Tag Archives: movies

Infographic: “Gender Inequality in [Hollywood] Film”

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Check out this infographic from the New York Film Academy on gender inequality in American films. A few of the facts involved:

-“Women purchase half of the movie tickets sold in the U.S.” but “28.8% of women wore sexually revealing clothes as opposed to 7.0% of men” in the top 500 films from 2007 to 20012 and the “average ratio of male actors to females is 2.25:1” in these same films.

-The number of men and women working behind the scene in major roles of the top 250 films of 2012 is pretty unequal: women are 9% of directors, 15% of writers, 17% of executive producers, 25% of producers, 20% of editors, and 2% of cinematographers.

-“Forbes 2013 list of the top ten highest paid actresses made a collective $181 million versus $465 million made by the top ten male actors” and “In 2013 the highest paid female actor, Angelina Jolie, made $33 million, roughly the same amount as the two lowest-ranked men. Furthermore, age appears to be a dominant factor in an actress’s monetary success compared to men.”

So much for progressive Hollywood? The infographic also suggests the depth of the inequality goes beyond just star actors and actresses; it applies to numerous important roles and how characters are regularly portrayed.

Another aspect of this is to think about using infographics for social activism. In one big graphic, this group has presented a lot of data regarding gender in American films. Is it more effective to present the data in (1) a splashy way – infographics are hot these days and (2) to overwhelm people with data?

Sociological musings about American culture in “It’s A Wonderful Life”

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This talk by a sociologist about It’s A Wonderful Life serves as a reminder that the film provides a nice window into modern American life. Although it is a holiday movie, here are a few sociological ideas that still resonate today:

1. Mr. Potter is the evil banker and the primary villain. While hero George Bailey just wants to help his family and others in the community, the banker only cares about money. Could be connected to discussions of inequality, the wealth of bankers, and the role of the finance industry in helping to build communities.

2. Hero George Bailey wants to build suburban-like homes in a new subdivision in his community. The movie came out at the beginning of the post-World War II suburban boom and anticipates that many Americans simply want a home of their own.

3. The movie is set in a relatively small town where George Bailey and his family can know lots of people. Even as Americans look to private single-family homes, there is still often a small-town ideal where everyone gets along and helps each other (and often the assumption that we have lost this over time).

4. George Bailey seeks meaning in his work and life. When he doesn’t find it, he considers suicide. Bailey wants to provide for his family and friends and struggles when he cannot do this.

5. George’s life is saved by an angel. Americans tend to like angels even as more Americans say they are not religious. Angels fit with a spirituality where God generally wants people to succeed.

6. The celebratory ending of the film comes as George is surrounded by his family and friends. The emphasis on family life is not unusual in American stories but this also highlights the small town coming together. Bailey has the American Dream at the end: a home, a loving family, helpful friends, and is optimistic about his future.

Of course, this film has been analyzed plenty as a classic sitting at #20 on the AFI’s top 100 movies. Yet, it is an important moment as America started seeing itself as the prosperous superpower.

Portraying the Internet in stories on-screen

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A look at the new movie The Fifth Estate highlights the difficulties of portraying Internet action in film:

“[It’s] almost like going back to the basics of silent filmmaking – you are going to do some reading in this,” Condon told WIRED about his use of the cyber-visuals. “The question is: How to make that as immersive as possible. I think one of the things about a dramatized version as opposed to some of the very very good [documentaries] – Alex Gibney’s was wonderful – is that this is meant to give you an experience of, a sense of what it was like to be in the room.”Ok, sure. But does the room have to be a metaphorical representation of the internet when the actual apartments/cafes/hacker spaces where the WikiLeaks team worked suffice? Probably not. In fairness, there is one moment when the aforementioned fake office is shown going up in flames as Domscheit-Berg (played by Daniel Brühl) deletes troves of WikiLeaks files that is poignant, even if a bit much, but simply showing the disappearing files got across the same message. And there is more than enough drama in the hurried scenes set in hacker conferences, the radical underground world of Berlin’s Tacheles, and the newsrooms of the world’s most prestigious newspapers to go around — dramatizing online chat doesn’t feel necessary…

But that doesn’t save it from the trap that has plagued modern cyber-thrillers from Hackers to The Net. The internet — and documents and troves of data it transmits and contains — are not characters. They don’t have feelings or personalities, and it’s hard to make drama out of what happens on them.

