Happy Accidents- A review

It’s nice to see a romantic film and not be nauseated.

You may think that this is just a macho knee jerk response to movies involving emotions but romantic movies on average just make me want to throw up. The sheer dominant paradigm aspects of mating rituals make it predictable and clichéd. And it does not help the fact that your average Mega Studio produced rom-coms are usually written by hacks; the sort of people who think that “It was a dark and stormy night” is cutting edge in terms of opening lines.

So you could have knocked me down with a feather (danger! cliché!) when I came across Happy Accidents, a movie that takes all the hackneyed aspects of the rom-com genre and throws them out of the window. One must give credit to the writer for just being entirely original. I have never been more delighted by a romantic movie since Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind.

Written and directed by Brad Anderson, the movie stars Marisa Tomei and Vincent D’Onofrio. It was released at Sundance in January 2000 and since then had great critical success. One may argue that the sheer cerebral nature of the story may have been the biggest obstacle to any commercial success. In addition the movie has a very subtle feel good aspect that would have made any other script cringe worthy but makes itself at home in this one.

Ruby is a “fixer”, i.e. a walking talking magnet of all the losers and emotional vampires and fetishists. A long line of ex boyfriends has made her somewhat cynical of life and she is very much into therapy. Then she meets Sam, a mid western boy from Dubuque, Iowa who seems to be the most normal guy she has ever been with. They hit it off and Ruby decides that she may have been mistaken about love after all.

But from the beginning there are glitches. Sam seems normal enough but he takes an unusual interest in everything, as if he sees them for the first time. Fairly quickly into their relationship, Sam confesses to Ruby that he’s from the future, in particular, from 2470. He is from Dubuque, Iowa on the Atlantic coast- apparently an ice age had made the ocean move far into the heartland. His parents have been renegades, old fashioned people who do not conform to the technological society’s norms. After losing his family, Sam was on the verge of suicide when a picture of Ruby in an old curiosity shop made him think twice. He traveled back in time to find her.

So, a story of a pair of neurotic lovers with a bit of time traveling thrown in- is that enough to hold my attention? But what really carries the movie is not a gimmicky script- you cannot remember any zinger of a one liner. It is a story of love- pure and simple. Two lost souls find each other and hold on to each other for dear life as the world continues to bask in condescending indifference towards them.

There is an aspect of time flowing backwards from Sam’s perspective: he tends to see the coffee leaping back on the pot, the eggs becoming unbroken, etc. But is he lying? Is he just delusional and the fact that his sister’s death may have pushed him off the edge? Is he truly who he say he is?

Yes, these questions will bug you all throughout the movie. But what is more important is for you to ask: will they make it? These two seemingly oddballs have discovered what it truly means to be in love with each other and the madness of their relationship and the madness of the world around them and the madness of each other just feeds off on your emotional response to the story.

I like smart alecks and I like banter. But it was humbling for me to see that pure feeling, tenderness and love could also be heartwarming. I think everyone should go see this  movie- it is that good.

No post.

I am really sick today. So I cannot write any reviews. Hopefully tomorrow would be better.

Dirk Gently on BBC 4: A Review

From finding a cat to stumbling onto a murder and then to fly off to time traveling- boy, this detective has his hands full.

Okay, it's not perfect. But then again, Douglas Adams would be thrilled that one of his more difficult novels have been adapted for TV.

Those of you who are big fans of DNA's (that's Douglas Noel Adams for you, and yes, he was born in Cambridge in 1952. Coincidence? I think not!) work outside the Hitchhiker's Guide series, are familiar with the Dirk Gently novels. It features (who else?) Dirk Gently- a modern day gumshoe who runs a detective agency. However this is pulp fiction with a twist: this is no ordinary enterprise in the private eye business. It is a holistic detective agency.

So it was with quite pleasurable surprise that I discovered that BBC has recently aired a dramatization of one of the Dirk Gently novels. It is difficult to describe my feelings as a DNA purist. I'll let you in on a secret: I still think that the radio plays of Hitchhiker's Guide were the best, it all went downhill form there!

It is hard to pin down DNA's strengths as a writer. For one thing, he was enormously versatile in writing fantasy and science fiction. Let us not forget that he cut his teeth as writer working on Doctor Who scripts. One of the most famous Doctor Who episodes, Shada, was written by him. It was never aired but it did find its way to be adapted by the radio series of Doctor Who. However, DNA branched out to writing Sci-Fi, fantasy and even straight laced non-fiction about ecology. So his repertoire of writing is vast.

