IT WAS THE PICTURES THAT GOT SMALL

It’s been a down year for the movies, at the box office and otherwise, and there’s a certain desperate cheeriness to the Times‘ critics “best of the year” roundups. “Was this a good year for the movies or what?” Manohla Dargis asks, after reeling off about forty of her favorites, and then adds that “while industry reporters have been busy filing doom-and-gloom analyses . . . a lot of filmgoers have been enjoying an exceptional year of movies.”

Well, it depends on what you mean by “a lot.” Of her forty faves, only two – Batman Begins, which wasn’t bad but wasn’t very good, either, and The Forty-Year-Old Virgin – could be reasonably classified as “big hits,” i.e. movies that made upwards of a hundred million dollars. Two others – Wallace and Gromit and Red Eye, neither one a flick for the ages – broke fifty million; In Her Shoes and the overrated A History of Violence each broke thirty million (barely); and most of the rest didn’t even gross ten million. (There’s still time for Munich and Brokeback Mountain, though unlike Frank Rich I wouldn’t bet on the latter’s mass appeal . . .)

I don’t mean to suggest that a movie only counts as “good” if it passes a certain box-office threshold. And it was an excellent year for small-budget, small-grossing movies: I haven’t seen some of the holiday releases yet, but my provisional top ten would include Grizzly Man, Junebug, The Squid and the Whale and Capote, none of which were ever likely to attract a mass audience. But even so, it doesn’t speak well of the American film industry that nearly all the finest movies of the year – at least if you believe the Times critics – were art-house gems and foreign films, while most of the industry’s hits were sequels and remakes, riding built-in audiences to compensate for their mediocrity. This is true every year, to a certain extent, but 2005 seemed to particularly lack for a slate of really good films that aimed at, and found, a mass audience. Time and again, a movie would seem poised to hit that sweet spot, only to be exposed as a dud. Kingdom of Heaven could have been the next Gladiator; instead it was the next Alexander. Syriana aimed to do for the oil business what Traffic did for the drug trade – but it didn’t. Narnia found an audience, but it was no Lord of the Rings. And so on. (Nor, glancing over the year’s films, do I see many modest hits – or modest disappointments – that are likely candidates to become classics on DVD or cable, like Braveheart or L.A. Confidential or The Shawshank Redemption.)

Still, there is one bit of good news for movie-watchers – the Slate Movie Club, the highlight of the year for highly amateurish cinephiles like myself, has just kicked off. (Though alas, without the crazy/wonderful presence of Armond White . . .)

– posted by Ross

GIFTED ECONOMY

Matt Yglesias responds to a Washington Post op-ed on how public schools fail gifted kids with the understandable but, I think, misguided thought that public schooling “should try to do well for the hardest to teach kids, included ones coming from difficult backgrounds and ones who simply for whatever reason have a hard time with school,” and not worry excessively about “the easiest cases,” which is to say, the gifted kids.

First, I want to echo some of Matt’s commenters in questioning whether those gifted kids really are the “easiest” to teach, especially given that they too may come from “difficult backgrounds.” As the Post article observes:

Nor do test scores indicate whether these students are being sufficiently challenged to maintain their academic interest, an issue of particular concern in high school. Shockingly, studies establish that up to 20 percent of high school dropouts are gifted.

And it’s at least possible that even on a strict egalitarian basis, there’s an argument for “taking the most talented as far as they can go.” Pushing a gifted potential-dropout to realize her full potential is, of course, a benefit to that student. But it’s also a benefit to the rest of us—the worst off included. I’m just guessing about the numbers here, but I’ll hazard that the per-pupil cost of some kind of program to keep those gifted kids engaged and stimulated is, at worst, no greater than that of remedial programs for their counterparts at the other end of the curve. And the payoff for that is, at least potentially, not missing out on the next Jonas Salk or Steve Jobs or… well, pick your favorite modern genius. Granted, some of them will go on to socially useless functions like, say, political magazine writer—but on the whole I’d hazard it’s a good investment over the long term even for the kids who don’t directly benefit from those programs, at least along some margin. I don’t know what that makes the optimal balance of remedial vs. gifted spending, but I think it means you can’t just do a crude maximin and suppose that equity demands not dropping a nickel on gifted programs until you can’t buy a jot more improvement on the low end.

—posted by Julian

LOW MORALES

Writing in The New York Times, Alvaro Vargas Llosa argues that the election of Bolivian demagogue Evo Morales is less worrisome than it might seem. He seems awfully sanguine—especially given that the case for optimism is tied to the U.S. responding in some quasi-sane fashion if the growing of coca is decriminalized—but there are a number of sound points.

