Totally off topic, but my wife and I recently spent 12 days in Italy.  Here are a few thoughts/suggestions for those thinking of visiting.

1.  I am currently teaching a course on “The Good Life.”  I don’t know what that means, but it seems like the US has “the convenient life” whereas Italy has “the beautiful life.”

2.  Italy is arguably the best country in the world.  I said arguably—I agree that arguments can be made for lots of other countries.  But it least it’s not one of those countries that are not arguably the best country in the world, like Moldova.

3.  I hate Italian cars.  I am one of those stupid Americans who never learned how to drive manual cars.  My rental car was actually considered an automatic–but I don’t know what that term means in Italy.  Fiat500, powered by a lawnmower engine.

4.  Venice isn’t just the best city in the world, the circa 1600 AD version was the best city ever.  Man’s greatest achievement.  Don’t miss Scuola San Rocco, which Ruskin called one of the three most valuable buildings in the world.  The other two, the Sistine Chapel and Campo Santo of Pisa, are also in Italy.  (Too bad the USAF didn’t read Ruskin.)  After seeing one of San Rocco’s Tintorettos Henry James commented “Surely no single picture contains more of human life; there is everything in it; including the most exquisite beauty.”

5.  Venice was packed to the gills with tourists–NEVER go there in August.  Fortunately the Accademia was nearly empty.  The arts are underfunded in Italy (or perhaps I should say they simply have too much art to take care of.)  The museum was obviously in need of money, but that made things easier for tourists.  You could walk right up to paintings like Giorgione’s The Tempestwithout even a guard nearby.   There are superb paintings by Bellini.    The room of Carpaccios is stunning.  Oddly, I saw very few Titians in Venice.  The Guggenheim has a nice collection of surrealist works, but that’s not why people go to Venice.

6.  We’d stayed in Vicenza for two days, but I recommend Padua instead.  It has a much livelier city center, with many good restaurants.  You can take the train to Vicenza and see the highlights in a single day (Villa Rotonda, Villa Valmarana, Teatro Olimpico, Piazza dei Signori.)  You can also see Venice with a short train ride from Padua.

7.  In Bellagio we stayed in the Hotel Panorama, which (as the name suggests) has an awesome view.  It’s only 2 stars, perhaps because the showers are too small.  But recall the set point theory of happiness.  All your aggravation in the shower will merely heighten the enjoyment of exploring the area.  We also had more luck conversing with people there than in the 3 star or higher hotels, just as David Brooks predicted.

8.  If democratic capitalism is the end of history, then Venice was the beginning of the end.  They were  a quasi-democracy, where the elected doge was nearly powerless.  About 2000 people from “good families” were given the vote.  It seems to me there is a sort of parallel between Venice and the Nordic countries.  The Nordics thrive despite relative high taxes.  Venice thrived despite the fact that it was a very expensive place to build, the entire city rests on millions of wood pilings driven deep into the mud.  In both cases the advantages of good governance overcame the disadvantage of higher costs (taxes or pilings.)  The first example of Seasteading?

9.  Is a market economy inconsistent with great art?  Answer:  Bellini, Carpaccio, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Tiepolo, Canaletto.

10.   When I first visited Venice at age 30 I thought about how I’d later return to do it right; with more money, time, and freedom.  I didn’t realize that when I returned I’d see the city through the eyes of a 55 year old man, not a 30 year old.  Don’t put off travel until you are old.

I’ll slack off from blogging soon for a bit of travel.  Comment response will be slower.  In case anyone is interested, here’s a brief list of some of the books, music, and films I consumed while taking a break from blogging this spring:

The most interesting book was probably A Time for Everything, a fairly long Norwegian novel that takes some of the Biblical stories quite seriously, although they are transported to a location that seems a lot like Norway.  I also read Microscripts, by Robert Walser and An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by Cesar Aira (both of which I found slightly disappointing.)  I found Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky to be delightful.  And I greatly enjoyed Tiepolo Pink by Roberto Calasso.  I’m told that Danube by Claudio Magris is a classic.  It is certainly impressive, but is probably better suited for those with a greater knowledge of Central Europe.  It left me with the impression that the Danube River contains the most dense and complex cultural mosiac on the planet.   If the internet had never been invented I’d be well read enough by now to have handled it, but the internet was invented.  I got 220 pages into Underworld by Don DeLillo, and gave up.   I just finished Peter Hessler’s River Town, and liked it alot.   He’s my favorite observer of Chinese culture (this is the first of three books that he has written.  I should probably do a book review.)