The Social Network is one of the few films to do it well, and even though it took its own liberties; the amount of time we actually spent watching Mark Zuckerberg program was minimal and it managed to depict the internet and tech culture in a way that didn’t induce the sort of eye-rolling from tech-savvy viewers that Fifth Estate likely will. While the film ostensibly took place in the world of Facebook, it sidestepped the pitfalls of the online thriller by never taking its gaze off of the sometimes funny, sometimes brilliant interactions between Mark Zuckerberg and his cofounders and partners (“A million dollars isn’t cool, you know what’s cool? … A billion dollars.”) The Fifth Estate attempts to do the same with Assange and his cohorts, but it gets muddled in explaining things and introducing unnecessary characters and loses its way. It’s a shame.

So The Social Network used the Internet as a prop in order to tell more common stories about human relationships, specifically the difficulty a young man has in building strong relationships with females. In this way, the star of the film is not really Facebook – it is the people involved in its making. People don’t have to care about or know about Facebook at all to know the familiar contours of a film about relationships. I’m also reminded of how The Matrix tried to show an always-on, connected data source: a screen of scrolling numbers and bits, representing information. But, again, that trilogy didn’t spend much time in those scenes and instead told a familiar story about oppressed people – and a chosen one – fighting back.

While this is an interesting analysis, how exactly could a film display the Internet without relying more on relationships? What would be a proper cinematic portrayal of the Internet?

“Have You Noticed How Adam Sandler Characters Always Live in Giant Mansions?”

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This level of commentary is not usually associated with Adam Sandler movies but this is an interesting question: “Have you noticed how Adam Sandler characters always live in giant mansions?”

Ostentatious displays of wealth are a tricky thing onscreen: Movies are meant to be aspirational, but if the main characters live in over-the-top splendor, not many audience members will be able to relate. No one has passed this note to Adam Sandler though; his characters, more than those of any other modern movie star, tend to live in gigantic, multi-million-dollar megamansions. How does Sandler so often manage to luxuriate in his own wealth without alienating his less fortunate fan base? It probably helps that as his characters’ homes grow ever grander, Sandler’s clothes remain eternally grubby. (Hey, you don’t have much money left over for new duds when the mortgages are this high!) Join us now on a tour of Sandler’s biggest screen houses, accompanied by a look at his wardrobe in each corresponding film. Get ready for some sticker shock!

I have seen two of these seven movies but I have a few ideas about why these characters might live in such homes.

First, the big home represents the pinnacle of success but ends up contrasting with characters who find they need more than money to enjoy life. Big homes are shown as lonely places – there is a lot of room for fun activities but it might take you a while to find other people or have regular interactions with others in the house. Thus, we see the big homes early in the movies as supposed success but we are meant to leave with the idea that one can be house rich and love poor. This is a theme of a lot of movies, not just Adam Sandler films.

Second, big homes (and other garish displays of wealth) are associated with bad people. In other words, movie-goers are intended to see the unnecessarily large home and quickly make the association that the characters living in it are not nice people. The big home is then a shorthand image intended to reveal more about the character of those living there.

This requires more analysis for a definitive answer but these big homes are certainly plot devices. Given the relatively short amount of time in a movie (particularly compared to longer novels or multiple seasons of a television show), these large homes are likely the product of careful decisions.

Using suburban homes for film shoots

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The Daily Herald describes what happens when suburban homes are chosen for film shoots:

Directors of Hollywood movies, TV shows, commercials and national print ads regularly use suburban homes as locations for filming and photo shoots. Just a few weeks ago, scenes from the movie “Precious Mettle,” starring Paul Sorvino and Fiona Dourif, were shot at homes in Naperville and Aurora…They will add the photos to their online database and show them to prospective directors. Because they have thousands of homes in their database, the odds of being chosen are slim. But you never know what a director is looking for, and there’s growing demand for suburban-styled homes, said longtime location scout Oryna Schiffman, based in Elmhurst.

