ReasonTV
Published on 2 Mar 2018Forget the Oscars! Here are five great movies made over the past quarter-century that any libertarian will (must?) enjoy.
_____The Incredibles (2004)
This Pixar film directed by Brad Bird is so full of speeches extolling individualism, it sometimes sounds like an Ayn Rand novel (in fact, Rand is clearly part of inspiration for the character of Edna Bird). Even the supervillain in The Incredibles is a creature of self-invention and self-improvement. While the Incredibles are born with their powers, Syndrome is a normie who worships Mr. Incredible and is desperate to be his sidekick.
Like an animated version of Richard Nixon, Syndrome’s ambition ultimately gets the best of him.
The Barbarian Invasions (2003)
Québécois director Denys Arcand’s brilliant sequel to The Decline of the American Empire is the single-best depiction of the depredations of socialized medicine. Canada’s health-care system is so sclerotic that the movie’s protagonist, a retired academic named Rémy, cannot even score the drugs he needs to commit suicide until his estranged son, a banker, buys them on the black market.
Even more disturbing is the moment when the terminally ill Rémy and his former colleagues admit that their intellectual faddishness led them to embrace every awful left-wing “ism” of the past 30 years despite their massive human toll.
Dallas Buyers Club (2013)
Set in the 1980s, Matthew McConaughey plays Ron Woodroof, a boozey roughneck who is given 30 days to live after being diagnosed with AIDS. Faced with a death sentence, he schools himself on a wide variety of treatments, first in Mexico and then all over the world. With the help of a cross-dressing party girl named Rayon, Woodroof skirts FDA prohibitions against importing, using, and selling unapproved drugs by creating a “buyers club,” in which members pay a monthly fee and assume all risks.
The depiction of official indifference to patient suffering and the bureaucratic quashing of medical freedom even for people who are certain to die is inspirational, especially now that even Donald Trump has endorsed “right-to-try” legislation that would allow terminally ill patients access to non-approved medicines.
Joy (2015)
Jennifer Lawrence became a mega-star playing the anti-government rebel Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games movies. While there’s no shortage of libertarian sentiment coursing through that trilogy, it’s actually a quieter movie starring Lawrence that embodies libertarian virtues of hard work, commercial innovation, and entrepreneurship.
In Joy, Lawrence plays real-life “Miracle Mop” inventor Joy Magano, who helped make cleaning your floors easier while making herself rich. The film is nothing less than a paean to capitalism’s genius at allowing self-expression and self-fulfillment.
In a dramatic scene with Bradley Cooper, who plays an executive at a home-shopping network, Joy summarizes in a few sentences what it took Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman whole books to say.
As former Reason Editor Virginia Postrel wrote, the film “acknowledges the wealth-creating value of incremental improvements even in the most mundane items.”
Ghostbusters (1984)
Released in 1984, Ghostbusters quickly became one of most successful comedies in film history.
The movie was perfectly in synch with the Reagan Revolution’s valorization of business and demonization of government. Ghostbusters begins with a team of paranormal investigators getting kicked out of Columbia University and starting a ghost-hunting business. But even though New York is literally being invaded by evil spirits, the real villain of the movie is not the otherwordly demon Gozer but an Environmental Protection Agency bureaucrat named Walter Peck, who shuts down their operation and puts the city at risk.
Well, what do you think? How far off the mark are we? What great libertarian movies would you add to the list? Let us know in the comments.
Produced by Todd Krainin. Written and narrated by Nick Gillespie.