Here’s some quick music comments:

The Wild Hunt by Kristian Mattson was my only discovery, as I’m afraid I don’t keep up with pop music.  I also got his two newest EPs.

Oh but rumor has it that I wasn’t born
I just walked in one frosty morn

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.   I can’t understand why Lucinda Williams isn’t a superstar.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.  I can understand why Kanye West is a superstar.

Jonsi Live.  The lead singer from Sigur Ros

Bob Dylan Live 1964.  For some reason I love his voice, but find Joan Baez (who also sings on the album) to be very annoying.  Go figure.

And now some brief film reviews.  These are mostly new films, but a few old ones.  I see what’s available at the theater, and almost never watch films on TV

Uncle Boonmee Can Recall His Past Lives (Thai)  3.9  Apichatpong Weerasethakul might just be the best director in the world today.  It’s a tragedy that few will see this on the big screen, where the visuals/sound/atmospherics are so impressive.  Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2010.

Poetry (Korean) 3.8  Another great movie by Lee Chang-Dong, director of Secret Sunshine.  Like some other great directors (and unlike Hollywood) his movies are partly defined by what they choose not to show.  Great use of sunlight.  Brilliant ending.  I’m sure I’d get lots more out of it on a second viewing.

HaHaHa (aka Summer/Summer/Summer) (Korean)  3.6  Song’s films are reminiscent of all those French films about young people adrift in and out of relationships.  I’m not sure if it’s the Korean setting that makes them seem fresh, or his skill as a director.

Cameraman: The Life and Times of Jack Cardiff  (British)  3.5  A must see film for fans of “Black Narcissus.”  I wish I could have lived his life instead of mine.

Incendies (Canadian)  3.5 A very powerful look at the Lebanese civil war.  Does a lot of things well, but doesn’t really excel in any single category””except perhaps acting.

City of Life and Death  (China)  3.4  The rape of Nanjing.

Deep End (British)  3.3  An old British film by a Polish director.  Reminds me of Peeping Tom, although not as good.

The Robber (Austrian)  3.2  Interesting film based on a true story of a marathon runner who robbed banks.  Stylistically reminiscent of many films of the 1950s and 1960s, which makes it seems derivative at times.

The Tree of Life (US) 3.2  Worth seeing, but I found it much less impressive than some of the critics suggested.  The visuals were nice, but not visionary as in Tarkovsky and Kubrick films.  Did a great job of capturing the feel of childhood.  The scenes with Sean Penn didn’t work for me.

The Housemaid (Korean)  3.2  Like many Korean films, it’s a movie that loves extremes.  It’s interesting seeing Western culture symbolizing decadence and evil.  Korea’s quite nationalistic.

Cold Weather (US)  3.1  An independent film that is ostensibly a detective story, but is actually a sly comedy about slackers.

The Strange Case of Angelica (Portuguese) 3.0  Charming at times, but in the end he doesn’t quite pull it off.  The director (Oliviera) is 102 years old.  Time to retire?

Midnight in Paris (US) 3.0  Another entertaining and completely forgettable film from Woody Allen.

Battleship Potemkin  (Russian)  3.0   Thrilling visual images, corny dialog, overacting, simplistic message and a really big ship.  No, it wasn’t Titanic, it was a “film classic.”  Didn’t Eisenstein steal that baby carriage sequence from Brian DePalma?

Nostalgia for the Light  (Chile) 2.8 Well-intentioned film that overreaches.

Summer Wars  (Japan) 2.5  Disappointing anime by the director who did The Girl Who Leap Through Time.

My favorite film blogger is Colin Marshall.  Here’s an except from a recent post:

Another essayist, centuries older but still a friend-maker in his way, may point to the escape route. A couple weeks ago, I interviewed Sarah Bakewell, Michel de Montaigne’s latest biographer. I admire many things about Montaigne, not least having invented the modern essay form, but his lack of strong opinions really wins me over. In his work “” point out the staggering oversimplification in this if you must “” I see a man struggling so hard to be honest about himself that, in the process, he strips himself of his opinions. I’ve come to think of honesty as a solution that, poured on one’s own opinions, dissolves them. When we dig down to bedrock, claims like “I love Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies” and “I hate Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies” amount to little more than “” well, grunts, right? We can’t credibly call them honest or dishonest, since their vagueness and rootedness in impulse takes them out of territory where that sort of truth and falsity applies.

