Movies

The rumor mill says Batman 3 (The Caped Crusader?) will feature Killer Croc as the primary villan and part of the movie will be set outside of Gotham with shooting in New Orleans.

Doubt it. Nolan wouldn't touch a character like Killer Croc. I take this as evidence pointing toward the Black Mask. He was introduced when Millar was 15, so he fits the description too. I don't think they would set a major action sequence outside of Gotham either, so I suspect the New Orleans shoot, if it's real, is for a part like the Hong Kong part of The Dark Knight. The Black Mask makes a lot of sense because someone has to fill the void left by the deaths of Gambol, the Chechen and Maroni.

So right now I'm hoping for the Riddler and the Black Mask, and I think that combination is most likely. Not sure who I'd have play them. DiCaprio could work as the Black Mask, but I'd like to see them find a no-name who fits better.

Influential Movies

I forgot to include this one in my list of influential books, but it's important, now more than ever.

The Return of Depression Economics - I never finished the book, but I learned the parable of the babysitting co-op and that was my first lesson in monetary policy.

Now for my list of movies with good ideas. Most of them just have one good idea that felt novel to me, but that's all you need since most pictures preach platitudes.

Avatar - The trees (and animals) are connected like neurons in a brain. Together, they form a self, Eywa, and can think. Isn't that interesting? What does it say about ecology on Earth? Probably nothing.

Bowling for Columbine - Michael Moore has tackled some questions beyond his reach. But Bowling for Columbine is a masterpiece. He wonders why America is so violent and plagued by so many homocides. Maybe, he suggests, its because we live in fear. I think he's just scratching the surface of social capital and institutions, but I didn't know about that stuff back then.

The Dark Knight - Crime is interesting, if only because I don't know much about it. Gordon introduced the theme of The Dark Knight at the end of Batman Begins: (paraphrased) "What about escalation? . . . We start carrying semi-autos, they buy automatics. We buy body armor, they buy armor piercing rounds. And your wearing a mask and jumping off rooftops . . ."

The Godfather - "It's not personal, it's just business." That's the basis for the the best tragedy in the history of film. Compare vis a vis Anakin in the Star Wars prequels and Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight. And how many people think straight about their professional lives anyway?

The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions - These are a great rumination on causality and determinism. But they don't introduce a lot I'd consider novel until the very end of Revolutions, which would have been great in a book but comes up short on screen. The basic idea is when you ask a yes or no question where both answers would be contradictory*, what is the answer? Neo represents that kind of a contradiction, choice does to, and Neo resolves the contradiction by simply deciding one way or the other (we think he does at the end of Reloaded, but he doesn't, we have to wait until Revolutions for it). That is the only "mind blowing" idea I've noticed in a movie.

* Example: The barber shaves all and only the people in town who don't shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself?

Is The Godfather IMDb's real #1?

Inception is #3 on IMDb's list of top movies. Toy Story was #6 a few weeks ago, but it's rank has sunk to #8 and will probably continue to plummet. Avatar started at #28 and has sunk out of the top 100. The Dark Knight, most famously, was briefly #1. There's got to be something wrong with how IMDb uses ratings for new movies. What is it?

It's called selection bias. The pool of people who vote on movies right when they come out isn't representative of the typical IMDb user who will vote on the film. They tend to be people who were so hyped about the movie that they saw it opening night or opening weekend. The result is that Inception has the 40,000 votes from people verly likely to enjoy the film. (IMDb corrects for this somewhat by filling in the "missing" votes that would get Inception up to 200k with an "average" opinion, but the trend shows they clearly don't compensate enough.)

There are other biases, though, in the IMDb formula that can throw the ranks out of whack. One is that it doesn't take into account the age distribution of voters. In general 18-29 years old give movies higher ratings than older people (45+) and these groups have different tastes. 18-29 year olds have substantially higher ratings than 45+s for The Shawshank Redemption (9.4 vs 8.7) and The Dark Knight (9.1 vs 7.7). In contrast, both age groups give similar ratings for The Godfather and Avatar. So I asked if it's possible IMDb has the ranking of Shawshank and The Godfather and The Dark Knight and Avatar backwards if you adjust for age demographics.

Short answer: yes. Based on these data, if you put a gun to my head and asked which movies would have a higher rating if the entire country watched each pair, my guesses would be The Godfather (by a big margin) and Avatar (by the slimest of margins).

