No Wrench

We’ve all been inexplicably shaped by our high school experiences: rather inevitable given that we spend our most tumultuous years trapped in a building with hundreds of other people undergoing the same hormonal uproar. Stay Cool is about those people who have never really managed to get beyond their experiences in high school. Mark Polish plays a successful author who has been invited back to his high school, 18 years after his own graduation, to give the commencement address. And for him, everything has remained pretty much the same. He’s hanging out with his old friends, living with his parents, infatuated with the same girl, except everyone is an adult now. The movie is mostly a comedy, but also something of snapshot of how the pain we feel growing up never quite goes away. There is little true profundity to be found here, except for a gentle chiding that we really do need to let go of the past, even though it is probably impossible to do so. This was a clear case of a film deserving a three-and-a-half, but since such things aren’t allowed I rounded up to a four. Mostly because it was fantastic to see Mark Blucas (Riley from Buffy) playing a high school jock turned hard-drinking basketball coach and all around asshole. And because Winona Ryder is just absolutely adorable.

Turkish film about three adult children who discover that their mother has Alzheimer’s, which causes chaos in their already dysfunctional lives. Except that nothing happens. Two hours of nothing happening. Staring at a brick wall might have been more fun. The actress who played the mother was pretty good and had some moments of comedic dementia. But those felt like a wee sprinkle of rain in an arid desert of boredom. There were no lessons learned, no life changes, no real story. It gets a two out of five, since it didn’t cause me to walk out and the actors did a good job. They just had absolutely nothing to work with.

Plotwise this was an extremely bland film. Average British dude has 5 relationships which all end badly. Each of the five is different and all contain varying degrees of moderately humorous moments. But overall, there really isn’t any character arc or any dramatic tension. And that, ordinarily, would have made this a little bit of fluff. What sets this film apart are the various creative storytelling techniques that director Julian Kemp employs. Non-linear action, animated dioramas with Barbie dolls, various breaks in the fourth wall, found footage, and even a giant amusement park that serves as a metaphor for the main character’s life (similar to the demented one in Monkeybone). It is almost sad that such incredible creativity was employed to tell such a mundane story. Maybe it was inevitable, since I am not sure that a more intricate story would have held up well under the heaping serving of cinematic device. If I were to judge this solely on the quality of the story, this film would have earned a 3 (if it hadn’t been British, probably a 2, but British people are dryly humorous in a way that tickles me correctly). But I enjoyed the myriad techniques that were employed in crafting this film enough that I was willing to give it a four.

I can’t think of a better way to start off Tribeca 2009 than this charming Algerian comedy (film really has gone global. It is fantastic.). A comedy of errors in the classic sense, Masquerade follows the exploits of Mounir, a gardener for the local bigwig. More than anything, Mounir wants to be accepted and looked up to by his peers, a process that is hindered by his own social awkwardness, but also by the fact he has a narcoleptic sister. So he devises a scheme whereby he pretends he is going to marry his sister off to a wealthy Australian. His sister, when she isn’t passed out, is carrying on a secret romance with Mounir’s best friend, and seizes on this plot as a way to force her admirer to ask her brother for permission to marry her. Soon enough, the entire village is worked up to a fever pitch over the impending, though fictional, nuptials. Zany hijinks, with a healthy dollop of human frailty, ensue.

What truly makes this film is the fantastic cast, starting with the main character who radiates such an earnest desire to be thought well of that one is forced to feel empathetically towards him. Of course, he is also controlling, self-centered, and something of a dick—in the contrast between the two reactions he inspires is found the humor. His sister is played by Sarah Reguieg who is both radiantly gorgeous and imbues a role which could easily have been played solely for laughs with a quiet calm and dignity. As a woman in a Muslim society, she has as much power as she can extract from the men around her—a fact she is frequently reminded us—yet despite her random napping she manages to remain in control (mostly) of the situations around her. And the rest of the supporting cast, including Mounir’s wife, son, and best friend, are uniformly excellent. In the end this is a well crafted screwball comedy that could just as easily been set in, say, Victorian England as in North Africa. It is the execution, not the premise, that elevate this film from being mildly diverting to wholly captivating. A solid five out of five and a great start to the festival.

