Top 2012 Sundance Festival Movies

Ok this may be a little geeky of me, but I wanted to know what were the best movies of the 2012 Sundance festival were since I wasn't able to make it this year and I want to make sure I use my time wisely when I go to SIFF later this year. So I started looking a few top-10 lists that various festival goers had posted and it was pretty obvious that opinions differed widely and not everyone had seen every movie. So rather than pick one person to depend on, I decided to aggregate together the opinions of as many lists I could find. I generally tried to stick to lists of people who appeared to have genuinely gone to the festival and probably made a few mistakes along the way, but here are the results of about 15 different lists:

Votes: Movie:
11 Beasts of Southern Wild
9 The Surrogate
7 Safety Not Guaranteed
6 West of Memphis
5 Room 237
5 Simon Killer
4 The Raid
4 Compliance
4 Queen of Versailles
4 For A Good Time Call
4 Celeste & Jesse Forever
4 Keep the Lights On
3 Sleepwalk with Me
3 Liberal Arts
3 Smashed
3 Arbitrage
3 Red Lights
3 Save The Date
3 VHS
3 Room 237
3 Wish You Were Here
3 Bachlorette
2 Wrong
2 I Am Not A Hipster
2 Shadow Dancer
2 Shut Up and Play the Hits
2 Your Sister’s Sister
2 Black Rock
2 Detropia
2 This Must Be The Place
2 Indie Game the Movie
2 Nobody Walks
2 Red Hook Summer
2 How To Survive A Plague
1 The End of Love
1 The Words
1 Robot and Frank
1 The First Time
1 For Ellen
1 Bones Brigade
1 2 Days in NY
1 Love Free or Die
1 The Atomic States of America
1 The Invisible War
1 Searching for A Sugar Man
1 The House I Live In
1 My Brother the Devil
1 The Imposter
1 Lay The Favorite

Top 20 Movies of 2011

Late to the party as usual, but here are my top 20 movies of 2011. There are so many movies that I haven't seen yet that this is almost a joke, most notably: We Need to Talk about Kevin, Like Crazy, Hannah, The Skin I Live In, The Beginners, Win Win, The Lincoln Lawyer, The Guard, Fast Five, Last Night, Another Earth, Margaret, The Tree of Life, Hugo, Descendants, and I could go on. So obviously this is based on what I did manage to see. Fortunately I did manage to see quite a few good flicks this year, and here is a partial list of my favorites:


20. X-Men First Class

19. Contagion

18. Moneyball

17. Super-8

16. Rise of the Planet of the Apes

15. Melancholia

14. Submarine

13. Crazy Stupid Love

12. Pariah

11. The Artist

10. My Week With Marilyn

9. Another Happy Day

8. Martha Marcy May Marlene

7. 50/50

6. In A Better World

5. Attack the Block

4. Shame

3. Take Shelter

2. Weekend

1. Drive

The Real Jobs Crisis

So I’ve been reading a never ending stream of news articles, analyses, and opinion pieces centered on the jobs crisis in America, but I feel that without fail, none of these articles truly grasp what we are seeing happen to the economy. Most recently, I was reading this opinion piece in the Financial Times by Richard Florida and out of everyone he comes the closest to actually grasping the current crisis. He states:

“America and other advanced nations are now in the early throes of a new jobs transformation, which requires an equally imaginative response. It creates two new distinct categories of jobs. The first includes millions of the best jobs America has ever seen: high-pay, high-skill jobs in professional and creative fields. The second, including such routine service work as care assistants and home health aids, retail sales clerks and food preparers, is less good. Pay for such jobs is roughly half that of manufacturing jobs. The result is as simple as it is tragic: a bifurcation of the job market and an increasingly unequal and polarised society.”

This analysis is spot on and is the real crisis that we are facing, but Florida then proceeds to propose a solution that makes me question if he really gets it. Basically he points to Zappos, REI and Starbucks as examples of companies who have created “career” path for that second cohort of jobs. As if providing the opportunity for a handful of those retail employees to eventually become store managers will solve everything. The fact of the matter is the problem is in the structure of these companies, not the culture, and this solution is like trying to use a band-aid to deal with a heart attack.

To illustrate what the real problem is I will go through the financials of two example companies. Google and Nordstrom. Both companies have been very successful in recent years. Picking Nordstrom as an example of the lower cohort employer is actually being extremely generous, because as primarily a luxury retailer, this company has much greater margins to work with than Wal-Mart and other big-box retailers. I went to BusinessWeek and grabbed 3 key pieces of data for both companies from their 2010 10k. Number of employees, Total Sales/Net Revenue, and Gross Profit. Gross Profit is basically calculated as Sales minus the cost of goods sold. So for Nordstrom if they sell a t-shirt for $90 and the cost for Nordstrom to acquire the shirt was $50 then they’d have a gross profit of $40. This is the money that a company has to apply to the costs of running its business, such as rent, supplies, and most importantly, wages.