March 3, 2018
5 Great Libertarian Movies!
February 10, 2018
When cinematography wins out over reality
Earlier this month, Charles Stross talked about why he’s been reading less and less science fiction lately, and touched on SF movies and (for example) why George Lucas chose to model space combat on World War 1 aircraft battles:
When George Lucas was choreographing the dogfights in Star Wars, he took his visual references from film of first world war dogfights over the trenches in western Europe. With aircraft flying at 100-200 km/h in large formations, the cinema screen could frame multiple aircraft maneuvering in proximity, close enough to be visually distinguishable. The second world war wasn’t cinematic: with aircraft engaging at speeds of 400-800 km/h, the cinematographer would have had a choice between framing dots dancing in the distance, or zooming in on one or two aircraft. (While some movies depict second world war air engagements, they’re not visually captivating: either you see multiple aircraft cruising in close formation, or a sudden flash of disruptive motion — see for example the bomber formation in Memphis Belle, or the final attack on the U-boat pen in Das Boot.) Trying to accurately depict an engagement between modern jet fighters, with missiles launched from beyond visual range and a knife-fight with guns takes place in a fraction of a second at a range of multiple kilometres, is cinematically futile: the required visual context of a battle between massed forces evaporates in front of the camera … which is why in Independence Day we see vast formations of F/A-18s (a supersonic jet) maneuvering as if they’re Sopwith Camels. (You can take that movie as a perfect example of the triumph of spectacle over plausibility at just about every level.)
… So for a couple of generations now, the generic vision of a space battle is modelled on an air battle, and not just any air battle, but one plucked from a very specific period that was compatible with a film director’s desire to show massed fighter-on-fighter action at close enough range that the audience could identify the good guys and bad guys by eye.
Let me have another go at George Lucas (I’m sure if he feels picked on he can sob himself to sleep on a mattress stuffed with $500 bills). Take the asteroid field scene from The Empire Strikes Back: here in the real world, we know that the average distance between asteroids over 1km in diameter in the asteroid belt is on the order of 3 million kilometers, or about eight times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. This is of course utterly useless to a storyteller who wants an exciting game of hide-and-seek: so Lucas ignored it to give us an exciting game of …
Unfortunately, we get this regurgitated in one goddamned space opera after another: spectacle in place of insight, decolorized and pixellated by authors who haven’t bothered to re-think their assumptions and instead simply cut and paste Lucas’s cinematic vision. Let me say it here: when you fuck with the underlying consistency of your universe, you are cheating your readers. You may think that this isn’t actually central to your work: you’re trying to tell a story about human relationships, why get worked up about the average spacing of asteroids when the real purpose of the asteroid belt is to give your protagonists a tense situation to survive and a shared experience to bond over? But the effects of internal inconsistency are insidious. If you play fast and loose with distance and time scale factors, then you undermine travel times. If your travel times are rubberized, you implicitly kneecapped the economics of trade in your futurescape. Which in turn affects your protagonist’s lifestyle, caste, trade, job, and social context. And, thereby, their human, emotional relationships. The people you’re writing the story of live in a (metaphorical) house the size of a galaxy. Undermine part of the foundations and the rest of the house of cards is liable to crumble, crushing your characters under a burden of inconsistencies. (And if you wanted that goddamn Lucasian asteroid belt experience why not set your story aboard a sailing ship trying to avoid running aground in a storm? Where the scale factor fits.)
Whatever you do, don’t go asking him about Han Solo’s claimed Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs…
January 24, 2018
Peter Jackson to bring modern digital technology to bear on IWM film footage of the Great War
Elizabeth sent me a link to this Daily Mail article on Peter Jackson’s new project:
When you think of First World War footage, chances are you conjure up grainy images of soldiers and jumpy footage of the trenches.
But a new 3D film by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson is set to bring the conflict to life in a way never seen before.
The Oscar-winner has restored and colourised 100-year-old footage from the Imperial War Museum’s vast archive, and early photos suggest the results will be remarkable.
One comparison shot shows the dramatic transformation from poor quality black-and-white scenes to clear colour images, while another shows the radically sharpened faces of our troops.
Jackson said he hoped the film, which will premiere at the BFI London Film Festival before airing on BBC1 later this year, will help audiences better connect ‘with the events on screen’.
Explaining the painstaking process of restoring the footage, he said: ‘We started to do some experiments and I was honestly stunned by the results we were getting. We all know what First World War footage looks like.
‘It’s sped up, it’s fast, like Charlie Chaplin, grainy, jumpy, scratchy, and it immediately blocks you from actually connecting with the events on screen.
