Nobody Reviews It Better: Live and Let Die (1973)

Yours truly is glad to be back with you for our survey of 007 films. Today we explore the transition to Roger Moore, which may have not been the low point of the series, but on its way to it.

Roger Moore's first Bond movie is definitely one of the more politically incorrect ones, with seemingly the entire African-American community of Harlem, as well as New Orleans, conspiring against him. As I understand it, this follows in the tradition of Fleming's novel, and I'm glad that the filmmakers had the courage to do this. However, a closer following to the original plot might have been a bit of an improvement. In the novel, the crime boss, Mr. Big, has connections to Soviet intelligence and is smuggling 17th century gold coins from English territories in the Caribbean. In the film, Mr. Big is simply planning to give away two tons of heroin in the U.S. in order to put his competitors out of business, creating a monopoly for himself, and increase the number of addicts. The problems with the latter are two-fold. One is that it gives no justification for MI6 presence in the U.S. Why would British intelligence care about drug trafficking in America? Secondly, as one who studies economics, I am offended that the screenwriters would think that this plan might ever work. It suffers from the fallacy of "predatory pricing" in which one firm will attempt to lower the price of its good in order to force other firms out of the market, and once this occurs will be able to increase prices due to having no competition. However, a firm attempting this strategy will lose money if it is selling at a price under the cost of production. Giving your product away would definitely qualify and it's not as if giving it away is cheap. The reason prohibited drugs are so expensive is because of the risks associated with production and distribution. Dealers will not work for free, so Mr. Big has to have the cash to pay his employees without getting any revenue from their labor. And even if he is able to put his competition out of business (which is not likely to be the case since the monetary revenues are so much higher than the monetary costs in this industry due to prohibition), it doesn't mean that new competitors won't establish themselves after he raises his prices. So not only is it not the case that he will have anything more than a very short-lived monopoly, it is likely that it would be so short that he won't even recoup the costs of giving heroin away in the first place! (And this isn't the only time a Bond villain will attempt to use such a bonehead strategy: Max Zorin tries to do something similar in A View to a Kill).

Ok, so the plot makes no sense, but what about the rest of it? I will say that the characters are much more interesting and colorful than many others in Bond films. Baron Samedi has attained legend status in the Bond canon, partially both for his mystical black magic persona and apparent immortality. Not only does Bond have to deal with him, but the very scary Tee Hee who sports a prosthetic limb with a two-pronged claw at the end. (It's too bad that their boss, Mr. Big, has an idiotic business plan.) Solitaire is not just a Bond girl that happens to be present and female, with few distinguishing characteristics. She is a tarot card reader and presented as somewhat of a quasi-virgin. They all interact with Bond in what some might see to be his most dangerous environment yet: being a "honky" in predominantly black parts of town. So these elements (villains, Bond girl, "exotic" location) are accounted for and satisfactory. How about the new Bond? He seems suave enough and even charming in a certain way. He also has the Bond-ish characteristic of unashamedly enjoying bourgeois luxuries. And yet the Moore-Bond disease rears its ugly head: he is a dirty man (he tricks the quasi-virgin to get her into bed), he is captured but not killed multiple times (one wonders why such sadistic sociopaths would not want to enjoy watching Bond's demise, consequently allowing him to make escape), he doesn't bring the toughness to the character that Sir Connery does (how many fights can you imagine Moore winning?), and he embodies my least favorite thing about Bond: the corny puns. All that being said, this is a fast-paced Bond film, with every scene pushing into the next and no long breaks in the action so that the evil plot can be revealed. Live and Let Die is above the average Moore movie, but not the best of what 007 has to offer.

Movie Review: In Time (2011)

Having a personal interest in the study of economics, I was fascinated by the premise of a world in which time has one left in his/her life could be exchanged. There are so many implications that this would have. In the Austrian school of economics, there is a large emphasis on time, and so I think its methodology would be well suited for analyzing this movie. First, let me list the premises of Timberlake's world: people are biologically engineered to live until their 25th birthday (from which they no longer age physically) and then have a year left (which is displayed on their arms), time can be traded among people through touching (or with a scanner, somewhat like one used for barcodes), time is the primary form of currency, and people are divided into different "time zones" which seemed to be based on their socioeconomic status. The movie begins with Timberlake waking up and not having much more than a day left. He goes about a normal day: goes to work to earn some time and spends his night at the bar. However, there is a man at the bar with more than a century left and is flashing his wealth. A gang comes to steal from him but Timberlake helps him escape. The man reveals to Timberlake that there is actually enough time for everyone but the rich keep it for themselves, gives him most of his time, and then leaves. And so Timberlake begins his quest to break the system that keeps the poor as wage slaves by robbing time banks and running from the time cops.

I was pretty disappointed with what was done with the story when they had such an interesting concept. It ended up just being a simple class-warfare, exploitation movie when it could have been a deep thought experiment in how much different the world would be if people could trade time. And they failed to think it all the way through. For example, if the human race were to survive under these conditions at all, I would expect there to be a majority of the population to be quite young, yet there were very few kids in the movie. Also, I would expect an armed revolution to be more prone to happening since people have very little to lose if they only have a few hours left to live. Austrian economics would lead us to the conclusion that people would have very high time preference (meaning that they are more concerned with present consumption than that of years later), which means that their saving would be lower (but there is a further complication in that their savings would be in years, but we'll disregard that). Without getting too technical, a higher savings rate means that there is more investment, and therefore more economic growth. But since people would have higher time preference, combined with the fact that most people would have less human capital than our world because the average age would be much younger, living standards should be much lower than displayed in the film.

But regardless of all these quibbles, let us just take the movie at face value and overlook the more subtle economic implications. Even then, they leave so many gaping holes in the story that its hard to make sense of it. The biggest one is that they never explain how "time" is created (as there is a vault in the movie containing a device which stores a million years, as well as banks with containers storing all kinds of time). Secondly, they never explain how the rich are able to steal time from the poor (it is just assumed that they do since they have so much more time). It's as if someone tried to write a Marxist allegory that has just as little understanding of economics in its story as in the real world. In our world, wealth has to be produced; it is not as if it all just existed and somehow the elite got more of it while the masses got little. In the movie, wealth just seems to exist. The film also doesn't seem to demonstrate any understanding of the structure of production: the rich just live somewhere else, seemingly not even participating in commerce with the underlings, but the rich exploit them somehow. Whatever it is, it cannot be a criticism of our world since it is too far removed from it.

Perhaps I over-analyzed In Time and this left me unsatisfied. It actually is somewhat entertaining, if only for the thought experiment, and it is useful, if only for exposing economic fallacies. Beyond its concept, don't expect anything groundbreaking. Perhaps if you lower your expectations enough, you won't end up as disappointed as I was.