Another bias to explore is gender bias. IMDb voters are overwhelming male, but the U.S. population (and movie-goers in general) aren't. Can that help explain why The Blind Side has a 4.4 on Netflix and an A on Yahoo! Movies but doesn't even make the IMDb Top 250? Sort of. The average rating for females is 8.2 vs 7.7 for men, and most of the ratings are from men. But if you give equal weight it only bumps The Blind Side up to a 7.9, not enough to make the Top 250 cut. The bias effecting The Blind Side is probably the selection bias in who visits the website (hipsters who don't like mainstream movies or football much?). The Notebook, though, is easily booted from the Top 250 by gender bias. It has a phenomenal 8.6 rating from females and a 7.8 from males, averaging to 8.2 and a would-be spot somewhere around #120. That is probably still to low, though, given it's 4.2 on Netflix from 5.5 million ratings.

Update: Here's another interesting story about the Godfather and Shawshank rankings.

Metaphysics

Like most "literal-minded" people, I'm not that interested in metaphysics. I think the questions are interesting: Do we have free will? What is real? Is there a God? They seem self-evidently important.

Yet there's something wrong with most metaphysical speculation. I can't say it as eloquently as Hume so I'll just dig up the famous quote to express my sentiments:

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

If philosophy departments are sophistry plants, then metaphysicists are the 20% in the 80/20 rule.

Still, Hume's statement contradicts itself. He wants us to avoid questions that can't be settled scientifically, yet his basis for the claim isn't scientific. There's something inescapable about questions of reality, purpose, and free will.

Free will is the easiest to settle. Everything in the universe seems pretty easy to explain in deterministic or at least probabilistic terms at a quantum level. There doesn't seem to be any scope for choice at the level of the tissues and organs, so it seems unlikely our brains can really make choices. Free will is a myth. But it's a myth that we should believe in. Stories are important to our lives, even if they are delusions. "Sometimes the truth isn't good enough. Sometimes people deserve more." We deserve free will.

The fact that I casually advocate deluding yourself suggests I don't care much about reality. That is mostly true. I don't think subjective idealism is refutable. I don't think you can prove anything is "real" or even care what word "real" means. But I do, of course, have implicit views. As far as I'm concerned what's real is what our intuition, the principle of parsimony, and scientific experiments combine to tell us is real. The ground we stand on is real, by intuition. Electrons are real, by experimental evidence. God is not real, by the principle of parsimony. There is no higher purpose in the universe, no set of criteria for deciding what is right and wrong or what we should do. There's just what's in our heads.

This is why delusions are ok. What's "really real" is whatever we can construct in our minds. We can give ourselves goals and set rules for telling right from wrong. We can give these goals and rules meaning. And we should--for our own health and happiness (the two "goods" I give meaning to start with).

Thus my metaphysic says, in short, we are probably just clumps of matter that somehow, through some strange loop, became self-aware. We don't have any objective purpose, but we shouldn't care. We should invest some purpose--then ignore the ladder of reasoning we used to arrive at that purpose and pursue it as a given most of the time. That's how we'll be happiest.

I don't have use for thought experiments like the experience machine or questions about whether we live in a computer simulation, or even whether we have free will. We shouldn't care.

"Of course it is [just] happening inside your head . . . but why on Earth should that mean that it is not real?"

Other interesting ideas in metaphysics I didn't get to mention:

1. In I am a Strange Loop Douglas Hofstadter makes an analogy for the interaction of neurons in our brain and our thoughts. I recommend reading the book because I can't explain it here but his basic point is that we can just as well say that our thoughts and feelings "cause" the neurons to fire in certain patterns as saying that those patterns "cause" us to feel the way we do. It's a semantic point about the meaning of "cause" but it's interesting.

2. In The Big Questions, Steve Landsburg notes that math is a universal. We're compelled by logic to agree with provable propositions. Perhaps, then, he proposes a sort of Platonism where math is the reality. It sounds better in the book.

3. The latter two films in The Matrix trilogy have an interesting "worldview." In the world of The Matrix there is an anomaly in the universe that is otherwise governed by (I guess) mathematical laws. This anomaly represents something like incompleteness or the halting program, and is represented in human form by Neo. Neo is the only person in the movies who can make choices, though he only ever makes one choice, because all the other "choices" are caused by this or that rationale. Neo gets caught in a fight with Smith that is analogous to the halting program, and he chooses to halt. Smith asks why, but there is no rationale, he does it simply "because [he] choose[s] to."

More on District 9

I trashed District 9 in an earlier post and I'm sure that offended the taste of uptown yuppies and hipsters living in their IMDB bubble where District 9 is the 122nd best movie ever made, ahead of classics of wide appeal such as The Lion King (146), Gone with the Wind (1939), and The Graduate (1967).

When I was talking to some such bobos last semester they pointed out that, if District 9 wasn't "better" than Avatar, at least it provided a better return on investment. After all, District 9's great special effects were done on a budget of $30 million while Avatar cost a reported $235 million, more than 7x as much. Alas, Avatar grossed over $2.7 billion because of its widespread appeal and acclaim while District 9 raked in about 200 million, or less than 10% as much. You do the math.

