cases and there are a few recurring characters.

4. After reading all of these stories, I’m not sure I could remember the details of many of them. I liked the four novels the most as there was room to develop the cases and have more twists and turns.

5. I had the opportunity to read most of these stories in the Oxford annotated editions (see an example here). At first, I thought this would be a hindrance (that long introduction, the extensive footnotes) but I really grew to enjoy this. This particularly came in handy with the novels The Gang of Four and A Study in Scarlet as the footnotes described how Doyle built the stories around interesting true events. I didn’t read all of the footnotes (and they truly seemed to be extensive – and occasionally esoteric) but the introductions were helpful.

6. I wish I had read these all in chronological order.

7. I suspect it would have been very different to read these all in the serial form in which they were released.

The extra-real sound of the Olympics

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For those interested in sounds, this is a fascinating read about how the sound from the Olympics sounds so (hyper)real:

For the London Olympics, Baxter will deploy 350 mixers, 600 sound technicians, and 4,000 microphones at the London Olympics. Using all the modern sound technology they can get their hands on, they’ll shape your experience to sound like a lucid dream, a movie, of the real thing.

Let’s take archery. “After hearing the coverage in Barcelona at the ’92 Olympics, there were things that were missing. The easy things were there. The thud and the impact of the target — that’s a no brainer — and a little bit of the athlete as they’re getting ready,” Baxter says.

“But, it probably goes back to the movie Robin Hood, I have a memory of the sound and I have an expectation. So I was going, ‘What would be really really cool in archery to take it up a notch?’ And the obvious thing was the sound of the arrow going through the air to the target. The pfft-pfft-pfft type of sound. So we looked at this little thing, a boundary microphone, that would lay flat, it was flatter than a pack of cigarettes, and I put a little windshield on it, and I put it on the ground between the athlete and the target and it completely opened up the sound to something completely different.”

Just to walk through the logic: based on the sound of arrows in a fictional Kevin Costner movie, Baxter created the sonic experience of sitting between the archer and the target, something no live spectator could do.

Television is supposed be able to bring you live events (I know this doesn’t necessarily qualify for the Olympics) – I know I don’t think much about what technology this requires. But this article suggests the sound is even better than real: there is no one at the Olympic archery range who is even hearing what televisions viewers can hear.

Does this make watching all of those Olympics commercials a little more bearable?

Harry Potter conference in Ireland cosponsored by sociology department

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The University of Limerick in Ireland this week hosted a Harry Potter conference. Interestingly, this conference was co-sponsored by the sociology department.

An International Academic Conference exploring the cultural influence of the Harry Potter books and films entitled ‘Magic is Might 2012’ took place at the University of Limerick this week.

The two-day event, which concluded on Wednesday, featured 20 presentations on papers showcasing international research on multiple aspects of the impact of the Harry Potter series from literature, to education, law to digital media. Speakers from over 10 countries presented their work on Harry Potter and the conference also included the live trial of controversial character Dolores Umbridge in the University of Limerick Moot Court exploring her crimes and debating the severity of her punishment…

“The characters’ relationships, the political and social systems, and cultural commentaries woven into Rowling’s writing are just some examples of what makes the Harry Potter series an exciting framework for academic discourse in a number of areas.  We will encourage intensive and lively discussion and debate around the papers. We are delighted that Wizards, muggles, established academics and postgraduate students have submitted papers, and we will put the collection of papers together into an e-book after the conference. We are also very excited to host the first Harry Potter conference to take place in Ireland” she continued…

The Conference was hosted by UL’s Department of Sociology in collaboration with UL’s Interaction Design Centre and the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems.

I’m sure this is not the first or last Harry Potter conference. Yet, I wonder why the sociology department was behind this. I know I don’t read or see all that sociologists publish but I haven’t yet run across any sociological works on Harry Potter. A few ideas why a sociology department might sponsor such a conference:

1. Harry Potter is a cultural phenomenon and this is what sociologists study.

2. The sociology department liked the idea of being tied to an international phenomenon. In other words, this is good marketing.