January 13, 2018
Actors and public morality
Jonah Goldberg on the differences in the way actors were viewed historically and today:
It may be hard for some people to get the joke these days, but for most of human history, actors were considered low-class. They were akin to carnies, grifters, hookers, and other riffraff. In ancient Rome, actors were often slaves. In feudal Japan, Kabuki actors were sometimes available to the theatergoers as prostitutes — a practice not uncommon among theater troupes in the American Wild West.
In 17th century England, France, and America, theaters were widely considered dens of iniquity, turpitude, and crapulence. Under Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan dictatorship, the theaters were forced to close to improve moral hygiene. The Puritans of New England did likewise. A ban on theaters in Connecticut imposed in 1800 stayed on the books until 1952.
Partly out of a desire to develop a wartime economy, partly out of disdain for the grubbiness of the stage, the first Continental Congress in 1774 proclaimed, “We will, in our several stations, … discountenance and discourage every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horse-racing, and all kinds of gaming, cock-fighting, exhibitions of shews [sic], plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments.”
[…]
The most recent Golden Globes ceremony has already been excoriated for being a veritable geyser of hypocritical effluvia, as the same crowd that not long ago bowed and scraped to serial harasser and accused rapist Harvey Weinstein, admitted child rapist Roman Polanski, and that modern Caligula, Bill Clinton, congratulated itself for its own moral superiority.
The interesting question is: Why have movie stars and other celebrities become an aristocracy of secular demigods? It seems to me an objective fact that virtually any other group of professionals plucked at random from the Statistical Abstract of the United States — nuclear engineers, plumbers, grocers, etc. — are more likely to model decent moral behavior in their everyday lives. Indeed, it is a bizarre inconsistency in the cartoonishly liberal ideology of Hollywood that the only super-rich people in America reflexively assumed to be morally superior are people who pretend to be other people for a living.
I think part of the answer has to do with the receding of religion from public life. As a culture, we’ve elevated “authenticity” to a new form of moral authority. We look to our feelings for guidance. Actors, as a class, are feelings merchants. While they may indeed be “out of touch” with the rest of America from time to time, actors are adept at being in touch with their feelings. And for some unfathomably stupid reason, we now think that puts us beneath them.
January 8, 2018
Mark Steyn reviews Darkest Hour
The latest screen depiction of Winston Churchill gets the once-over from Mark Steyn:
Churchill tends to the Churchillian, which is to say the epic. Darkest Hour, by contrast, is very finely focused. Joe Wright, director, and Edward McCarten, writer, confine their two dark hours of screen time to a couple of critical weeks in May 1940, when Hitler’s invasion of Norway precipitated Neville Chamberlain’s retreat from Downing Street. Aside from some rather elaborately choreographed overhead shots and a lush grandiose score, Darkest Hour is filmed claustrophobically, too – in poky sitting rooms, Downing Street basements, attics, Westminster ante-rooms, and chilly lavatories; the lighting is crepuscular. The fate of the world is being determined, but we never glimpse the far horizons, only the dingy backrooms.
What happened that month was a showdown between the two principal contenders for the Prime Ministership, Mr Churchill and Lord Halifax. Stephen Dillane is excellent as Halifax, the vulpine cadaver looking down (in every sense) from the Commons gallery at Churchill’s turns at the dispatch box. Unfortunately, aside from skillful deployments of his inscrutable yet condescending eyebrows, he gets somewhat short shrift on screen, so as a Churchill vs Halifax cage match it never quite comes off – presumably because the third Viscount Halifax is entirely unknown in Hollywood. (“Third Viscount Halifax? Hey, let’s see what the first two gross before we commit to that…”)
This is a pity, because the two men were on opposite ends of the seesaw, and, capacious as Churchill’s own bottom is, most of the other players – the King, Chamberlain, the parliamentary party, defeatist generals, Dominion prime ministers around the globe – were inclined to park their own butts down Halifax’s end. On May 10th, the day Winston became PM, the Germans invaded Belgium, France and the Netherlands. Ten days later, Hitler’s army reached the Channel, and was within reach of throttling the 300,000-strong British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk, and seizing the entire French fleet. In that dreadful month of May, Churchill wanted to fight on; Halifax preferred to use Mussolini’s “good offices” to sue for a “peace” that would leave Britain and its empire more or less “intact” – save for East Africa, Suez, Malta, Gibraltar and sundry other places that would have to be addressed, per the Italian ambassador in London, “as part of a general European settlement”.
