Month: July 2014

Andrew Romano suggests the small screen is to blame:

[N]ow that Hollywood has concluded that its only remaining competitive advantage is spectacle, it’s all but ceded the fairer sex to cable TV. The only demographic adrenalized enough to reliably show up for this weekend’s latest extravaganza is men aged 18-24, or so the thinking goes, and so the industry keeps churning out dude bait. Even romantic comedies themselves have become more male-centric over the last dozen years, with the Nora Ephrons and Nancy Meyerses of the world giving way to “bromance” auteurs such as Judd Apatow (The 40-Year Old Virgin) and Jason Segel (I Love You, Man).

Girls have something to do with this shift as well – again, on both sides of the camera. Take Mindy Kaling, who has made no secret of her love for romcoms. “What I’d really like to write is a romantic comedy,” Kaling revealed in The New Yorker in 2011. “This is my favorite kind of movie.” And yet Kaling hasn’t created a big-screen romantic comedy yet; she’s been too busy making a television show (The Mindy Project). Same goes for Tina Fey (30 Rock) and Lena Dunham (Girls), two other female writers who could potentially reinvigorate the genre (but who likely see more creative freedom in TV).

Matt O’Brien ties the rise of the Chinese film market to the decline of film comedy:

[T]he death of the comedy movie has come because the world is flat — and senses of humor aren’t. What’s funny to an American audience doesn’t always translate for a Chinese one. And now that China’s box office is the world’s largest outside of North America, that’s a major consideration.

Remember, Hollywood studios aren’t in the business of making movies. Like all financiers, they’re in the business of minimizing risk. That’s why, as Derek Thompson points out, they churn out so many sequels, prequels and reboots (and unnecessary splits of the last movie of a series into two). They do this because it works, and Hollywood knows it does. And now Hollywood knows that American comedies don’t work overseas, but American action movies do — especially if, like “Transformers 4,” they suck up to the Chinese government.

Indeed, Transformers 4 is now China’s top-grossing movie of all time:

Given that critical reaction to Transformers: Age of Extinction has been almost conspiratorially negative across the board — Richard Roeper called it “relentless,” and not as a compliment; Peter Travers at Rolling Stone refused to give it even one star — much of the coverage of its success in China has been, well, pretty darn condescending: “Chinese people are dazzled by anything Hollywood, etc.”

The reality is more complex. If the bar of cinematic quality is indeed set lower in China, the tastes of its 1.3 billion people aren’t necessarily to blame. The Chinese Communist Party is exceedingly picky about the films screened in the country, especially in the case of foreign cinema; so if a movie does well, one can ultimately thank the government.

The long and the short of it: Bay made a movie set and filmed in China, starring Chinese actors, using Chinese resources and pushing Chinese products, and in exchange, the movie gets a timely premiere across the country’s 18,000-plus movie screens.

Not Paul Ryan:

The reformicons’ retreat from Ryan-style apocalypticism is not only a shrewd tonal shift, but also a welcome — albeit unacknowledged — recognition that the party’s doomsaying has not come to pass, and that the American way of life will indeed survive Obama’s reforms. Indeed, the success of Obama’s domestic agenda may create more space for a conservative counteroffensive, in the way that Reaganism opened political room for Bill Clinton. Whether or not the reformicons ever compose a workable domestic agenda, they have come to recognize that they cannot run a presidential campaign promising to rescue America from fire and rubble visible only to themselves.

Vinik takes a closer look at this split:

Term limits mean Ryan can’t keep his current chairmanship. And that’s where things get interesting. As a replacement, he’s expected to seek, and to get, chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee. That will give him direct jurisdiction over tax reform and, as the Washington Post’s Robert Costa confirmed in a tweet, Ryan hopes to keep pushing the same supply-side agenda. But that’s likely to put him in conflict with the nascent reform conservative movement. You’ve probably heard of this group. They’re the ones who were the subject of that New York Times Magazine article on Sunday – and who, prior to that, put together a new policy agenda in a compendium called “Room to Grow.” What you may not know is that the chapter on tax reform, written by Robert Stein, represents a substantial departure from agenda Ryan and other supply-siders have been pushing.