Another year, another Tribeca Film Festival. As in years past, each year they make it slightly harder for people like me to get tickets and move more and more of the festival out of Tribeca. The one improvement is that eighty percent of the films are now showing in a single theater, making it much easier to get around (and making it possible to pack in more movies). The theater is in the East Village, not Tribeca, but such is life (though it does make the American Express commercial featuring people extolling how much business the festival brings to Tribeca ironically funny). However the festival eliminated the discount ticket packages they offered last year, which had replaced the daytimer passes they offered the year before, leaving no worthwhile packages for individuals who wanted to see lots of films. Thankfully, they did not raise their prices, which made the sting slightly less.

The festival also moved to siphon as much money as possible out of the pockets of ticket buyers. As in years past, there is a two dollar per-ticket surcharge for tickets purchased online and over the phone. Why there is an online surcharge in general is mind-boggling to me, since it has the least overhead of any of the three methods, but I digress. In years past, tickets went on sale Saturday morning at 11am in-person and online. So as long as you showed up early to stand in the line, you could get all the tickets you wanted without paying surcharges. This year, however, tickets went on sale at 11am on a Tuesday, but the box office didn’t open until 2pm. That meant if you wanted to guarantee getting tickets, you had to get them online or on the phone, which made Tribeca an extra 2 dollars a ticket.

Since I refuse to pay the surcharges, I went to stand in line, knowing I was probably going to miss out on a lot of movies I wanted to see. Now due to some interesting circumstances, I managed to get my tickets at noon, which meant I got tickets for 23 out of the 29 films I wanted. Still, compared to years past, that is a pretty horrible hit rate. There were 3 or 4 films I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to get, because they were the headliner movies that I figured pass-holders would snap up. But still, it was obvious that being forced to wait an hour after people could get them online had an effect. All in all, I’m pretty pissed. Obviously not pissed enough, yet, that I’m going to stop attending, but it will happen eventually. I’m sure the festival won’t care if I stop attending, but it will be sad. Anyway, I’m going to try rushing for tickets for 5 of the 6 I missed out on, so we’ll see what happens.

File this one under the department of huh? Nate Silver over at 538.com decided to throw up a post encouraging people to spend their way out of the current recession:

But, after a decade or so of spending outside their means, Americans seem almost to feel guilty right now about spending money. This is exactly the opposite of what the economy needs. The structural problems of the financial sector are liable to take a long time to untangle, but if consumers signal that they’ve weathered the storm and are prepared to start consuming again, then jobs and investment capital will follow.

That is exactly the wrong approach to this entire problem. Why are we having massive problems in the housing market? Because the American public as a whole is indebted to the hilt. We have a negative savings rate in this country. The last fifteen years have been a veritable orgy of unfettered consumerism and we are just beginning to have to pay the piper. So for the love of god, if you have extra money SAVE IT. Stick it in savings account, a CD, or some T-bills.

Increased savings will help to recapitalize the banks, which might actual get commercial lending starting again. It will help counteract the massive account deficit the USA is going to have to get out of this recession/depression. Spending more money right now is just throwing more fuel on the every growing fire. Nate should stick to political prediction, since this advice is about as bad as it gets.

Update: I just have to say. 70% of the GDP in this country was consumer expenses. There is NO WAY such a percentage is maintainable. If all you do is buy things (and not make things for others to buy), there is going to be an eventual liquidity crisis. The only thing that kept this giant Ponzi scheme going as long as it has was the Fed monkeying with interest rates to create the housing bubble. We need to seriously reduce consumer expenditure and bring our GDP percentages back into whack. Asshattery.

Another day, another study showing that vitamin therapy doesn’t work. From the Guardian:

The notion that antioxidant supplements such as vitamins C and E could slow ageing has been dealt a blow by a scientific study showing that the theory behind the advice is wrong.

Beloved of health food shops and glossy magazines alike, antioxidants have long been peddled as preventative pills that have the ability to slow ageing and protect against diseases such as cancer. But the research has shown that the molecular mechanism proposed to explain how they work is mistaken.

Is this really a surprise? I know that there are desperate people out there who want a super-pill that will make them healthy and live forever, despite all the crap they routinely consume. And there sure is a huge industry that exists to try and sell it to them. But guess what? We are so far from understanding the nuances of how the human body works and how it processes nutrients (both macro and micro) that anyone who tells you otherwise is just trying to make a buck. Food and vitamin companies do not you want to be healthy, they want you to spend more money.