However, one thing that stands out in DNA's fiction is the essence of humor. It is really funny. It will make you laugh. Not only will it make you laugh but it will do so every other line. DNA is one of those rare writers who oozes humor and it does not feel like too much. We want more.

Yeah, you may say I am a DNA junkie!

But the crucial element of his humor is that it is culturally and linguistically contextual. Take the whole paragraph on Vogon poetry, for example or that of babel fish: how would you translate that into screen and be able to demonstrate how funny both of these situations were? Or to cite a non-Hitchhiker's example, how do you convey the essence of the opening line of The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul: “It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression 'As pretty as an airport'.”

Nevertheless it is rather laudable that BBC has not forgotten one its finest writers and is trying to bring Dirk Gently into the mainstream. The entire story – although devoid of the DNA touch was simplified a little and not all the zany elements were included.

However, in its defense, Dirk Gently is wacky and funny, just like the way Douglas Adams would have preferred. It was a a very good job and I think that anyone who is not familiar with the works of DNA, this would be a nice introduction. If it gets the audience to read his works, the better!

Dirk Gently was aired on BBC 4 on December 16, 2010.

Tim Harford's Trust Me, I'm an Economist Part 4: Your Future

Get your crystal balls out folks! Tim Harford is going to talk about applying economics in being able to look into the future. He is going to talk about irrational decision making that affects your future and how the experts are almost never the best forecasters and many more. Well, better an economist than some scary gypsy woman in a dark room any day.

In this fourth and last episode of Trust Me, I'm an Economist Harford focuses on how our long term decision making can be improved with the help of tools from economics. But first of all, he wants to talk about why you make the irrational and wrong decision about the future.

The reason people make wrong decisions is because of fear of risk. Because the future is unknown, it is difficult to predict and is therefore risky. However, people's take on the degree of risk that future holds is grossly overrated. Our fear of the unknown and the unpredictable makes us vulnerable and easy prey for experts and companies who deal in the business of uncertainty.

Take product insurance for example. Harford pays a visit to a cell phone store where nearly all of the phones come with an added package of insurance. If you are scared out of your pants about losing your new smart phone, then you are very likely to have it insured- often at a very high premium. However, if you asses the risk yourself in an objective fashion, you would find that it is very unlikely that you are going to lose your phone- unless you are the very careless type. Yet, exploiting your fear of the future, the cell phone company may fleece you even further.

This is true for nearly all of our durable goods purchases but it is also true about our big life decisions. It is necessary for all of us to save for the future and insure such things as life and major properties. However, dealing with retirement issues bring us to a very important point. Do we trust the experts who tell us where to put our money?

It turns out that the experts who are paid to predict the future of markets are no better at it compared to random guesses. Financial markets are what the economists call “efficient” markets: it adjusts very quickly to new information. So such things as hot tips or expert opinions on investment opportunities are useless. Harford points out that finding a good stock to invest in is like looking for the shortest queue in the supermarket- as soon as someone spots one, every one moves to it, making the relatively shorter queue no longer short. Similarly, as soon as a stock becomes a good investment opportunity, the market will adjust to the information very quickly- making the opportunity obsolete.

However, experts would like you believe that they can predict the future-but often it is in their interest to be wrong about it as well. In a bull market that is overheating, an expert who predicts a crash would hounded out of the market because he makes investors nervous. So there is a lot of incentives for an expert to keep predicting a rise in the market even though it could be a bubble. In the end, the average investor will lose out but the expert would pocket his cash. Harford strongly cautions against trusting expert opinions- particularly those that are overtly optimistic.

Harford goes on to examine the business of predictions at the horse racing circuit. Here he explores a particular idea about forecasting: the wisdom of the crowds. We see that a large body of people making predictions and putting their money on it often makes better forecasting results than random picks or expert advice. Often, the majority opinion about the future is the right opinion!

I think over all this has been one of the most enjoyable TV shows I have seen. Of course I am biased because the subject matter, economics, is what I am primarily interested in. But Tim Harford, with his easy going style, sense of humor and depth of knowledge in economic analysis has proved himself to be a great ambassador of the discipline to the mass audience. Not to mention the fact that venturing economics into hitherto unexplored fields is precisely what we should be doing and what would bring new popular interest in the subject.

I have a new hero: his name is Tim Harford and he's an economist!