3. The series itself has a number of sociological themes (though the same could be said about other media).

I’d be interested to hear more about the consequences for the sociology department…

“The Queen of Versailles” is not about a McMansion

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More reviews are coming out of the new documentary The Queen of Versailles (and critics are liking it according to RottenTomatoes.com) but I would still argue with some of the depictions of the 90,000 square foot house at the center of the film. Here is an example: the Jewish Daily Forward has a headline titled “The Biggest McMansion of Them All.” I’ve argued this before: a 90,000 square foot home is far, far beyond McMansion territory. This is the land of the ultra-rich. Take this information from the same Jewish Daily Forward story:

David Siegel, 76, is the billionaire founder of Westgate Resorts, which he claims is “the largest privately owned time-share company in the world.” Jackie, 31 years his junior, is David’s surgically enhanced wife, and mother to seven of his 13 children. They live in a 26,000-square-foot home in Orlando, Fla., with a household staff of 19. They believe the house is too small…

All went well until the credit crunch of 2008. The Siegels’ problems weren’t caused by the house — though it did become a burden. Rather, David’s company ran into trouble as lending dried up. Typically, Westgate customers borrowed money from the company to pay for their vacation time-shares. The company, in turn, borrowed from the banks at lower interest rates. When the banks stopped lending, the bottom fell out.

Added to that difficulty was the burden of the PH Towers Westgate, a new 52-story high-rise luxury resort in Las Vegas, which drained Siegel’s corporate resources as well as $400 million of his own money. Finally, in November of 2011, Siegel was forced to sell…

Originally, the project was going to be a look at how the wealthy live and, of course, at the Siegel’s house-in-progress. It was very much in line with Greenfield’s previous work as a documentarian and photographer.

I’m looking forward to seeing this film at some point but it is difficult to draw conclusions about McMansions and American excess from one ultra-wealthy couple. Thus far, it sounds like reviewers and others see this film as a metaphor for the American economic crisis of the last five years or so and I’m not sure you can stretch it that far. As a view into the life of the elite, it may be fascinating but it would be difficult to describe this as a “typical” experience that explains the logic behind all McMansions and excessive consumption.

New movie to feature “nonviolent conflict resolution specialist teaching sociology”

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It is relatively rare to find television shows or movies that feature sociologists. Here is a new one: the upcoming movie Hit & Run features one of the lead characters as a sociology instructor.

Charlie Bronson (Dax Shepard) is trying to live a quiet, respectable life in a small California town in Hit & Run. He’s doing right by his girlfriend (Kristen Bell), a nonviolent conflict resolution specialist teaching sociology at a local college, sharing a tender moment in bed as the film opens. But, things go south really quickly.

You see, Charlie’s actually in the witness protection program for testifying about a botched robbery turned homicide he witnessed in Los Angeles. Now his girlfriend’s been offered the opportunity of a lifetime in LA and, rather than lose her, Charlie decides to risk everything to get her there. The couple quickly picks up a few tails in pursuit, including Charlie’s assigned marshal (Tom Arnold), Bell’s jealous ex (Michael Rosenbaum), the cons Charlie ratted out (Bradley Cooper, Ryan Hansen and Joy Bryant), and a pair of local law enforcement caught up in the swing of it.

I wonder how much the film plays up the irony of a “nonviolent conflict resolution specialist” teaching sociology getting involved in exciting car chases…

Shoddy McMansions provide good settings for books, movies

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A book review in the Christian Science Monitor suggests that McMansions lend themselves to good mysteries:

Forget crumbling castles or isolated mansions. The recession has created something truly rare: a whole new kind of haunted house. The summer’s best two mysteries are both set in shoddy subdivisions of McMansions – relics of wrecked hopes built just before the housing bubble popped in 2007. Both feature seemingly golden couples, one Irish and one American, who lose the ability to cope when the world suddenly throws out the guidebook to the good life. And both offer shrewdly written, darkly compelling stories that rank among the year’s best.

So there is at least one good thing about McMansions: they make for good dystopian settings!

I will note that this is not limited to fiction books. A number of movies and television shows also use McMansions as a backdrop. Think of The Sopranos or the Real Housewives series. As with books, there is some commentary here as well: McMansions are lived in by certain kinds of people.

New York Times review of SimCity Social

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Here is evidence that the world is a changed place: the New York Times has a short review of the new SimCity Social game for Facebook.

SimCity Social brings the original city-building video game to Facebook, though fans will be hard-pressed to find any of the depth and complexity of that popular PC series. Players place businesses, factories, houses and various attractions, as their expansionist ambitions are kept in check by an energy meter that slowly refills.