Here is snapshot of how this data panned out for Google and Nordstrom in 2010:

Take a look at this for a second. While Google is only 3 times as big as Nordstrom on a sales basis, it is 6 times as big on a gross profit basis. The structure of the company is such that it is able to keep twice as many sales dollars to pay towards its fixed cost structure as Nordstrom. The next big difference is that Nordstrom needs almost 2 times as many employees as Google to run its business. The fact is that the actual difference in terms of employees needed to actually run the business is probably even greater. Google is known to be staffing up to expand into new product categories and brace itself against possible assaults from Facebook, Apple, and other tech heavy weights. Many of the employees Google has brought on board as a part of this strategy are responsible for generating little if any revenue for the company.

So what does this mean? The result is that on a gross profit basis, Google is pulling in $775k per employee compared to Nordstrom pulling in only $66k per employee. This means that if Nordstrom allocated every single one of its gross profit dollars to wages, (ignoring rent, marketing, supplies, and of course Net Income), it could only pay an average salary of $66k across its workforce. Any higher and the company is losing money on an operating basis. Google on the other hand can (and does) pay very generous salaries and still have a substantial amount of money left over for other costs and income.

Overall among retail employers, Nordstrom employees are actually fairly well payed and as a result they are known to have some of the best employees in the retail space. The margin they get from providing luxury goods allows them to pay above market wages and get the best retail employees which of course helps them to ensure a fantastic customer experience. Big discounters like Wal-Mart have lower margins, but leverage their massive scale to try and keep costs of sales down. But the problem is greatest in the small and medium sized business space where many retailers and service providers are operating with tiny margins and extremely un-automated processes. The ability of these businesses to pay high wages simply does not exist and many of these businesses are barely scraping by as is.

So what is the solution? The more I look at this the more I wonder if what we need to do is the exact opposite of the approach many politicians and economists have been taking. Rather than strive to encourage employers to take on yet more employees into marginally productive roles, further degrading the gross profit dollars per employee metrics, perhaps we should do the opposite and try to destroy jobs. And what I mean by trying to destroy jobs, is to attack the sources of unproductively in these low-economy of scale businesses to vastly reduce the workforce needed to generate the same amount of gross profit, this will allow these employers to raise wages (as indeed they will, competing for the best talent) and the lower cost structure will lead to lower prices (another way to raise real wages).

If we reduced Nordstrom’s workforce from 52k to 24k (leaving them still 1/3 as productive as an average Google employee), what happens to the other 28k people who no longer are needed at Nordstrom? Well the theory is that with higher average wages across the board and lower cost structures leading to lower prices, consumption will increase. Further, savings and investment will increase, leading to more new companies, new products, and ultimately new jobs. This process however takes time.

Further the jobs being eliminated across the board are the lowest skill jobs (most easily automated) and the new ones being created (at the leaner Nordstrom as well as at new businesses) are high-productivity jobs that are generally very high-skill requiring substantial education and preparation. We could invest as a society in jobs-retraining programs and send unemployed people back to college, but even these solutions will not work for everyone.

I’m not really sure what to do in the interim. Though it does lead me to wonder if ever higher workforce participation is really the goal we should be striving for. With years of automation in place, the cost of basic goods have never been lower and many people can and do have fulfilling lives on very low incomes. Perhaps, our goal should be the exact opposite. We should be trying to eliminate work as a necessity, to break the lockstep between work and life. Perhaps we should be moving towards a society where work is an option rather than a requirement, where once can have a fulfilling life as an artist or educator, a scientist or raise a family, without having to worry about how they are going to make a living. I'm not really sure how this would work in reality, but it is something to think about.

March Movies

This month is looking to be a great one for new movies! Here are 4 movies opening this month that I can't wait to see:

The Adjustment Bureau - March 4th



Battle: Los Angeles - March 11th



Limitless - March 18th



Sucker Punch - March 25th

Sundance 2011 Recap

Sundance is always a blast and 2011, my third time round, was no exception. With a week of friends and enemies as well as relative strangers all huddled together against the blistering cold plotting movie time tables, bartering tickets, and swapping stories about improbable celebrity sightings there were an endless stream of great memories. One of my favorite parts about the festival is how it pulls together a set of friends who are increasingly geographically dispersed. My house all met at the SLC airport before making the trek out to Park City, with flights arriving from Seattle, Boston, NYC, and LA. For a few days it was like we were all back in Seattle again.

Of course the most important part of the trip was the movies I saw, and this year's viewings clocked in at 11 screenings. This post is mostly for me to remember the films I saw this year, but if you want to hear about some great movies, read on. These reviews are presented in chronological order based on my viewing them at the festival.