Which isn’t to say that we should stop talking about the cultural products that attract or repel us. I just wonder if we should talk about them from richer angles than liking and disliking. In the best critics’ vocabularies, do words like good, bad, and any synonyms thereof have any place at all? In our interview, Geoff Dyer mentioned his current work on a book entirely about Stalker, in which “” and only my own conjecture follows “” he will not say “Stalker is good,” or even “Stalker is great.” I wager he’ll say something more interesting like, oh, “It’s not enough to say that Stalker is a great film “” it is the reason cinema was invented.“ Hence, I suppose, the fact that I showed up to interview him, not the other way around.

I won’t say Stalker is great, but I will say that it has shown at Harvard about a half dozen times in the past 30 years.  And I will say that I saw it twice at Harvard.  And I will say that the 4 times I missed it were four of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made.

PS.  I really need to read Montaigne—he sounds like he has exactly what I like in a essayist.

I recently read a history of Buffalo in the 20th century, and got interested in its architectural heritage.  Here’s a photo of a stunning Buffalo church.  And here are another 45, all in Buffalo.  And Buffalo has less than 1/1000th of the US population.  We have architectural riches beyond human comprehension.

But the US does not have 1000 times as much good architecture as Buffalo does.  Although Buffalo has about the same population as Henderson and Plano, I’d guess those other two cities would not be able to put together a similar portfolio of stunningly beautiful churches.  Why is that?

Perhaps because Buffalo was mostly built between 1870 and 1940, and the other two towns were built after 1940.  During the 1870-1940 period (the heyday of Richardson/Sullivan/Wright) the America we know and love was built.  Just as the Paris and London we know and love were mostly built in the 19th century.

And it’s not just churches; my town (Newton, MA) is full of beautiful old homes from the 1890s and 1920s.  (If you examine the date of nice homes in our affluent inner suburbs, you’ll notice that quite a few were built in 1926, halfway through the Coolidge administration.)  Post-war housing in America mostly ranges from mediocre (in the southwest), to ugly (the rest of the US.)  Or consider tall buildings.  Next time you visit Manhattan, walk through one of those neighborhoods full of glorious art deco towers, where the late afternoon sun glistens off gold leaf-encrusted spires and ziggurats.  Then walk down 6th Avenue and see the boring 1960s boxes.

Or contrast the old movie palaces with suburban shoebox theatres, where a roving projectionist sets each film on “slightly blurry,” so that it is less likely to break.

If the buildings built since 1940 were somehow destroyed, there’d be a few masterpieces by Kahn and Gehry and van der Rohe that we’d miss, but most of them could be re-built.  If the structures built before 1940 were destroyed, they could not be rebuilt.  There’s not enough money.  The church in the first link cost $513,000 in 1928, and by 1976 the replacement cost was estimated at $425,000,000.

In my view the loss of great architecture is much greater than the gain from having cell phones, laptops, and iPods.  I’d guess Morgan Warstler disagrees.  Who’s right?  We both are, as preferences are subjective.  The debate over Tyler Cowen’s Great Stagnation hypothesis faces essentially the same problem.  Some economists see lots of progress; for others, not so much.  Even a reactionary like me thinks that overall things are better than 40 years ago, but I also mourn what we’ve lost, and don’t think the progress is as rapid as the amazing period from 1870 to 1940, or even the next 30 years, when the comfortable lifestyle that upper middle class Americans enjoyed in 1940, spread to the working class.

What’s the “true” rate of inflation?  Take per capita nominal income growth, subtract your subjective estimate of how much better life is today as compared to the old days (i.e. real GDP growth), and you get inflation.  Is that what you want the Fed to target?

Disclaimer:  Most of my life I’ve lived in houses built during the 1920s.  Unfortunately, I’ve spent most of my life working in a place built after WWII.  Oh, and I don’t own a cell phone, laptop or iPod.

The title of this post is perhaps unduly provocative.  I don’t intend to bash all white people, just 21st century white Americans.  Let me also assure readers that some of my best friends are white folks.

About 5 years ago I noticed something wrong with white people, but first a little perspective.  I grew up in the racially-charged 1960s, when there was much turmoil over issues like school desegregation.  Many white parents didn’t want to send their kids to schools that had lots of black children, out of fear that the academic standards would be too low.  Then about 5 years ago I read about white parents in California who pulled their kids out of heavily Asian school districts, fearing the academic standards were too high.  This struck me as odd; can’t white parents make up their minds about whether they want low standards or high standards?