Kilgore celebrates this development:

[F]or the moment, it’s refreshing to see that Ryan looks more and more like a standard GOP business hack with an unhealthy addiction to Ayn Rand novels, and less and less like the Brains of the GOP.

Charles Kenny argues that immigration reform isn’t really dead, at least not in the long run. He’s talking not just in the US, but Europe as well:

Politically, there’s little question that immigration is currently seen as a losing issue. … The average citizen in both the U.S. and Europe, however, appears to be far calmer about immigration than the heat and light of recent events would suggest. Though there has been an uptick in popular concern about levels of migration in Europe and (to a lesser extent) the U.S., that rise should be seen in the context of a longer-term trend away from nativism. According to World Values Survey data, the proportion of Germans who think that “when jobs are scarce, employers should give priority to people of this country over immigrants” has fallen from 56 percent in the late 1990s to 41 percent more recently. Over the same period in Spain, the proportion fell from 70 percent to 53 percent, and in the U.S., 59 percent to 50 percent.

The U.K. is the only country out of eight European countries and the U.S. surveyed by the German Marshall Fund where the majority of respondents thought there were too many immigrants in the country in 2013. Compare that with 41 percent in the U.S. and only 24 percent in Germany. In the U.S., more than two-thirds view immigration as a good thing for the country.

But Reihan feels that Kenny’s column “obscures more than it reveals”:

What Kenny does not mention is that when asked if there were “a lot but not too many” immigrants in the country, 39 percent of Americans, 55 percent of Germans, and 28 percent of Britons answered in the affirmative. One obvious possibility that Kenny neglects is that Germans might be reluctant to tell a pollster that there are “too many” immigrants residing in their country while Americans and Britons, who presumably don’t have the same anxieties about national chauvinism, are somewhat more inclined to do so. While Kenny cites the fact that only 24 percent of Germans will forthrightly say that there are too many immigrants in the country, he neglects to mention that 43 percent of Italians and 43 percent of the French say the same. The Swedes, like the Germans, are outliers in that only 23 percent report that there are too many immigrants in the country, yet Sweden is home to large numbers of migrants from neighboring countries like Finland (12.5 percent of all foreigners residing in Sweden), Denmark (6.8), and Norway (6) as well as countries like Iraq (9.3). A finer-grained question might ask respondents if there were “too many” immigrants from affluent market democracies or from the developing world. …

Instead of admonishing politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to consider the math, Kenny should keep in mind that the math favors immigration policies that raise the average skill level over those that lower it. Lo and behold, it turns out that societies that select immigrants on the basis of skill are also less hostile to immigration.

EJ Dionne’s latest column outlines how liberals might embrace constitutionalism:

For too long, progressives have allowed conservatives to monopolize claims of fealty to our unifying national document. In fact, those who would battle rising economic inequalities to create a robust middle class should insist that it’s they who are most loyal to the Constitution’s core purpose. Broadly shared well-being is essential to the framers’ promise that “We the people” will be the stewards of our government.

Kilgore comments:

[W]hile I offer best wishes to those who wish to argue for “constitutional progressivism,” I do think it’s important for progressives to raise an occasional objection to the general idolatry of the Founders and their work before competing for the allegiance of their acolytes. Yes, the basic constitutional framework has held up relatively well, and probably better than the Founders themselves had any reason to anticipate. But it still required a bloody civil war and significant amendment (not to mention judicial interpretation) to function effectively at all.

Jonathan Bernstein agrees:

The Constitution is no more a formula for social democracy (or whatever liberals want) than it is for a libertarian paradise. To the extent that it works (and it works extraordinarily well), then it’s appropriate to praise those who wrote it. But that’s all. We should use the Constitution with eyes wide open, aware of its problems and limitations.

