In the movie District 9, the aliens (“prawns”) have developed a tremendous addiction to cat food. A Nigerian gangster lives in the prawns’ preserve and has a monopoly on the sale of cat food to the prawns. How can he maintain his monopoly and what barriers are there to entry by other sellers?
You can learn a lot about the world just by asking questions of people that normally don’t get asked. That’s why we do a Q&A series here, and why you may like David Lynch‘s Interview Project; Alex Chadwick‘s Interviews: 50 Cents; and Our Time, a revealing documentary on American youth directed by Matt Heineman and Matt Wiggins, and co-screenwritten by Freakonomics research assistant Ryan Hagen.
The Tri-State Transportation Campaign makes a case for improving the Hudson River bus crossings connecting New Jersey and Manhattan using a combination of animation and statistics, such as
Levitt was floored by the documentary Smile Pinki, about two children in India who receive free surgery to repair their cleft lips. The documentary, which won an Oscar last year, gets its television premier tonight on HBO at 7 p.m. You can watch the trailer, here.
You know that sensation when you’re reading an article in your morning newspaper and, about three grafs in, you start imagining the movie version and you can practically hear the Hollywood studios scrambling to get hold of the writer and the subject in order to lock up their life rights?
I rarely have occasion these days to see new movies in theaters, but I had the good fortune recently to see two of the Oscar-nominated best films, Frost/Nixon and Slumdog Millionaire, within 24 hours. It was a strange coincidence that both of them were time-jumping stories built around TV shows.
I recently saw a remarkable short documentary entitled Smile Pinki. It tells the story of two poverty-stricken young children (one a girl named Pinki) in India who are born with clefts and have the opportunity to receive free surgery to fix their condition. It is incredibly moving. I’m not the only one who feels that way — the movie is . . .
I’m a bit late getting to this, but I just saw that my friend Roland Fryer appeared on The Colbert Report on Monday. He was — officially — talking about his current experiments with providing incentives for kids to get better grades. While it is pretty hard to look good next to Colbert, Roland pulled it off. And it takes . . .
Our resident quote bleggar Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, is back with another request. If you have a bleg of your own, send it along here. Thanks to all for the hundreds of responses to the movie lines bleg. I was looking for 21st-century quotes, but there was some confusion on the issue. My sense is . . .
Ben Mezrich Ben Mezrich‘s book Bringing Down the House — a nonfiction account of six M.I.T. card-counters who made millions in Las Vegas — has sold more than a million copies and was translated into 18 languages. But the changes made in the recent movie adaptation, 21, have (besides helping to bring in $23.7 million in the movie’s debut weekend) . . .
Sudhir Venkatesh’s book Gang Leader for a Day has been optioned for a film to be directed by Craig Brewer, who wrote and directed Hustle & Flow. Who should play Sudhir? And J.T., and Ms. Bailey?
It’s official: Freakonomics is going to be turned into a feature-length documentary film. It will be an omnibus format, with different stories within the film told by different directors. According to Variety: Doc is being produced by Chad Troutwine (“Paris je t’aime”) and Seth Gordon (“The King of Kong”), and they have enlisted Morgan Spurlock (“Super Size Me”), Rachel Grady . . .