I was reminded of this when I read of the huge hubbub over the Amy Chua book on strict Chinese parenting.  Apparently many people were outraged that Ms. Chua pushed her kids too hard to succeed.  Once again, this brought back memories of when I was younger, and I’d hear middle class white people complaining that welfare moms don’t push their kids hard enough to succeed.

What’s the right way to raise kids?  In my post “The arrogance of the here and now” I hinted at one answer.  The right way to raise kids is the way “we” raise kids “right now” around here.  Isn’t that obvious?

I know that some commenters will accuse me of “relativism.”  I seem to be claiming there is no right or wrong way, and we have no right to criticize others.  They’ll insist there is objective evidence that welfare moms don’t do a good job raising kids.  They’ll point to high rates of incarceration and low levels of income for kids brought up by welfare moms.  OK, let’s say that’s true.  Let’s say it proves “our way” is superior.  Isn’t it also true that Chinese-American kids earn even more than white kids when they grow up?  And aren’t they less likely to go to prison than white kids?  If so, then what’s wrong with white kids?  Why aren’t they pushed harder to succeed?

Some may argue that the big fuss over Amy Chua had no broader implications.  It wasn’t an implied criticism of Chinese parenting styles, just an expression of outrage against a single person.  Yeah, and the huge fuss over the mother of octuplets who got public assistance was just about one family, with no broader implications about society’s attitudes toward welfare moms.

If those with stricter parenting styles than us are bad people, and those with less strict parenting styles are also bad people, then doesn’t this imply that we also used to be bad people?  After all, weren’t our ancestors much stricter with kids a few hundred years ago?  And aren’t our descendants also likely to be bad people too, after all (extrapolating current trends) they are likely to be much less strict than we are.  I find most people are happy to confidently declare that “we” raise kids better than welfare moms, and better than tiger moms, and better than moms who used to send their 12 year old daughters to work in textile mills.  But they don’t necessarily agree with my view that the future moms will also be horrible.  I think that’s because in some sense “the test of time” is implicitly viewed as providing the last word as to what’s right or wrong.

Richard Rorty was once asked what people meant when they said “people currently believe X, but eventually it will be shown that Y was true.”  He responded that this was no more than an implied prediction that people would later believe Y.  I’m predicting that future parenting styles will be very different, and that they will look back at moms of 2011 as some sort of horrible monsters, cruelly abusing children.

Part 2:  Hollywood’s ultimate insult

Each January, Hollywood inflicts upon the world an insult so exquisitely cruel, so mind-bogglingly un-PC, so appalling lacking in taste and refinement, that it goes by completely unnoticed.  I’m referring of course to the best picture nominations.  As you know, in recent years they’ve had to struggle to find 5 worthy entries.  To cover up this embarrassment they recently expanded the category to 10 pictures, in the hope that the mind-numbing mediocrity will be hidden my sheer numbers.

Consider the following 8 best picture nominees:  Grand Illusion (1938), Z (1969), The Emigrants (1972), Cries and Whispers (1973), Gandhi (1982), The Postman (1995), Life is Beautiful (1998), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000.)  I’m not certain, but I believe these are the only 8 films ever nominated where English was not the dominant language of the film (some films are bilingual.)

Now I know what you are thinking, “Sumner’s going to complain that they didn’t nominate more of those artsy foreign films that nobody wants to watch.  This is our celebration, let Cannes cover the foreign films.”  Actually, that wouldn’t be a good argument, as there are lots of great foreign commercial films.  No, you’ve misjudged me, the real outrage is that they’ve nominated 8 too many!  It’s what makes the insult so sublime.

Suppose no foreign films had ever been nominated.  What would people say?  Obviously many people would point to the separate category for foreign films at the Oscars, and perhaps note that it makes sense to have two separate categories.  Not optimal, but perhaps at least somewhat defensible.

Alternatively, Hollywood might have nominated around 200 foreign films, out of the roughly 400 films that have received nominations.  Again, it’s slightly insulting to the rest of the world to claim that we have produced half of all the great films, but then people could say “naturally Hollywood would focus a bit more on their own films, which they know best.”

But Hollywood didn’t choose either option.  Instead they nominated about one foreign film a decade, and only Gandhi actually won.  And Gandhi was partly in English, so no completely non-English film has ever won best picture, not once in 83 years.  Why 8 films?  Why not 200?  Or zero?  Here’s my theory.  Hollywood has an inferiority complex.  They constant prattle on about being “artists” precisely because they know that they aren’t artists.  They are resentful of all the critics who rave about uncommercial films by Antonioni, or Kairostami, or Hou Hsiao Hsien.