The game allows friends to establish sister cities or rival cities, which enables some entertaining cross-border acts of charity or benign sabotage. SimCity Social is a cute and capable social city builder. It’s also a shameless attempt to capitalize on the success of Zynga’s wildly popular CityVille, slapping a powerful name on a game that could never live up to SimCity’s legacy.

As a long-time SimCity fan, I’m tempted to try out this new version. However, several things will stop me:

1. I don’t want a watered down version. I’d rather use my computer and XBox 360 to play full, more stunning versions of games.

2. I’m not sure even a full-scale social version would add to the gameplay.

3. Does this app bug all of your friends like Farmville and the like? If so, I’m staying far away.

4. It sounds like this version may have become more “gamified” rather than being the free-flowing game I’m used to. Here is another review that explains some of the game:

So it’s technically Facebook, but when you’re playing it, it feels like a place (OR A CITY) of its own. I started playing it last Friday and I can’t stop. I am on Level 17, my population is at healthy 6,000, and SimCitySocialCheat.com is the website I aspire to be managing editor of. There’s something about the colorful utopia that I can not not stop thinking about.

Maybe it’s the constant yearning of completing tasks to get more energy bolts, thus being able build more houses and increase population and, in doing so, unlock the next level and new attractions.

Perhaps it’s the constant praise the game lauds on you for doing something so dumb and pointless, like planting a tree in a high-populated area. The the real world just doesn’t offer that,  unless you send a tree to Israel. (Then you get a fancy certificate back in return.)

And my friends are redeeming themselves there. You find an inner-circle of people that you can trust and rely on—not for moral support, but for land permits, teamwork badges, and Dunkin’ Donut energy bonuses: Jordanville runs on Dunkin’.

SimCity has always had some incentive to grow as you get to build different kinds of things. This often worked like it does for real cities: as a city grow, it can support monuments, cultural attractions, and more complicated transportation options. However, it sounds like this new version takes it to another level.

 

Quick Review: The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

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This documentary (written about earlier here) is a fascinating look at the ill-fated Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis but it also speaks more broadly to public housing in general in the United States. A few thoughts about the documentary:

1. The documentary tries to tell a comprehensive story about why Pruitt-Igoe failed. The argument is that is was not about bad residents or poor architectural design: the project was built as part of a system that is set up to fail where the government supported suburban growth after World War II, white flight out of cities like St. Louis, a flood of poorer residents to northern cities looking for jobs, urban business interests looking to clear slums and open up development opportunities, a shift away from an urban industrial economy, and issues of race and segregation throughout. In other words, this is a complex issue and simply eliminating public housing or building better developments don’t effectively address all of the relevant concerns.

2. This contains a great mix of archival photos, video clips, and interviews with former residents. I wish more of these images of cities and public housing from the 1950s and 1960s were readily available.

3. There is an interesting section on control over the residents of the projects. For example, the documentary says men were not allowed to live in the projects in the early days for women with children to get aid money. Therefore, a new generation of children in the projects lived without fathers and male figures. Additionally, early residents were not allowed to have television sets.

4. The documentary effectively shows the hope present at the beginning of such projects. For many of the early residents, this was a step up from tenements. These projects were not failures from day one. The repeated pictures of the projects with the gleaming St. Louis Arch in the distance drives this point home. Additionally, one resident repeatedly tells of good moments in her life while living as a kid in the projects.

5. While the film is directly about St. Louis, this is a story repeated in numerous other American big cities. The Chicago story doesn’t seem too different: the projects were built on land civic and business leaders chose, the projects were a step up from tenement living, and within several years the projects became incredibly segregated, rundown, and the social problems began to spiral out of control.

6. There is one issue that the film doesn’t tackle: why exactly did this one project get torn down and not notorious projects in St. Louis and other cities? Why, for example, did it take until the 1990s and the HUD’s HOPE VI program for projects like the Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green (the last building demolished just last year) to be demolished? There is clearly more to the story here in St. Louis as well as elsewhere: as the projects experienced more problems, why did it take decades to do something about it? (I’m not suggesting here that demolishing the projects was necessarily the best way to go. As the film briefly asks, what happened to all of those people who left?)

In the end, this would be a great film to show in class to discuss public housing and related issues of urban development, race and class, and public policy.