"Freakonomics" (2010)

 
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agate
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 24, 2011 6:29 pm    Post subject: "Freakonomics" (2010) Reply with quote

This movie has had quite a bit of attention, but I was disappointed in it.

It just tries too hard to be clever in its presentation but doesn't have much to say.

It seems slick and trendy coming at us on the screen, but what is it saying?

It says that what a spectator sees in watching sumo wrestling is often fixed. Is this surprising? I always understood that most wrestling matches were fixed.

It says that the name a person is given is sometimes used against him or her--this is based on some research showing that African-Americans tend to give their children unusual names, and these unusual names make the child easily identifiable as African-American.

I know nothing about the research that was done but off the top of my head I can say that quite a few white southerners I've known have had unusual names too.

Yes, people do discriminate against other people based on their names, or their phone voices, or the car they're seen driving. Do we need a movie to point this out though?

My main complaint has to do with the longest segment of the movie. It deals with a project involving paying Chicago Heights 9th-graders $50 a month to raise their grades. Apparently not all 9th-graders--just those who were having trouble keeping their grades at an acceptable level.

The project is presented objectively, without passing judgment in favor of or opposed to the idea. The outcome seems to have been mixed.

But I object to any program that essentially bribes students to learn. To bribe them is to cave in to the idea that our world runs on materialistic principles.

There will be a time when the students who were paid to raise their grades will no longer be paid to excel in their studies. Will they lapse back into their old indifference? I suspect that they will. They will never know the joy of pursuing a question because they're curious and want to broaden their knowledge or of wanting to do well for the sake of knowing they can. They will have learned only to follow the dollar.

To have given this experiment so much attention by devoting a large part of a movie (and best-selling book, evidently) to it is to give it far more than it deserves.
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