So they devised the ultimate insult.  Open up the best picture category to all films, of any language, but never let any non-English language films win.  That will show all those snobby French cineastes who’s really on top of the world.  You might then wonder why they didn’t nominate zero foreign films, to maximize the insult.  Ah, but that’s the beauty of this outrage.  If no foreign film was ever nominated, it would be assumed that, de facto, the category was only open to English language films.  Especially given that there is a separate category for foreign language films.  No, this is much better, have the category open to all films, and then nominate roughly one foreign film a decade to remind the rest of the world that we do consider your movies, we just don’t find any that meet our high standards.  Truly an insult of John Malkovichian subtlety.

Just as white folks don’t like parenting styles that are more or less strict than their own; Hollywood doesn’t like films that are more or less “artistic” than their own.  BTW, when I say “artistic” in scare quotes I don’t mean having aesthetic merit.  Lord knows that’s not what determines which films get nominated for best picture.  If you don’t believe me, just look at a list of films directed by Hitchcock in the late 1950s, and then look at the films nominated for best picture in the late 1950s.  No, Hollywood equates “artistic” with films about the way we live.  And by “we” I mean English-speaking people.  More specifically, white English-speaking people.  Movies with which “we” can identify.

Part 1:  They told you so!

Last summer the economic recovery was clearly going nowhere.  I argued that monetary stimulus was our only hope.  In September and October there were a series of speeches by top Fed officials that made it seem increasingly likely that monetary stimulus would be forthcoming.  It didn’t happen in September, partly because two of Obama’s appointees hadn’t been seated yet.  And that was because he waited 15 months before even nominating them.  And that’s because almost no liberal politician, advisor, or pundit was telling him in early 2009 how absolutely important it was to get his own people onto the board.  And Obama doesn’t read any quasi-monetarist blogs.

The Fed didn’t do all that was needed, but what they did do had a significant effect on the markets.  And now we are already seeing the results:

Faster growth in retail sales.

Much stronger auto sales.

Much stronger service sector.

Even an uptick in construction.

Then there’s the ADP jobs number.  Last summer we were looking at 2% to 2.5% real growth in 2011.  Now I’m seeing 3.5% to 4.0% forecasts.  The Fed should have done twice as much, pushing growth up to 5.0% to 5.5%.  But this is better than nothing, and better than Dr. Doom at the NYT expected from QE2.  That’s because his model says QE2 will only work if it is believed that it will work, and there is no reason for anyone to believe anything the Fed says; after all, they are conservative central bankers.

Of course I’m exaggerating a bit, Paul Krugman did say QE2 was worth a shot, and I suppose his supporters will claim that the recent positive data reflects the afterglow of the recent fiscal stimulus announcement.   And they’d be right, as the cutting edge research in Keynesian economics suggests that the expansionary effect of fiscal stimulus comes when the policy is announced (actually expected) not when the money is actually spent.  So it could explain the stronger real economy in the last few months of 2010 (although obviously not the strongly positive response of equity markets and TIPS spreads to rumors of QE2.)

I fervently hope Krugman claims that the fiscal stimulus already started working when the deal was announced.  It would be true, and it would also blow out of the water all the excuses made for the fact that fiscal stimulus did not work in the first half of 2009.  Remember all those Keynesians saying “but the money hasn’t yet been spent.”

I’d love to say “I told you so.”  But of course I don’t do forecasts.  All I can say is “they told you so.”  The markets told us QE2 would work somewhat, but not as much as we really needed, and now it seems to be working somewhat, but not as much as we really needed.  My hunch is that the recent upswing in stocks suggests that things were already improving in December, and this will show up in future government data releases with a lag.  The market observes the world in real time; we economists see everything through government statistics with a one month lag, or even longer for GDP.

BTW, I just read that Obama is at over 50% approval.  Two year in office, millions of jobs lost, unemployment has risen from 7.8% to 9.8%, and most people still approve?  I made money betting on him in 2008, maybe I’ll make some more in 2012.  If he’s popular now, just imagine how popular he’ll be in 2012, after a few years of recovery.  Unless the GOP can re-animate the Gipper, I don’t see them having much chance.