Tim Harford's Trust Me, I'm an Economist Part 3: Work

How do you get ahead at work? How would you be able to cash in on your talent and reach the optimum level fulfillment in your professional life? But most importantly, how would you be able to stay ahead of your slouching colleagues and beat your boss in his own game?

Fear not, the answer is here. Tim Harford has the key to life at he workplace and he will show you the economic analysis that would pave a pathway to your success. In the third episode of Trust Me. I'm an Economist, Harford focuses on the workplace and how to succeed there with the help of economics.

One of the basic principles of the workplace is that everyone wants to be at the top and there are only a finite number of top positions. Workers compete among themselves and are encouraged by the boss to do so because they all want to be in his shoes one day. All this competition performance is good for the company because that gives them maximum yield in employee productivity. But is that an optimum level of welfare for the workers?

How do you demonstrate your worth at the workplace? How would your boss know how valuable you are as an employee? The main problem involving those questions concerns information. Your biss simply does not have enough information about you or your colleagues to make an optimal evaluation about you.

Using the second-hand car market, Harford illustrates the problem that is known as information asymmetry. How do you know that a used car is either a “peach” or a “lemon”? The dealer knows but he won't share that information with you. Because of you lack of information and his having that information, the dealer therefore has an advantage over you. However, because you don't know whether the car is a lemon or not, you may choose to walk away from the deal, leaving the seller with the problem of unsold goods.

It's all down to what economists call “signaling”. Employers suffer from information asymmetry and you hold the information. What you can do to rectify the situation is to signal to the employer your seriousness in achieving things. You can tackle academically challenging subjects like philosophy and mathematics and prove to the employer that you have genuine analytical skills. Or you can coach a team and prove your mettle fro team work. Either way you can demonstrate to an employer that since you have managed to be productive on your own, you can be equally or more productive in the workplace given the right incentives.

Often employers look for inquisitive, confident and articulate employees and they are more than willing to help them acquire skills. What they are interested is not what you learned at school but what you proved at school. This is the best of signaling: showing the employer the proof of your worth.

How would you measure performance in a world of information asymmetry? How would you pay the right person person the right kind of incentive to maximize productivity? What, essentially must be the rewards for performance?

There can be the flip side of the performance pay: the wrong person can get the rewards. Witness the corporate scandals on the early 2000s when Enron executives lied about how well the company was doing. They did so because they were rewarded on the basis of the increase in stock prices- the better the company looked on paper, the better their reward. No wonder they cooked the books!

But ultimately, success in work would always depend on how much you like what you do. Nothing would be a good enough substitute for passion as a recipe for for success. The key is to love what you do.

Tim Harford's Trust Me, I'm an Economist Part 2: Shopping

Yes we have seen how economics can be a useful tool in the quest for nookie. Now let us see how it helps us in our shopping.

Now you would think that a topic like shopping fits in right with our idea of economics. Economics deals with money, right? So exchange of money for goods would be the perfect area to tell us about how economic analysis works. Stuff we get at the store and the money we pay for it, economics in a nutshell.

Or so you would think. But you are in the company of Tim Harford, one of the most celebrated economists in the world and he is hear to show you that economics can be used for practically any aspects of life. Harford asserts that the main purpose of economics is to not to look at the GDP or inflation and what not, but to study behavior, both individual and collective.

In the second episode of Trust Me, I'm an Economist, Harford takes on the idea of how to deal with shopping. Or in other words, how do big business ends up gouging the last bit of cash from your pocket and how you, the average consumer, enable them to do so.

So, this guy is just a glorified shopping consultant, you say. All he's telling me is how spend my money. Huh! I can do a better job than he can, I don't have to pay him to tell me anything!

Yes, but if I may suggest some patience? In dealing with consumer behavior and how big business succeeds in making them pay top dollars for their services, Harford poses a very interesting question: how do you get turkeys to vote for Christmas?

This is what he calls the “self incriminating” aspect of consumer behavior. How does big business gets the maximum amount of cash out of your pocket? The answer is simple: you tell them how by buying their product!

The first thing to do, Harford says, is to establish principles. There is a distinction between price of something and it's value. And the way a large corporation would like to ascertain how much value you place on something so that they can extract maximum price from you is you behavior. You tell them exactly what they want to know.