Again, there is a simple solution. Eat in moderation. Eat whole foods. Limit your consumption of products from the agri-industrial complex: buy organic, but even more so, buy local. Eat foods that are raised the way nature intended them–grass-fed cattle for example. And remember that no one who has a quarterly EPS to meet has your best interests in mind.

Having just finished Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of food and the benefits that accrue from eating locally. There is the obvious benefit of reducing carbon emissions, since there are massive amounts of fossil fuels burned to transport all the different foods to the odd ends of the world. There are also benefits that accrue from destroying the industrialization of food production, such as the reduction of groundwater pollution and decreased used of antibiotics in our food.

However I do not think it is necessary or even desirable to destroy the global food chain. There are great advantages in the quality of life in having different sorts of food available year round. While it might not be natural to be eating green vegetables in the middle of a North East winter, it is certainly much more healthy and enjoyable to consume a balanced diet throughout the seasons. Obviously steps need to be taken to reduce the carbon footprint of transferring goods around the world, but that is true in general and really applies to all expenditures of energy. The amount of energy consumed by humans is not going to drop; we just have to find cleaner and renewable ways of generating it

To get back to the food chain issue, it is a commonly held belief that eating locally is going back to the “good old days” of pre-industrial farming. So it was somewhat amusing to discover, as I started plowing through John Ferling’s massive history of the American Revolution “Almost a Miracle”, the following quote:

He thought Boston was attractive and its climate good, at least until his first New England winter set in. The food was superb. There was an abundance of seafood, including turtle soup, which he relished. Madeira and tropical fruit, also among his favorites, were consistently available.

Even in the late 1700’s, food was being shipped from the Caribbean up to the Northeast, setting the patterns now followed by fruits and vegetables migrating up from Latin America. There will always be a human desire for the exotic and the nonseasonal food; it has always been satisfied to the best of technology’s abilities. Tropical fruit might barely survive the sailing ship voyage up the American coast, but these days a freighter can have it here in plenty of time while a plane takes only a few hours.

Eating locally is a good, and probably a necessary, thing, if we are going to improve the health of both people and the land they live on. But advocating an absolutist position like a ‘hundred-mile diet’ is both unpopular and contrary to human desire. It is also contrary to all prevailing notions of world trade and exchange. Assuming our society (not American, but human society) does fall into absolute rack and ruin, international commerce will continue to broaden and grow. This is undeniably a good thing, assuming the associated environmental risk is both properly assessed and offset (the externalities of shipping goods around the world needs to be factored into their cost, as does the environmental impact of countries with overly permissive standards). A balance needs to be found that allows ecology to be preserved and even promoted, whilst still allowing us in the frigid north a taste of mango.

This is the post that helped inspire me to write about investment strategies:

I have no idea what’s going on with any of my equity investments, because that is not short term money that I need to keep my eye on.

If you look you will get upset, and you will be tempted to do something stupid. I can’t guarantee that the market won’t drop further and you won’t regret having held on. But as a general rule, selling into a massive liquidity crisis is a pretty bad idea. Selling in a panic because your assets just dropped 30% is almost certainly a bad idea.

Since that was posted the Dow has dropped from 9447 to 8046, a loss of almost 15%. So if someone followed her advice and didn’t sell in early October, they’re even farther down. And since it looks like an economic revival is doubtful at the moment, the losses will probably just get even worse.

Completely hands-off management is never the answer.

I’ve got three different things I’m working on right now.

• A series of posts of DRM and the future of transactions/media. I’ve been mulling this over for a while and I think I’m ready to post on it.
• One or two big posts on financial issues. I’ve seen a lot of people lately advocating buy-and-hold or dollar-cost averaging as investment strategies and I want to layout why these are terrible ideas for anyone who actually wants to retire at a meaningful age. I’m writing some simulation code to run different scenarios to demonstrate the problems with these approaches.
• Getting back to the literature blogging. I never managed to blog about my favorite 5 from last year and this year is almost over. oops.

I’ve got the next week reasonably free besides seeing friends and family. So hopefully at least some of this will happen.