Part 2:  Il sorpasso:  It’s closer than you think

In previous posts I’ve argued that China will catch up to the US in GDP much quicker than anyone believes.  Lester Throw says it won’t be until the 22nd century.  Some of the major private sector forecasters have been throwing out numbers like 2030 or 2040.  Recently The Economist did some calculations and came up with 2019, that’s barely 8 years away.  But keep in mind that even this forecast was based on current market prices.  In PPP terms it’s much closer than that, because most estimates show Chinese prices are only half US levels, and they seem even less than that to me.  You can eat out for a third the cost of the US, and grocery prices are also quite low.  A haircut in a nice place in Beijing is $2.25, it’s probably 25 cents in the countryside where half the people live.  If China’s NGDP reaches one half US levels their economy will probably be bigger using any sort of apples for apples comparison.

China’s a hard country to grasp, because it is so diverse.  It needs to get as rich as Mexico to surpass the US.  But Mexico is also quite diverse, so even though I’ve travelled many times to both countries, I have a hard time making mental comparisons.  The backward parts of China seem poorer than the backward parts of Mexico (although it’s been a few years, which is a generation in Chinese terms.)  The cities seem more futuristic. Consider this description of a new rail line about to open in China:

The Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway, also known as the Jinghu High-Speed Railway is a 1,318 kilometres (819 mi) long high-speed railway that will connect two major economic zones in the People’s Republic of China: the Bohai Sea Rim and the Yangtze River Delta. ^[2] Construction began on April 18, 2008, ^[3] and a ceremony to mark the completion of track laying was held on November 15, 2010. ^[1] The line is scheduled to open in October 2011. ^[1]

The railway line is the first one designed for 380 km/h commercial running. Once in operation, its train services will become the world’s fastest “” the position currently occupied by the trains of the Wuhan-Guangzhou line, which opened in December 2009. The non-stop train from Beijing South to Shanghai Hongqiao is expected to finish the 1305 km journey in 3 hours, 58 minutes, ^[4] averaging 329 km/h.

The Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway Co., Ltd. is in charge of construction. The project is expected to cost 220.9 billion yuan (about $32 billion). An estimated 220,000 passengers are expected to use the trains each day, ^[2] which is double the current capacity. ^[5] During peak hours there should be a train every five minutes. ^[5]1060.6 km, or 80.5% of railway will be laid bridges. There are 244 bridges along the line. The 164-km long Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge is the longest bridge in the world. ^[6], the 113.69-km long viaduct bridge between Langfang and Qingxian is the second longest in the world, and the viaduct between Beijing’s Fourth Ring Road and Langfang is the fifth longest. The line also includes 22 tunnels, totaling 16.1 km. 1196 km of the length is ballastless.

Imagine getting on a train in NYC, and just over 4 hours later arriving in Chicago for lunch.  Do some shopping, have dinner, and return on the same train.  That’s why it’s so hard to get a grasp on the Chinese economy.  Mexico doesn’t have anything like that, indeed Japan and France don’t really have anything as good.  And it’s not just Beijing and Shanghai, other lines are already open, and an entire network is being built connecting all the major cities across China.  As far as the US, we have our 60 mph Acela between NYC and Boston.  And they don’t leave every 5 minutes.

Over the next 5 years there will be a steady increase in articles claiming China is already number one, perhaps starting as soon as next year.  I’ll say 2015.

Part 3:  The coming decade of Hollywood mediocrity

The teens will produce few if any great Hollywood movies.  I know of no young directing talent that can re-energize the industry.  When I think of talented young directors I think of David Lynch, and he’s old.  In the teens no director will produce 4 masterpieces like Coppola did in the 1970s, or the amazing Kubrick films made in the 1960s, or the sublime Hitchcock films of the 50s.  The well has run dry.  Ambitious directors are always looking for new ways of expressing themselves, but the easily accessible commercial techniques have all been tried.  Great films will continue to be made in Taiwan, Thailand, and Turkey, but not in Hollywood.

I guess all art forms split at some point, with the pop art continuing to amuse the masses, and high art becoming increasing esoteric and inaccessible to the average reader/viewer/listener.  But I’m not too discouraged.  There are enough great films around to keep me amused for the rest of my life.  And as Howard Hughes discovered, even Hollywood films are better than real life.  (Anyone for Ice Station Zebra?)

Because of my blog I saw few films last year.  I seem to recall The Prophet (France), Mother (Korea) and Air Doll (Japan) as the standouts.  But no masterpieces.

I won’t be blogging much for the next few days.