“Since the recession started, I’ve been getting less and less requests for your typical North Shore mansions. They say, ‘I want real people who live in real houses,'” said Schiffman, who accepts photos at oryna@me.com. “You never know what they’re going to ask for next.”…

However, there is a downside to offering up your home. Filming and photo shoots can disrupt your routine, your sleep, and possibly your neighborhood. Movie crews, especially, tend to completely take over an area with trailers and equipment. Homeowners usually get short notice about the shoots and need to hastily sign off on the legal paperwork.

While most film crews are respectful of people’s property (and often contractually obligated to return it to its original condition), paint sometimes gets chipped and things get broken or banged up. That’s why it’s important to get things in writing before the filming begins.

Of course, the article starts with a story of a family who was paid $12,000 for giving up their home for six days for a print advertisement shoot. There may be quite a few suburbanites who would relish such an opportunity.

The quote that directors are looking for “real homes” is interesting. The suggestion here is that with tighter economic times, people want to see more normal homes while during more economic prosperous times people like seeing bigger homes. When they arrive at a home, how much do they take the home as is or they change it up to suit their filming needs? Plus, how often is the tone of the commercial, TV show, film, or advertisement that the suburban home needs improving or there is something to critique? On one hand, there are a lot of critics of suburban tract homes but they are apparently useful for marketing and some artistic purposes.

Narratives built around the sociological “small world theory” of social networks

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A review of a new novel highlights recent ideas in the sociological analysis of social networks:

In sociology, the “small world theory” holds that any two people can be connected to one another along a chain of no more than a few acquaintances (typically six, the fabled “six degrees of separation”). Though the research behind it is at best contentious, there’s something deeply appealing about its logic-defying simplicity, something exciting about what it implies. In a world that can seem vast and alienating, the idea that we’re all much closer than it seems is, at first glance, comforting. The flip side is that our influence may extend further than we realize.

In his second novel, “The Illusion of Separateness,” Simon Van Booy presents a cast of characters who have had a profound effect on one another’s lives, yet cannot see the bonds that link them. He divides his book into six separate narratives, each following a different character through different eras, from the Second World War to the present: Martin, a retirement home caretaker; Mr. Hugo, a disfigured Wehrmacht veteran; Sébastien, a lovelorn young boy; John, whose B-24 bomber is shot out of the sky over France; Amelia, a blind museum curator and John’s granddaughter; and Danny, a budding filmmaker. Van Booy presents their stories in a nonlinear fashion, shifting back and forth from character to character, decade to decade.

Van Booy’s premise — that we are all linked in ways we may not fully understand, and that our smallest actions can have a significant effect on the lives of others — is fairly banal, and its execution verges on overly sentimental. He builds to the scenes in which his characters cross paths with great ceremony, yet these intersections are the book’s weakest moments. While the plot seems to aspire to present an overarching sense of meaning, Van Booy never quite drives it home. For some, the significance is inscrutable, as when John and Mr. Hugo engage in a tense, but ultimately inconsequential standoff in a field in war-torn France. Others, like when Martin cradles the dying Mr. Hugo in the book’s opening pages, seem like contrivances meant to give the narrative the appearance of structure and meaning.

For more popular descriptions of recent sociological research on this topic, see Six Degrees by Duncan Watts, Connected by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, and Linked by Barabasi (a physicist who covers a lot of ground).

This kind of narrative involving interweaving stories is not new. It seems to be popular in movies in the last 10-15 years – I’m thinking of films like Crash, Love Actually, and others that make use of intersecting characters. This leads to two thoughts:

1. Is this a good instance of social science discoveries, that social networks influence people without their knowledge, influencing popular culture? It could be relatively easy to track whether this is a new kind of plot or whether it has a longer history.

