The Psychopathic Chicken (and Other Lessons of Evolution)
In the fifth chapter of his 2007 book Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives, David Sloan Wilson writes: “It turns out that something very similar to my desert-island thought experiment has been performed on chickens by a poultry scientist named William Muir.” That probably sounds odd. It will likely sound even odder when you find out what the desert-island thought experiment is: a set of three hypothetical situations to explore human morality through the lens of evolution.
Short movies are at once the most ubiquitous and the most neglected films there are, garnering little critical appraisal as objects themselves even as they’re unavoidable in everyday life.
Quarantine won this week’s Box Office Power Rankings, and my first thought was that, with Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores of 61 and 54, respectively, the horror flick would have done even better a few weeks ago. Sure enough, those scores would have secured an additional five points for Quarantine because of weaker competition. That got me thinking about dumping grounds – the conventional wisdom that early in the year and after the summer movie season, Hollywood drops its unwanted product on the market just to be rid of it. I decided to try to quantify the dumping ground.
Does it make sense to get out of the way of a certain blockbuster? Or should studios try to tap into a market being unserved by that which every human is required to see on its opening weekend? There are certainly examples of effective counter-programming. Mamma Mia! found a $28-million opening-weekend audience despite The Dark Knight’s $158-million debut. It has earned more than $143 million in the United States. Yet the numbers suggest that studios were wise to avoid putting any wide releases against Quantum of Solace.
How do we evaluate Watchmen’s box-office performance, given that most of the assessments so far are based on unrealistic expectations that it would do Batman or Spider-Man business? Fear not: I am watching those watching the Watchmen. Even though I haven’t watched Watchmen.
Philip Dickey had a burning question about the pizza place that his band, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, would be playing in January. It was not about the size of the room, or the setup, or the acoustics. “Is it really good pizza?” he asked.
Like many people, I had an immediate negative reaction to the announcement last week of a new Achievement in Popular Film category for the Oscars. But as I thought about it, I grew to like the change and see it as a worthy and noble effort.