Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

‘Howl’: Sex, Poetry and America in the ’50s

September 21, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Movies, Politics, Culture

October 7, 1955. A 29-year old poet named Allen Ginsberg takes to the stage at San Francisco’s Six Gallery and begins to read: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…” The poem was “Howl,” now universally regarded as one of the great American literary works of the 20th century and a touchstone of the Beat movement. But Ginsberg’s creation was important for another reason — it spawned The People v. Ferlinghetti, one of the seminal obscenity cases in ... Read More

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Sex Appeal, Exotic Setting Equal Satisfied Moviegoers

September 17, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

What makes a movie appealing? Is it having a lead actor or actress you can identify with, or an opposite-sex lead you find romantically desirable? Newly published research, which both refutes and confirms conventional wisdom, points strongly to the latter. “Star power does play a relevant role in driving consumers’ evaluations,” Michela Addis of the University of Rome 3 and Morris Holbrook of Columbia University report in the journal Psychology & Marketing. “But this role seems to depend more on attraction than identification, at least with regard to actual age and ... Read More

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It Turns Out There Is Accounting for Taste

September 7, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

If I told you my taste in movies, would you be able to tell me what kind of music I listen to? How about my favorite reading material, or taste in television? Peter Jason Rentfrow can — and it’s no parlor trick. The Cambridge University psychologist is lead author of a new study that finds a person’s entertainment choices tend to share certain basic characteristics, which may or may not be immediately obvious. “Individuals prefer genres that share similar content, irrespective of the medium through which it is conveyed,” he and his colleagues write in the Journal of ... Read More

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‘A Film Unfinished’ Focuses on Nazi Documentary

August 15, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

No matter what crime, perversity or act of madness the Nazis committed, there's always a new one to be uncovered. Case in point is A Film Unfinished, a documentary currently opening around the country in which filmmaker Yael Hersonski deconstructs 60 minutes of unedited propaganda footage shot by the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942. On the surface, the scenes in the unfinished film, snippets of which were used for years as generic footage in Holocaust-related documentaries, look like the real deal: mass street sequences, people unconcernedly passing by the bodies of those who have ... Read More

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It’s the End of the World as We Blow It

July 19, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

The film Countdown to Zero might be one of the most frightening movies ever made, and it doesn’t feature a single vampire, zombie, biological mutant or alien slime thing. Just a bunch of talking heads discussing the possibility of nuclear terrorism, war or accident. Scary. Very, very scary. The film, which opens July 23 in New York and Washington, followed by a national rollout, is both a condensed history of nuclear weaponry and a sober analysis of contemporary nuclear issues. Produced by Lawrence Bender, the same man behind Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary’s ... Read More

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Sebastian Junger Brings AfPak to Big Screen

June 24, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Journalist Sebastian Junger says he's "not going to spend another year with a unit at a remote outpost getting shot at," and after seeing Restrepo, which opens June 25 in New York and Los Angeles, you can understand why. The film, which Junger co-directed with Tim Hetherington, won the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival and is a companion piece to War, Junger's best-selling book about being embedded for more than a year with the soldiers of Second Platoon, Battle Company in Afghanistan's distant and incredibly dangerous Korengal Valley. Shot on ... Read More

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Studies That Stretch to Infinity, and Beyond

June 17, 2010 • By • 1 Comment

Pixar Animation Studios has produced 10 consecutive smash hits, representing "a standard of consistent excellence with few historical precedents," in the words of Slate film critic Christopher Orr. This spectacular success can be traced to its succinct set of operating principles. The first two — "everyone must have the freedom to communicate with anyone" and "it must be safe for everyone to offer ideas" — foster a relaxed corporate culture and encourage creative thinking. But we at Miller-McCune are particularly drawn to the company's third and final principle: "We must stay close to ... Read More

More like this: July-August 2010, Media, Research in Summary
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Chinese Audiences Give Two Thumbs Up

June 3, 2010 • By • 1 Comment

What can be gained from sifting through the opinions of a million moviegoers? For Noi Sian Koh and fellow researchers, it was a revealing portrait of the cultural differences between Americans and Chinese, albeit one that confirms certain stereotypes of both societies' norms. In a paper in the journal Electronic Commerce research and Applications, they surmised that because of these differences, web-users in China and the United States would choose markedly different ways to publicly voice their opinions even about a benign topic like movies they'd seen. The study culled data from ... Read More

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The Sociology of Avatar, The X Files and The Simpsons

April 29, 2010 • By • 2 Comments
Homer Simpson Marches on Washington

After watching the premiere episode of House, I confidently predicted the Fox medical drama would be dead on arrival. I was certain the viewing public would not respond to a program based around such a cold, arrogant character. And the questions it posed — Is there a God? Does anyone ever tell the whole truth, even to himself? In the end, don't we always choose self-interest over altruism? — were not ones the American Idol crowd was especially interested in contemplating. I gave it six weeks, eight tops. House is now in its sixth season and remains among the 10 most-watched programs in ... Read More

More like this: Culture, May-June 2010, Media, Views Reviews and Interviews
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Oscar Winners Should Thank Their Economist

March 6, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

As anyone who has channel surfed past Entertainment Tonight is aware, movie studios put massive energy into their Oscar campaigns each year. But does this effort to sway the voting members of the Motion Picture Academy of America pay off in terms of increased revenues? A series of studies over the past decade have reached conflicting conclusions. In a 2001 analysis titled “What’s an Oscar Worth?” a team of economists led by Randy Nelson and Michael Donihue of Colby College compared the box-office take of 131 nominated films with that of 131 less-heralded movies released in the same ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, March-April 2010, Research in Summary
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