2. The reviewer suggests that while the author has impressive prose, the overall structure of the story is lacking. Since we do indeed live in social worlds strongly influenced by social networks, how can that be effectively translated into a compelling narrative? Going back to the movies I mentioned above, those intersecting storylines involved quite a bit of individual or small group interaction by the end of the movie. In contrast, this book seems to be going for a more disconnected set of stories. Setting up the structure of a social network narrative likely involves balancing the connections alongside the individual interactions that tend to characterize and propel narratives.

Using algorithms to judge cultural works

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Imagine the money that could be made or the status acquired if algorithms could correctly predict the merit of cultural works:

The budget for the film was $180m and, Meaney says, “it was breathtaking that it was under serious consideration”. There were dinosaurs and tigers. It existed in a fantasy prehistory—with a fantasy language. “Preposterous things were happening, without rhyme or reason.” Meaney, who will not reveal the film’s title because he “can’t afford to piss these people off”, told the studio that his program concurred with his own view: it was a stinker.

The difference is the program puts a value on it. Technically a neural network, with a structure modelled on that of our brain, it gradually learns from experience and then applies what it has learnt to new situations. Using this analysis, and comparing it with data on 12 years of American box-office takings, it predicted that the film in question would make $30m. With changes, Meaney reckoned they could increase the take—but not to $180m. On the day the studio rejected the film, another one took it up. They made some changes, but not enough—and it earned $100m. “Next time we saw our studio,” Meaney says, “they brought in the board to greet us. The chairman said, ‘This is Nick—he’s just saved us $80m.’”…

But providing a service that adapts to individual humans is not the same as becoming like a human, let alone producing art like humans. This is why the rise of algorithms is not necessarily relentless. Their strength is that they can take in that information in ways we cannot quickly understand. But the fact that we cannot understand it is also a weakness. It is worth noting that trading algorithms in America now account for 10% fewer trades than they did in 2009.

Those who are most sanguine are those who use them every day. Nick Meaney is used to answering questions about whether computers can—or should—judge art. His answer is: that’s not what they’re doing. “This isn’t about good, or bad. It is about numbers. These data represent the law of absolute numbers, the cinema-going audience. We have a process which tries to quantify them, and provide information to a client who tries to make educated decisions.”…

Equally, his is not a formula for the perfect film. “If you take a rich woman and a poor man and crash them into an iceberg, will that film always make money?” No, he says. No algorithm has the ability to write a script; it can judge one—but only in monetary terms. What Epagogix does is a considerably more sophisticated version, but still a version, of noting, say, that a film that contains nudity will gain a restricted rating, and thereby have a more limited market.

The larger article suggests algorithms can do better at predicting some human behaviors, such a purchasing consumer items, but not so good in other areas, like critical evaluations of cultural works. There are two ways this might go in the future. On one hand, some will argue this is just about collecting the right data or enough data. Perhaps we simply aren’t looking at the right things to correctly judge cultural products. On the other hand, some will argue that the value of an object may be too difficult for an algorithm to ever figure out. And, even if a formula starts hinting at good or bad art, humans can change their minds and opinions – see all the various cultural, art, and music movements just in the last few hundred years.

There is a lot of money that could be made here. This might be the bigger issue with cultural works in the future: whether algorithms can evaluate them or not, does it matter if they are all commoditized?

Argument: the movie “42” ignores Jackie Robinson’s role in the larger Civil Rights Movement

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Peter Drier argues that the new movie 42 fails to properly put Jackie Robinson in a larger context: as part of a larger social movement.