In other words, we are at the great hinge moment of the twentieth century: Had Halifax prevailed, there would have been a neutered Berlin-friendly British Empire directly bordering America on the 49th parallel and all but directly the Soviet Union in Central Asia. There would have been no potential allies for Moscow in the event of war with Germany, thus incentivizing a successful conclusion in late 1940 to Molotov’s talks in Berlin to join the Axis; and no allies whatsoever for Washington, assuming Japan still felt the need to bomb Pearl Harbor the following year. Instead, Churchill prevailed – and Britain and its lion cubs fought on, playing for time until first the Soviets and then the Americans joined the war against Germany, Italy and Japan. That year in which the moth-eaten Britiish lion and its distant cubs stood alone is, more than any other single factor, the reason why the world as ordered these last seventy years exists at all.
[…]
As with Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, one’s admiration for the film is tempered by a terrible profound sadness – for a people who “won the war, and lost their country anyway”. To anyone old enough to remember an England where one could “walk into any pub in the country and ask with perfect confidence if the major had been in”, the sense of loss can bring tears to the eye. Unlike Iron-Man 5 and Spider-Man 12 and Cardboard-Man 19 and Franchise-Man 37, this is the story of an actual, real-life superhero: You leave the theater with the cheers of the House ringing in your ears …and return to a world where quoting Churchill in his own land can get you arrested.
December 22, 2017
Learning To Be Yourself With Buddy The Elf
Foundation for Economic Education
Published on 7 Dec 2017The classic holiday film Elf offers a lot more than a good time and a bunch of laughs. It teaches you how to get the most out of your life by finding your comparative advantage – the intersection between what you’re good at and what people need.
After watching this video, download our free ebook “Your Life, Your Work” to learn more about how to find your own comparative advantage and build a life you’re excited about.
Get it here: https://info.fee.org/your-life-your-work
December 21, 2017
William Gibson: The 80s Revolution – Extra Sci Fi – #7
Extra Credits
Published on 19 Dec 2017Start your free 1-month trial for The Great Courses Plus! http://ow.ly/3iLM30egcfR
After Star Wars, the science fiction genre suddenly became a pop culture darling, and a flood of schlocky imitations followed. William Gibson led the charge to reclaim space in the genre for his concept of future history – one that, in turn, eventually launched cyberpunk.
December 16, 2017
What? There’s another Star Wars movie? Did the Death Star regenerate itself?
My level of excitement for new Star Wars movies probably peaked just before the release of The Revenge of the Return of the Bride of the Jedi, and now has fallen and can’t get up. I’m perhaps not alone, as David “Iowahawk” Burge kindly illustrates:
Oh great another Star Wars movie so I get to read through another 3 weeks of cartoon character theological debates
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 15, 2017
Spoiler alert: in the new Dawn of the Blasticons, Grabnar Jibbersnorf laser-freezes the Bloongsnoodi, even though his charmcloak DIDN'T HAVE THE POLARIAN CRYSTALS 😟😟😣🤬🧐😵😵🦖🦖
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 15, 2017
And then they expect us to believe Roobu Gark would let Grabnar and D-60Z tractorpod the carbonzone, without their infinitysocks! I mean like WTF?
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 15, 2017
THEY'RE DESTROYING MY WHOLE CHILDHOOD
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 15, 2017
December 2, 2017
Great Movie Fighting Techniques as illustrated by Helen of Troy
Lindybeige
Published on 31 Jan 2014This video played fine within Sony Vegas Studio, but very oddly in Windows Media Player. On YouTube it seems to be part way between the two. I just wish my videos would look and sound the way I set them in the editing software. No matter – this will have to be good enough. I have delayed uploading it too long already.
This feature film (also broadcast as a mini-series) has I think enough commentable material in it for one more video.
November 26, 2017
Fire-arrows!