—posted by Julian

THE MALKIN AWARD WINNNERS 2005

This award is a relatively new one – reflecting the uniquely batty voice of Michelle Malkin, defender of Japanese internment in the Second World War, and far and away the break-out star of the hard right blogosphere in the past year. The award is for hyperbolic, divisive, mean-spirited, far-right boilerplate, of the kind Malkin produces on an almost hourly basis. The award has largely supplanted the old Derbyshire Award, named after NRO’s resident bigot and curmudgeon, John Derbyshire. Compared to Malkin, he’s a voice of calm reason. (He will be awarded his own prize later this week, so fear not.) Anwyay, drum roll, please, for the finalists ….

DISBARRED BUT WORTH A CITATION: “Liberals love America like O.J. loved Nicole,” – a headline on an Ann Coulter column at Townhall.com, January 6, 2005. (Coulter is disbarred from the contest, because others have got to have a chance.)

MALKIN AWARD HONORABLE MENTION 2005 : “The Democrats are mounting the most scurrilous political campaign that has been seen in American politics since the Civil War.” – Powerline blogger, John Hinderaker. And they call me excitable.

MALKIN AWARD RUNNER-UP 2005: “It’s time to ask, bluntly, whether self-government can work for people not operating within a Judeo-Christian worldview.” – Joseph Farah, WorldNet Daily.

MALKIN AWARD WINNER 2005: “[B]lood will tell, as the old saying goes: [Mark “Deep Throat” Felt’s] posterity is now dragging out his old body and putting it on display to make money. (Have you noticed how Mark Felt looks like one of those old Nazi war criminals they find in Bolivia or Paraguay? That same, haunted, hunted look combined with a glee at what he has managed to get away with so far?) And it gets worse: it’s been reported that Mark Felt is at least part Jewish. The reason this is worse is that at the same time that Mark Felt was betraying Richard Nixon, Nixon was saving Eretz Israel. It is a terrifying chapter in betrayal and ingratitude. If he even knows what shame is, I wonder if he felt a moment’s shame as he tortured the man who brought security and salvation to the land of so many of his and my fellow Jews. Somehow, as I look at his demented face, I doubt it.” – Ben Stein, American Spectator.

Tomorrow, the equivalent from the nutty left: the Moore Award nominees!

– posted by Andrew.

GHOSTWRITERS OF CHRISTMAS PAST

Julian wonders whether non-Beltway insiders understand that most prominent people have ghostwriters penning “their” op-eds, books, etc., and whether there should be more outrage over this quasi-dishonesty. For my part, it’s never bothered me that a Times op-ed by, say, a U.S. Senator or the Secretary of Health and Human Services probably wasn’t written by the eminence themself – but I was shocked to find myself, during my first year in D.C., being introduced to a guy who ghostwrote for a syndicated columnist. I’m not sure what the difference is, exactly – I suppose there’s just something about a regular byline that made me assume, foolishly, that the “author” was writing the thing by himself.

This has been a Gregg Easterbrook pet peeve for many years, incidentally – though he tends to focus on praising celebrities and pols who credit their ghostwriters (like John McCain), and pillorying those who don’t (like Hillary Clinton, on both It Takes a Village and Living History).

FOR UNTO US A CHILD IS GIVEN: Unless, that is, you’re in Japan:

Japan’s population declined this year for the first time since the country began keeping demographic records in 1899, according to preliminary figures released by the government this week.

The decrease, which specialists say signals the start of an era of shrinking population, occurred two years earlier than had been expected . . . The number of deaths outnumbered births by 10,000 this year, according to statistics released by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. Excluding wartime figures, the number of births, at 1.067 million, was the lowest since records have been kept; births dropped 44,000 from the previous year.

. . . Japan’s current population of 128 million is expected to fall to 100 million by 2050 and to 64 million by 2100 if current trends continue.

And on that cheery note, Merry Christmas!

– posted by Ross

MERRY CHRISTMAS

I’m headed off to the in-laws for a Michigan Christmas, after a week of semi-coma (a kind of real life semi-colon), and book-writing. Many thanks to Julian and Ross for keeping the home fires burning. They’ll still be here next week and I’ll also be unveiling our annual award winners – for sundry examples of idiocy and insight over the past twelve months. Check in for solstice silliness. And have a wonderful peace-on-earth few days.

– posted by Andrew.

CORY MAYE

If you haven’t been following Radley Balko’s posts about the case of Cory Maye over at The Agitator, you should. In a nutshell, the story is this: Late in 2001, police in Prentiss, Mississippi, got a tip that Jamie Smith, who lived on the other side of a duplex with Cory Maye, was dealing drugs. Police execute a no-knock raid, bursting into Maye’s side of the duplex late at night, while Maye and his young daughter are asleep. Maye (who is black) wakes up, sees armed intruders, and fires off a shot—killing the (white) son of the chief of police. Maye now sits on death row.

You can read Radley’s first post on the case here, and here is his most recent post with trial transcripts, but it’s really worth scrolling through for the whole series.

—posted by Julian