The film portrays baseball’s integration as the tale of two trailblazers—Robinson, the combative athlete and Rickey, the shrewd strategist—battling baseball’s, and society’s, bigotry. But the truth is that it was a political victory brought about by a social protest movement. As an activist himself, Robinson would likely have been disappointed by a film that ignored the centrality of the broader civil rights struggle…

42 is the fourth Hollywood film about Robinson. All of them suffer from what might be called movement myopia. We may prefer our heroes to be rugged individualists, but the reality doesn’t conform to the myth embedded in Hollywood’s version of the Robinson story…

Starting in the 1930s, reporters for African-American papers (especially Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier, Fay Young of the Chicago Defender, Joe Bostic of the People’s Voice in New York, and Sam Lacy of the Baltimore Afro-American), and Lester Rodney, sports editor of the Communist paper, the Daily Worker, took the lead in pushing baseball’s establishment to hire black players. They published open letters to owners, polled white managers and players (some of whom were threatened by the prospect of losing their jobs to blacks, but most of whom said that they had no objections to playing with African Americans), brought black players to unscheduled tryouts at spring training centers, and kept the issue before the public. Several white journalists for mainstream papers joined the chorus for baseball integration.

Progressive unions and civil rights groups picketed outside Yankee Stadium the Polo Grounds, and Ebbets Field in New York City, and Comiskey Park and Wrigley Field in Chicago. They gathered more than a million signatures on petitions, demanding that baseball tear down the color barrier erected by team owners and Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis. In July 1940, the Trade Union Athletic Association held an “End Jim Crow in Baseball” demonstration at the New York World’s Fair. The next year, liberal unions sent a delegation to meet with Landis to demand that major league baseball recruit black players. In December 1943, Paul Robeson, the prominent black actor, singer, and activist, addressed baseball’s owners at their annual winter meeting in New York, urging them to integrate their teams. Under orders from Landis, they ignored Robeson and didn’t ask him a single question…

Robinson recognized that the dismantling of baseball’s color line was a triumph of both a man and a movement. During and after his playing days, he joined the civil rights crusade, speaking out—in speeches, interviews, and his column—against racial injustice. In 1949, testifying before Congress, he said: “I’m not fooled because I’ve had a chance open to very few Negro Americans.”

Fascinating. Robinson can be applauded for his individual efforts and we can also recognize that he was part of a larger movement – it doesn’t have to be one or the other. But, our narratives, now prominently told in biopic movies, love to emphasize the individual. This is part of a larger American issue regarding an inability to recognize and discuss larger social structures, forces, and movements.

Many Americans might assume the Civil Rights Movement begins in the mid-1950s with Brown vs. Board of Education or the actions of Rosa Parks (this is where the Wikipedia article on the subject starts) but things were stirring in Robinson’s day. While baseball was America’s sport (pro football didn’t start its meteoric rise until a decade or so later) and Robinson’s play was influential, there were other efforts going on. In 1948 the military was integrated via an order from President Truman. After World War II, blacks tried to move into better housing, often found in white neighborhoods, but faced serious (sometimes violent) opposition in a number of locations.

I’ve been conflicted about whether I should see this movie as a big baseball fans. Sports movies are a little too mawkish for me and don’t ever really reflect how the game is played. This argument is not helping the movie’s cause…

Looking at Seneca Falls, New York, “the real Bedford Falls” in It’s a Wonderful Life

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Social Explorer, a cool tool for looking at demographic data, takes a quick look at the New York community that was the inspiration for Bedford Falls in the holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life:

Producer and director Frank Capra set the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life in the fictional small town of Bedford Falls, NY.  The actual town of Seneca Falls, NY, claims to be Capra’s inspiration.   The town hosts the annual It’s a Wonderful Life Festival and visitors can explore the history at the museum dedicated to the legend…

Back in 1940, Seneca County had 25,732 residents, of whom 99.5 percent were white and 0.5 percent were black.  Nearly a third of the county’s foreign born population (32.0 percent) hailed from Italy, more than both statewide (one fifth) and nationwide (one seventh).  Many foreign born residents also came from Germany (10.2 percent) and England and Wales (9.1 percent).

Today, Seneca County has grown 37.1 percent to 35,285 residents, while the state grew 43.2 percent and the nation grew 133.0 percent.  Seneca County remains predominately white (92.9 percent) with a small but growing black population (4.3 percent).  According to 2006-10 ACS data, today 4.6 percent of the foreign born population comes from Italy.  Larger shares of newcomers come from other countries including Canada (17.4 percent), India (11.2 percent), Laos (6.1 percent), Ukraine (5.1 percent), and Poland (3.6 percent).