Lindybeige
Published on 10 Jun 2016Fire-arrows – did archers really use them in battles? We see them in the movies, so presumably not.
This is the most-anticipated video of all for this channel, which naturally makes me a bit nervous. Will people be hideously disappointed? I mentioned two and a half years ago that I would make a video on this topic, and this video shows that I am as good as my word, and not over-hasty either.
My thanks to the three people who pointed out quite correctly that when I said ‘Francis Bacon’ (1561-1626) I meant Roger Bacon (1219-1292).
November 8, 2017
QotD: The second coming of SF’s depressing and neurotic “New Wave”
Back in the mid to late 70’s the “New Wave” was in full force. Downbeat endings, “black and gray morality” (which can be good if handled well, at least as a change-up from more clear cut items) or worse “black and black.” Those were the tone of Science Fiction.
Then, fairly close to each other, two movies came out which took an entirely different approach: Lucas’ Star Wars and Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The rogue was given back his heart of gold. The callow youth could be the hero of the piece, not ground down by the world weary cynics. Heroes who are actually heroes fighting bad guys who weren’t so “sympathetic” that you couldn’t tell hero from villain.
It was a refreshing change. And the result was that, for a time, it became OK to have good guys who were good guys. Bad guys who were actually bad and not just “oppressed” or “victims of their backgrounds”. You didn’t have to wonder who to root for.
Today we’re kind of in a similar position. One of the best selling series, for young people is The Hunger Games. Black and Very-Dark-Gray morality, little really to choose from in the sides, and (no spoilers) that’s shown pretty clearly in the ending. And in printed SF? So much “humanity is a plague” stuff. Bleah.
David L. Burkhead, “Star Wars and the Human Wave”, The Writer in Black, 2015-10-21.
October 13, 2017
October 10, 2017
Crap archery in Helen of Troy
Lindybeige
Published on 9 Jan 2014This film continues to be a mine of errors, and there were so many on archery, that I thought I could do a whole video on this one subject.
On the speed of arrows, I was assuming the belly of the horse to be 12 feet above the archers. The first arrow to arrive took 20 frames to get there, which is 4/5 second (PAL 25 frames per second), and 5/4 of 12 is 15, so they were travelling at about 15 feet per second.
On opposed landings, I could give the example of the British liberation of the Falkland Islands. Even though there were not vast numbers of Argentinians on the Islands, and the British had air and sea superiority, the British still chose to land unopposed the other side of the islands and walk all the way across, rather than risk an opposed landing. In the ancient world, I do not know of a successful attack on a fortified place from the sea. When the Romans cleared the Mediterranean of pirates, they did it by landing troops away from the pirate strongholds, and then marching to the strongholds overland.
www.LloydianAspects.co.uk
October 5, 2017
Out of Frame: The Real Life Wilson Fisk
Foundation for Economic Education
Published on 5 Oct 2017Wilson Fisk is one of the most terrifying villains in the Marvel universe. Good thing he’s just fictional, right? Wrong!
In this episode of Out of Frame, we explore the real-life Wilson Fisk, a central planner from America’s not so distant past.
Learn more about Robert Moses and his greatest nemesis, Jane Jacobs at FEE: https://fee.org/articles/jane-jacobs/
September 26, 2017
To mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution … sorta #TheDeathOfStalin
Entertainment One UK
Published on 11 Aug 2017In Cinemas Oct 20.
The internal political landscape of 1950’s Soviet Russia takes on darkly comic form in a new film by Emmy award-winning and Oscar-nominated writer/director Armando Iannucci.
In the days following Stalin’s collapse, his core team of ministers tussle for control; some want positive change in the Soviet Union, others have more sinister motives. Their one common trait? They’re all just desperately trying to remain alive.
A film that combines comedy, drama, pathos and political manoeuvring, The Death of Stalin is a Quad and Main Journey production, directed by Armando Iannucci, and produced by Yann Zenou, Kevin Loader, Nicolas Duval Assakovsky, and Laurent Zeitoun. The script is written by Iannucci, David Schneider and Ian Martin, with additional material by Peter Fellows.
#TheDeathOfStalin
www.deathofstalin.co.uk