Jack Balkin wants liberals to stop framing “the debate on terms set by movement conservatives in the 1980s”:

It was conservatives, and not liberals, who insisted on drawing a clear distinction between originalism and the work of the Warren and early Burger courts. Liberals had been quite happy to draw on adoption history to explain how and why enduring constitutional commitments should be applied to present-day circumstances. As Frank Cross has pointed out in his article Originalism: The Forgotten Years, the trend of increasing citations to the founders in Supreme Court opinions begins with the Warren Court. And the great avatar of the living Constitution, Franklin Roosevelt, explained and defended his constitutional commitments in terms of fidelity to the constitutional text and to the founders’  vision.

If you start by accepting that the difference between conservative and liberal visions of the Constitution is that one attempts to be faithful to the text and to the founders’ vision and the other does not, well, that’s just not a very helpful way for liberals to talk, either to themselves, or to the general public.  And of course, that’s precisely why modern movement conservatives sought to frame the choice in that way.

Ramesh chimes in:

The Constitution is in many ways a conservative document, and originalism a conservative methodology. Those aren’t points that can be proven in a blogpost, of course; suffice it to say that if that’s right, then conservatives should not be embarrassed that insisting on the original understanding of the document will tend to serve conservative ends and subvert progressive ones.

Dionne wants of course to press a progressive reading of the document—and because it deliberately leaves so many matters unsettled, some of the space the Constitution creates can be filled by progressive initiatives. But progressivism does not seem to me as good a fit with the constitutional structure, which is why so many progressives over the years have expressed impatience with that structure.

Zack Danger Brown wins the Internet today with this Kickstarter:

John Herrman lets us in on the joke:

As of writing, a Kickstarter campaign for “just making potato salad” has raised $37,115. Every few seconds that number climbs higher, and each uptick is greeted with cheers. It’s a self-perpetuating humor machine, and it is horribly efficient. There is no joke, at least not anymore; whatever joke there was has become an adaptive, joke-like arrangement of circumstances. It is a perfect device, compatible with all known theories of humor and therefore with none of them.

Michael Thomas explains how this is possible:

[W]hile Kickstarter once vetted all projects, they can now move forward without approval, though the company can still shut down a project page at any time.

There were also rules against projects that essentially funded a person’s lifestyle, with a food-related exception. As this project’s popularity increases, more and more media outlets are chiming in on its relative worth. Polygon is fully supportive of the endeavour, with writer Ben Kuchera calling the project “original, goofy and satirical” while adding that people are always willing to spend a bit of money on novelty. On the other end of the spectrum, the AV Club‘s Katie Rife calls this project “the fall of the ironic empire” and that people shouldn’t give Brown any more of their money.

Brian Barrett sees the project as needling Kickstarter:

Good things have come out of Kickstarter. But, especially with these new rules in place, they’re far outnumbered by terrible no good impossible projects, pipe dreams wrapped in windmills, renders not worth the pixels they’re produced with. Potato salad guy, though? Openly satirical. You give money to Danger because you’re in on the joke, not being made into one. At this point it’s safest to think of Kickstarter as performance art. And potato salad right now is the best show in town.

The copycats are popping up already:

At least a dozen Kickstarter campaigns have launched in the past 24 hours attempting to capitalize on the newfound attention surrounding potato salad. (Yes, writing that sentence made me question my choices in life.)

One user put up a campaign, called “I’m also making potato salad,” and has raised $1 out of its $9 goal. Another has raised $10 out of his $50 goal to make Japanese potato salad. Some found more success by changing things up a bit. Sidney Shapiro of Sudbury, Ontario, launched a campaign to fund making chicken soup and has already raised 74 Canadian dollars, beating his goal of $10. “Lets prove its better than potato salad!,” Shapiro wrote on the campaign’s page.