The top occupations in 1940 were:

  • Proprietors/Managers/Official (20.9 percent)
  • Craftmen/Foremen/Kindred Workers (16.4 percent)
  • Operatives/Kindred Workers (15.0 percent)
  • Laborers (13.9 percent)

Of the adult residents, 18.2 percent had completed high school (or more) and 3.0 percent had graduated from college, which were both smaller percentages than in the state (22.9 percent and 5.5 percent) and nation (24.1 percent and 4.6 percent).

Sounds like small town life that may not be much different today. The movie seems to provide more information about the “feel” of the community rather than the demographics. George Bailey is trying to build suburban-type homes and is thwarted by the evil banker in the community. By the end of the film, Bailey and other average citizens in the community are shown to be decent people who rally together in times of need. Does this story necessarily line up with the ancestry of the community or the top occupations? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps demography is not narrative destiny in this case. Perhaps the best way to attack this issue would be to compare the demographics of Seneca County in 1940 to other typical small towns and counties and see how “representative” the movie demographics might have been.

Contrarian view: “Why 2012 was the best year ever”

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The Spectator argues that 2012 wasn’t so bad when you look at the big picture:

It may not feel like it, but 2012 has been the greatest year in the history of the world. That sounds like an extravagant claim, but it is borne out by evidence. Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity. The West remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing countries are charging ahead, and people are being lifted out of poverty at the fastest rate ever recorded. The death toll inflicted by war and natural disasters is also mercifully low. We are living in a golden age.

To listen to politicians is to be given the opposite impression — of a dangerous, cruel world where things are bad and getting worse. This, in a way, is the politicians’ job: to highlight problems and to try their best to offer solutions. But the great advances of mankind come about not from statesmen, but from ordinary people. Governments across the world appear stuck in what Michael Lind, on page 30, describes as an era of ‘turboparalysis’ — all motion, no progress. But outside government, progress has been nothing short of spectacular.

Take global poverty. In 1990, the UN announced Millennium Development Goals, the first of which was to halve the number of people in extreme poverty by 2015. It emerged this year that the target was met in 2008. Yet the achievement did not merit an official announcement, presumably because it was not achieved by any government scheme but by the pace of global capitalism. Buying cheap plastic toys made in China really is helping to make poverty history. And global inequality? This, too, is lower now than any point in modern times. Globalisation means the world’s not just getting richer, but fairer too.

The doom-mongers will tell you that we cannot sustain worldwide economic growth without ruining our environment. But while the rich world’s economies grew by 6 per cent over the last seven years, fossil fuel consumption in those countries fell by 4 per cent. This remarkable (and, again, unreported) achievement has nothing to do with green taxes or wind farms. It is down to consumer demand for more efficient cars and factories.

And so on. It is hard to keep this big picture in mind. Tragedies seem common or at least too frequent. Good news doesn’t seem to trickle up to the top of the news heap as much. Or perhaps it is because our relative status in the United States and elsewhere in the West seems precarious. Or perhaps it is because due to globalization we are also more aware of the risks in the world around us.

This argument reminds of Stephen Pinker’s 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature (my quick review here). Pinker argued in the book that humans have had a much more violent past and today is marked by relative peace and conflict today tends to be more limited in terms of deaths and how big of an area is affected. Yet, the average citizen would not probably pick up on this.

Before watching The Hobbit on Friday night, my wife and I were struck by the number of movie trailers for post-apocalyptic films. Granted, we didn’t see any trailers for romantic comedies or many Oscar worthy dramas – the theaters clearly think there is a certain audience for The Hobbit – but these sort of narratives seem to be on the rise. People want to watch fictionalized movies and TV shows about the end of times, when the narrative of human progress is clearly smashed and small groups of people try to put the pieces together again. Of course, such movies can also be an excuse for monsters and violence but this is a fascinating trend tied to pessimism about the present and future.