Betting on The Hollywood Stock Exchange? Better Play Roulette

I certainly don"€™t know much about investing, but I can give you one solid tip: don"€™t bet in the movie box office futures market. Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald expects to get federal regulatory approval to begin trading movie pseudo-shares in April (and a start-up called Veriana ...

Zachary Mason and the Legacy of Borges

In synopsis, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, a lapidary first work of fiction by Silicon Valley computer scientist Zachary Mason, sounds like an overly clever postmodern literary jest. This elegant collection of very short stories consists of 44 purported pre-Homeric variations on the legends of the ...

The Death of Spectator Sports

What's the long-term future of spectator sports? With the conclusion of the Winter Olympics, some new trends have come into focus. The Olympics, for instance, have established a niche as the Exception to the Rules of Sports Fandom: they"€™re the athletic event for people who like watching ...

The Case of the Gay Figure Skater

Imagine that you are a young fellow who likes being the center of attention as you spin around in the air. How would you choose among Olympic sports? The Winter and Summer Games offer events whose varying conceptions of masculinity are so encoded in their apparel that American twelve-year-olds ...

Tarantino vs. The Coen Brothers

The inflation from five to ten in Best Picture Oscar nominees means that to have any hope of keeping them all straight in your head, you"€™ll need to group them. Fortunately, the Best Picture nods fall into five obvious pairings: —The Easily Confused Titles: Up and Up in the ...

What Bigelow Learned From Cameron (And Vice-Versa)

As you"€™ve no doubt heard by now, leading Oscar nominees Avatar and The Hurt Locker are directed by ex-spouses: James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow, who were married from 1989-1991. What you might not know is that traces of each can be seen in the other's movie. But first, the question of the ...

Megalomaniac Filmmakers

With James Cameron's Avatar shouldering aside George Lucas's original Star Wars and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight for second place on the all time movie box office rankings (behind only Cameron's own Titanic), it's a good time to note one of the odder twists in the evolution of popular film ...

In Defense of James Cameron

You might think that James Cameron, the man who wrote and directed the two biggest global box office blockbusters in history, Titanic and technologically groundbreaking Avatar, hardly needs defending. Yet, amidst all the denunciations of Avatar by neoconservative such as John Podhoretz and David ...

Up in the Air: Reitman, Clooney Disappoint

Until the Underpants Bomber tried to blow up Flight 253 over Detroit, the frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar was widely assumed to be Up in the Air. Indeed, before the Christmas Day incident reminded everybody of how much they hate business travel, the dramedy"€”in which George Clooney plays ...

The Ballad of Jeff Bridges

After The Dark Knight failed to earn a Best Picture Oscar nomination, the Academy expanded the number of nominees for its top honor from five to ten. With luck, these improved odds will prod popcorn movies to aim a little higher and license Oscar-bait films to let themselves be a little more ...