1. Here was the first film I saw at Sundance and by far the least appealing. This movie provided a visually stunning portrayal of the Armenian countryside and a somewhat ambling story about two disconnected young adults whose lives briefly cross paths. This movie was an achingly long 120 minutes and could have easily be compacted into half that length. This not only would have not sacrificed the key elements of the film, but probably would have made it far more enjoyable. One I was past the "Ooh pretty!" stage, I spent most of my time in this film watching the clock. (3/10 stars)

2. The second movie I saw was Little Birds, a movie about two 15-year old girls growing up in a desolate stretch of rural California who decide to run away to the big city in LA. The movie then follows their adventures upon arriving in the city and promptly falling under the sway of some less-than-upstanding homeless boys. Both girls respond very differently to the situations they are thrown into and remain relatively believable. The final sequence was fantastic and shocking and in my opinion made the movie. I would say this movie is worth checking out if it makes it to Netflix. (5/10 stars)

3. The next movie that I saw was Another Happy Day and this was by far the highlight of the festival. This move falls into the dysfunctional-family-brought-together-for-a-wedding genre, but was extremely well made with a whole cast of strong believable characters, especially Ellen Barken as Lynn and Ezra Miller as Elliot. To top this off, the director of the movie is only 25 and broke down in tears while talking about his film and his experiences bringing it to Sundance. Another Happy Day won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and I highly recommend checking it out when it comes to town. (10/10 stars)

4. In A Better World was a film that was part of a new feature at Sundance called Spotlight, these films were not entered into the festival for award consideration, but rather were a selection of films that had come out over the past year that the festival coordinators especially liked and wanted to bring more exposure to. As you might expect being one of these films, In A Better World was an extremely well done film. This movie was mostly in Dutch and revolved around two families dealing with how to handle masculinity and violence in modern society. The movies features a fantastic performance by a young boy Christian who becomes convinced that violence was absolutely necessary to establish ones dominance and to protect what is his. This movie has been nominated for an academy award, so definitely check it out. (10/10 stars)

5. Next up was Submarine, a look into the life of a rather existential teenager named Oliver Tate. The movie plays out like a diary looking into the fantasies, fears, and general travails of Oliver as he navigates his way through high school in rural England. In general, the movie held my attention and didn't feel too long, the story was interesting and Oliver was a very likable character so I would say it was largely a success for the festival. (6/10 stars)

6. On The Ice: This movie came up through the Sundance system for developing film makers and started its life as a short several years ago. It was now adapted into a feature length film and I'd say this was it's biggest fault. There wasn't quite enough story for this length and about half way through it started to drag. The first half though was extremely fascinating. The moved revolved around two Inuit high school seniors growing up in a small town in the very far north of Alaska. The look into the culture of these kids, what they have adapted from mainstream American culture and what they retain from their tribe's roots, was very cool. I also realized that I could not imagine ever living in northern Alaska. (4/10 stars)

7. Page One: This was an amazing documentary about life at the New York Times as the company copes with a changing business environment driven by new technologies and fragmentation of both consumers and advertisers across competing mediums. You really get a sense for how the company is in a state of free fall with everything that it built its business model on being undermined, but at the same time a sense of optimism pervades among the staff that the NYTimes will survive this period and even prosper. As someone with a fairly keen interest in the news industry and digital media this documentary was a must and it completely delivered. (8/10 stars)

8. Homework: This was a great little movie about a boy growing up in NYC who simply refuses to do homework. In his opinion life is too short to waste it on such a pointless endeavor. The movie is a typical teenage coming of age story with a girl, and older guy who is a questionably bad influence, and out-of-touch parents and teachers. Ultimately the protagonist, George, learns quite a bit about himself, his goals, and what exactly he is doing here and the journey makes for a very enjoyable experience. (9/10 stars)

9. The Ledge: This feature was all about a young man who is standing on a ledge of a tall building and threatening to jump. The story unfolds as a police officer is brought in to negotiate with the jumper and gradually begins to understand how he got into this predicament. There is also some story around the negotiator himself, which while not completely derivative, I felt largely distracted from the primary story line. Several of my friends complained about the dialog as being unrealistic, but honestly I didn't notice it while watching the movie. All together the film could stand another run through the editing room to really tighten up the story, but it was a very well done festival film. (7/10 stars)

10. Melt With You: This was definitely the craziest movie that I saw at Sundance and completely did not play out like I expected. Featuring Rob Lowe and Jeremy Piven, this movie is about four middle aged college friends, who get together at a remote beach house for a reunion and to escape their less than satisfying lives. The movie gets going with a massive amount of drinking, drugs, and partying and then takes a dramatically different turn that I wasn't expecting. I don't want to give the surprise away, but the movie gets more and more bizarre with each event that unfolds from then on. (5/10 stars)