Still, box office grosses don't tell you that much as other friends noted. Sometimes a great one slips through the cracks--think The Shawshank Redemption. And $200 million isn't exactly slipping through the cracks. But Avatar is one of the few movies to earn an A on Yahoo! Movies while District 9 earned the average, a B+, putting it on par with Transformers 2, despite having fewer votes. (The fewer people vote on the movie the higher the upward bias as those who choose to watch a movie are more likely to like it than a random person.) Still, didn't everyone hate Transformers 2 and most people like District 9 because of it's insightful allegory about . . . well something to do with race relations. But no, not at all. On Netflix District 9 actually has a lower rating than Transformers 2, a 3.6 vs 3.8, despite the fact that the Netflix movie-buff audience is biased toward the kind of people who (you would think) would like District 9. Update: On Facebook over 47,000 Americans list "Transformers 2" in their interests, and 385,000+ some variation on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (but that may pick up some of the much more popular predecessor) while less than 20,000 list "District 9."

The thing is, even though District 9 got an Oscar nomination and critics loved it, people didn't like it that much. It didn't generate enough good word of mouth from moviegoers to draw others to go buy a ticket, nor did it generally impress those who later saw it in DVD. The evidence is overwhelming that Transformers 2 is a better movie in the sense that more people would prefer the experience of watching it.

But sometimes the truth isn't good enough. Sometime's people deserve to have their delusions and smug superiority rewarded.

The Epistemic Problem

I just read a good paper by Tyler Cowen on "the epistemic problem" for consequentialism. The problem is that it's hard to predict the consequences of actions, esp. over a long time horizon, and we are meant to infer that this implies consequences can't be a good basis for deciding how to act.

If that sounds like a stupid argument, it is.

Unfortunately, philosophers have constructed sophisticated examples to help pull the wool over their own eyes. Take this example, discussed in Cowen's paper. You are a general deciding where to invade France to ensure victory over the Nazi's. You can land at the Pas-de-Calais or in Normandy and have no good reason to prefer one over the other. You do know, however, that if you land in Normandy you will break a dog's leg during the landing. (Ignore how implausible it is that you could know something about the dog but nothing about the beaches.)

A utilitarian would land in the Pas-de-Calais so as not to harm the dog. But that is stupid, we're supposed to say. It's patently so stupid the utilitarian must be bonkers and we shouldn't be utilitarian's or we risk being thrown in Arkham. And you don't want to be thrown in the asylum, do you? I didn't think so.

But here's the catch that got swept under the rug. If we didn't know about the dog we wouldn't have a way for deciding on Calais or Normandy. We'd just pick one of the beaches randomly, probably by flipping a coin. Is getting in touch with our inner Two-Face a better way to decide? I guess some Very Serious Philosophers think so.

The Dark Knight: Maroni

Gordon: I didn't get a chance to thank you.

Batman: And you'll never have to.

[6 months later]

Gordon: Thank you

Batman: You don't have to-

Gordon: Yes, I do.

When the Joker is in the car with Maroni, Two-Face flips and Maroni is spared. But then he flips again to decide the fate of the driver. Why does Two-Face cheat is he is so committed to fairness? Later he lets Ramirez, who is as responsible for Rachel's death as anyone, off the hook.

Also, Maroni talks about his wife in that segment with Two-Face. But earlier in the movie, at the club he's with a woman half his age whom he asks "why would I want to hear you talk?" Is she his wife? No, according to the script she's a mistress.

I only noticed this the last time I watched the movie: when Gordon leaves Dent's room at Gotham General he meets up with Maroni, who is there recovering from his fall. Maroni then tells Gordon (off-camera) where the Joker is meeting to divy up the funds. That is why Gordon has all of his men at the ready when the Joker's threat (to blow up a hospital) is broadcast.

With Maroni dead (presumably) by the hand of Two-Face and the Chechen and Gambol slayed by the Joker--and their men at his command--what is the fate of the mob? Presumably Maroni's right hand man will step up and lead the Italian mob, but the rest could be in disarray with the Joker behind bars. I think this is something that needs to be wrapped up in the next film. It should be the last one.

Batman Began as a means to clean up Gotham. The Dark Knight was a side-show about "one man" when the target was "the whole mob." The Caped Crusade (which should be the next film's title) needs to complete the story arc.

Fact of the Day: In the original script for The Dark Knight, Maroni tells Batman "No one's gonna tell you anything" but no Italian mobster would say "anything." In the film it's changed to "nothing."