Just a simple trip to your local yuppie coffee shop demonstrates this principle. You could get a simple cup of coffee for $1.70. But if you choose a hot chocolate with marshmallows and cinnamon sprinkling, that might set you back a good five dollars plus tax. And the coffee shop loves a customer like that, not because they are willing to pay top dollar but because they reveal so much information about their preferences to the seller. They are going to use this information about your behavior to try and maximize their profit out of you. They will also cater to the guy who wants a simple cup of coffee.

But the chocolate drinker with all the frills is a very distinct type to consumer compared to the simple coffee drinker. Being able to charge both of them different prices is one of the strategies of profit maximization. This strategy is called price discrimination or, as Harford calls it price targeting.

A curious aspect of the electronic goods market seems to be the mass market paradox. In order for a product to be more appealing to a wider audience, companies often downgrade their products. This phenomenon is called “crippleware”. For example, Intel took their premium chip and disabled some parts of it to sell at a lower price. The low quality product cost more to produce but sold at a fraction of the original price.

You can buy a Sony mp3 player or an iPod but the heavy users of these products will tell you that the batteries cost the earth. Printers are cheap but the ink cartridges are very expensive, similar to cheap razors and expensive blades. Users to value the product most would pay more to maintain it. This is called quantity discrimination.

Well, looks like odds are stacked against the average consumer. So how to fight back? Be aware of how you are signaling to the seller with your behavior. Make sure that you are aware of what you are getting in exchange is worth the value. And most importantly, it would not hurt to go for the cheaper prices!

But then again, some prices are worth paying.

Tim Harford's Trust Me, I'm an Economist Part 1: Love

Do you want to find love?

Get ahead at work?

Take on and succeed against big business?

Secure your future?

If you have said “yes” to any of the questions above, then what you need is : Economics!

Now, don't give me that look. Stranger things have happened, but turning to economics to solve any problems in life may just be the most rational thing you will ever do.

Tim Harford, the part time agony uncle of the Financial Times and full time economist, would like to show you a new way. With the help of economics, Tim would help you to find love, take on big business, get ahead at work and look into your future, sans a crystal ball- all with the tools of analyses available from economics.

Convinced yet? Hmm, I thought so. No wonder the show is called Trust Me, I'm an Economist.

Well, it may sound gimmicky, but it's all true. Harford is a very well respected economist. He has worked for the World Bank and the International Finance Corp, writes the “Dear Economist” column at the Financial Times, hosts the BBC Radio 4 program More or Less and is the author of such international bestsellers such as The Undercover Economist and The Logic of Life.

And now he is in your TV screen, talking about your everyday decision making viewed from the angle of economic analysis. Would you bite?

Well let's have a look shall we? How would Tim Harford help you find love? Simple. He will train you in a concept called game theory. It is the field of study where strategies and payoffs in competitive atmospheres are the primary focus. Every thing in life can be viewed as a game with the goals as highest payoffs and the strategies as how to get there.

For example, you can play the game of finding love. The goal is to end up with a romantic partner and the strategies involved would be how to achieve such an outcome. Tim takes us to the world of speed dating which is the one place where information is truly random, hence rational predictions are possible. What are your strategies about proving to a potential partner that you are a reliable and trustworthy person and not just playing the field?

Then we go to a couple buying an engagement ring- how much is it worth? How would a couple entering marriage view it: in terms of the commitment that they expect form the other or in terms of the commitment and effort that they bring to the table? How much is marriage worth? Unromantic as it may sound, is it not really like a business merger?

How would a couple, after some time of stable relationship show their commitment? Would the man sell his bachelor pad and move in with the woman?If he does not, then may be he's not entirely committed! If she asks him to sell his flat, would he agree to it just to show how much he is in love with her? Would he come up with a counter offer: let both of us sell our places and move into somewhere bigger and better. If this was a poker game, you would call it raising the stakes.

Do you want high or low quality children? To answer that question, consider this: how much would you be able to afford to spend per child? A perfect illustration is the musical instrument. If you have four of five children, you may be able to buy them cheap instruments like the flute. If you have three, then you may be able to invest in guitars. With two, you can buy violins and cellos. And with only one child, you can invest in a grand piano.

These are just some of the areas of romantic relationships and family dynamics you can explore with economics. With Tim Harford as the host, there is always an interesting angle to the most mundane of human events. There is never a boring moment!

Next time, I shall talk about how Tim can help you turn the table on big business by using the same strategies they use to gouge cash off your pockets.

Trust me I'm an Economist is available on DVD.