11. Being Elmo: This was a movie that I tacked on at the last minute with some extra vouchers I had and was a TBA at the time so I had no idea what I was signing up for. To be honest, I don't think I would have seen this movie otherwise, it being a documentary about the man who invented Elmo. However, having seen the movie it was actually very well done. The film follows the life of the now famous and wealthy puppeteer as he grew up a somewhat peculiar African-American youth in rural Baltimore to eventually landing on the crew for Sesame Street under the tutelage of the prolific Jim Hensen. (6/10 stars)

Wow that was quite the task putting all that down. In addition to these movies I really wanted to see Margin Call (finance thriller starring Zachary Quinto), The Son of No One (a police thriller), and Kaboom! (new Gregg Araki film), but wasn't able to get into any of them. Fortunately, all 3 films look set to come out to general release so I will definitely be catching them eventually.

The Great Reset

I just finished reading Richard Florida's latest book "The Great Reset." This book lays out his vision for how the US and global economies are going through a process called the great reset as it shifts from one economic paradigm to another. This kind of reset has happened twice before in the late 1800s, as the economy shifted first from agriculture to one based on steel and railroads, and again during the great depression, shifting to an economy based on mass production and automation.

Today Florida sees the economy shifting to a creative ideas-based economy and thinks this shift underlays many of the great trends we see happening around us including everything from the current recession, to the rise of the great coastal cities, to the hollowing out of the rust belt. In the future Florida envisions a handful of teeming cities anchoring a couple of megaregions as the primary form of development. These cities will be filled with young information workers living in rented housing, not owning a car, and investing in experiences rather than material goods.

It's an exciting vision without a doubt. My guess is that he is missing a few things along the way, because these kinds of resets as Florida makes clear take decades to unfold. All the same he gives some very compelling evidence supporting his position and I expect his vision will turn out more right than wrong.

So what does this mean for Seattle? Fortunately, Florida sees a lot of good things for Seattle. We have a strong economy braced on the back of innovative companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks, and Boeing. We are the hub of the growing Cascadia region, are home to some extremely well educated people, and boast a beautiful natural environment that is the envy of cities everywhere.

However if Seattle wants to remain competitive it will really need to step up its game. Seattle is a small city in a small region. It has an aging automotive infrastructure and almost no mass transit to speak of. The city has to do a better job of attracting and retaining key businesses. Recent announcements that Facebook and Hulu are opening offices locally are great news, but Seattle should be seeking more. I cannot recall the last time a major corporation moved its headquarters to Seattle. We should change this. Education also needs to remain a priority. Seattle boasts a fantastic library system and a top-tier university, we must continue to invest into these assets as well as build up new ones.

Finally and most importantly, Seattle must fully embrace growth. If Seattle wishes to compete nationally, if not globally, it must become a magnet for talent, drawing ambitious and creative people from all over and this means that Seattle must allow for denser growth with taller high rises and more infill into neighborhoods dominated by single family homes.

I think that generally Seattle does a lot right, but there are clearly opportunities for improvement. The local populace could do well to embrace local businesses as allies and seek opportunities to work together to build up the region.

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Starbucks Value Meals

Starbucks announced today the launch of their new value meal program where consumers will be able to purchase a discounted combination of a coffee drink and breakfast food. They are also training their baristas to emphasize the value of Starbuck's drinks including the fact that "90% of Starbucks drinks cost under $4." By refocusing the brand as a "value" product in the consumers mind the chain presumably is hoping to better weather the recession and compete more effectively against McDonalds.

I fear however that the strategy may backfire on the chain. Most consumers consider Starbucks drinks to be a luxury indulgence, something to help sooth an otherwise hectic day. By concocting their own crazy drink, they turn their morning caffeine fix into a statement of their own personality. This brand image has been carefully nurtured by years of carefully coordinated messages through the store, baristas, and general PR.

This new move counters all of that. By offering discounted combos and emphasizing the products value, they risk creating a new brand image of mediocre quality and low prices. Many consumers will begin to shy away from associating themselves so blatantly with the brand and potentially seek out alternatives. Meanwhile, in the value segment, Starbucks will be going up against the McDonalds machine and if anyone can succeed in providing an adequate product at rock bottom prices it will be McDonalds. In the end, Starbucks would lose the high end and fail at the bottom, leaving the chain listless and significantly overbuilt.

Perhaps I am wrong and Starbucks will successful deal with McDonalds while keeping its high end image. It has dealt with every potential competitor so far with no problem and has quite a bit of brand capital to spend. In the meantime, I'll take a number 2 with soy please.