Forbes list of 'Most bang for your buck' actors doesn't really mean anything

By Sarah Sluis

I'm all about cute statistics, but Forbes' list of actors that deliver that most bang for their buck doesn't really say much. It uses the ratio (actor's salary: total gross of movie) to determine what stars deliver the most money for their performance. If only it were that simple. First, the low-hanging fruit: correlation does not imply causation.

Take the topper on that list, Shia LaBeouf. He was in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. A movie directed by Steven Spielberg starring Harrison Ford and one of the most famous franchises out there. Of course his salary was low compared to the movie's total gross! He wasn't the main draw in the movie. He wasn't paid that much because he didn't matter that much.

LaBeouf also starred in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Another news flash: no one cared about LaBeouf, they cared about seeing those toys turned into giant heroes and villains in the most confusing, terrible movie to make over $800 million (I'm still bitter about the two hours I lost because of that movie).

What would show the star power of an actor would be a performance in a star-driven vehicle, like a generic action movie or romantic comedy. You would have to exclude performances in huge franchises, control for the effect of having co-stars that were bigger than them, or a huge director. But it's kind of hard to find such movies.

Anne Hathaway, who placed second on the list, comes close to a "star power" movie with Bride Wars, a so-so flick that she starred in with Kate Hudson. The real reason that Hathway placed second, though, was because of a supporting role in Alice in Wonderland, where she played the White Queen. Actor Johnny Depp was a bigger draw, and her influence is somewhat lost in the 3D-driven spectacle adaptation directed by Tim Burton. She contributed to the movie's success, she didn't cause it.

The third-place finisher, Daniel Radcliffe, is also third mainly because he's cast in the behemoth franchise Harry Potter.

It's only when you go lower down the list that actor performances actually start to come into play. Although Iron Man 2 is a comic book franchise, Robert Downey Jr. helped sell tickets, as did his performance in Sherlock Holmes (another adaptation of a well-known property).

Whether an actor is a "value" depends on a lot more than salary and total gross of the movie. If anything, this list confirms that being part of a franchise or known property gives a greater probability for success than an original film. Yet another reason there are so few Inceptions out there and so many Transformer 2s. Also, a note to actors: if you want to game the system, land some supporting roles in really big films, and your fractional salary will boost your ratio and lead everyone to believe you're a great value.

The duty of a war documentary: 'Restrepo'

By Sarah Sluis

Last week I saw the Sundance Award-winning documentary Restrepo (read FJI's review here). Directors and journalists Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger (author of The Perfect Storm) followed a group of soldiers in the Korengal Valley for a year. In an area known as "The Valley of Death," these soldiers engage in firefights every day, and up to multiple times a day--the kind of combat not seen since Vietnam. The documentary's stated purpose is to document the life of the soldiers, without including the overarching politics

or outside viewpoints. I enjoyed the documentary, with some hesitations. After hearing it lambasted by another blogger, who felt the movie "misleads and distorts in a way that any fair-minded person would and should find infuriating," I feel the need to weigh in.

The documentary opens with the kind of scene that scares you half to death and gives you a huge adrenaline rush. While in an armored Hum-V, the soldiers take fire. They abandon their vehicle, take cover, and return fire. The camera moves Blair Witch-style, looking down at the ground as the camera operator runs for cover. Sonically, it goes from recording huge booms and gunfire so loud it's distorted, to eventually losing all sound, broadcasting a barely perceptible static. It's freaky, and one of those scenes you can't believe is real, because it feels like a movie.

Of course, most of the time the soldiers are hanging out, horsing around, or shooting at targets hundreds of yards away. They also have weekly meetings with local elders, and occasionally wake up residents in the middle of the night to gain information or detain them for questioning. Here, my sentiments toward the soldiers were not as positive. These soldiers are not culturally sensitive. You can understand their

frustration, but at the same time they act incredibly rude. The leader speaks to the elders with exasperation, annoyed that they are still focusing on the errors of his predecessor. The soldiers laugh about "the cow incident," in which they killed (and ate) a villager's cow that had become tangled in their fence, but they also don't seem understand how the cumulative impact of these incidents can engender ill will among the residents. No wonder the townspeople are hiding the Taliban, and the situation seems like it can only get worse.

Even if the documentary itself doesn't address how this behavior can affect what's going on in the bigger picture, its scenes are indelible. This week, General Stanley McChrystal is in the news for his comments in a Rolling Stone article, which just led to his dismissal as top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. When I read the article, I paid attention to the new military strategy referred to as COIN (counterinsurgency theory). "Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps," the article explains, you "[send] huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation's government." I seriously doubt that the soldiers' presence in the Korengal Valley fostered good will among the locals. At its most benign, their actions were a nuisance and prone to misunderstandings. Once the soldiers start taking residents out of their homes in the middle of the night, killing cows and speaking to them in rude and frustrated voices, the relationship between the locals and the soldiers becomes one of toleration. Trust? How can they trust each other? The residents are hiding Taliban and soldiers accidentally kill innocent people trying to find them. By presenting footage without extensive commentary or contextualization, the filmmakers are doing audiences the favor of letting them draw their own conclusion.

Restrepo shows, it does not tell. Will everyone that watches the documentary be worried about how the soldiers treat the locals? No. But with many sources of information about the war in Afghanistan, there is a place for a documentary like Restrepo, and its portrait of Afghanistan is one I will remember for a long time.

Who wants to see a 'Slumdog Millionaire'?

By Sarah Sluis

Slumdog Millionaire releases today in NYC/LA, and Fox Searchlight has done an incredible job activating the
blogosphere with the well-deserved buzz over this film.  "Breathless" seems to be Slumdog's collective adjective, used variably to describe the editing, the story and pacing, and the cinematography.

The premise has a cheesy feel to it that requires reassurance of its quality: a boy on the Indian version of the game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?," suspected of cheating, must tell police investigators stories of his life experiences.  Each story, which cues a flashback, explains why he knew the answer to a particular question.  In the hands of Boyle, each story poses as many questions as it answers, surprising the viewer with the frenetic and poignant turns in the boy's life, as well as the stunning and grotesque images of a developing India.

As a director, Danny Boyle has assembled an impressive oeuvre of "genre" films that mix in conventions from other genres.  He made 28 Days Later, his "horror" film, entirely in digital, while still managing to make the film look better than the average horror film.  Nor was he afraid to give his characters dynamic relationships.  He even changed the film's enemy halfway through the story, making the story not so much about escaping the zombies as escaping the militaristic "refuge" established in the wake of the world's zombie infestation.

Slumdog Millionaire, generically a "coming-of-age drama," adds crime, romance, Bollywood, and comedy to the mix to make it sparkle.  Like many of his other films (Millions, The Beach, Trainspotting), Boyle plays with the idea of money, including a character's disavowal of money even as he constantly highlights its importance.  India, with its extreme poverty, juxtapositions of wealth, and dynamic growth, could not be a better backdrop to explore this subject.  In Slumdog Millionaire, Jamal (Dev Patel) cares little for money, going on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" only to find his lost love.  His older brother, however, understands the importance of money and propels the duo through an impressive array of hustling professions, each set in a hypnotizing intersection of rich and poor: the economy of foreign tourists visiting the Taj Mahal; an adult-led farm of child beggars; teens squatting in an abandoned luxury high-rise; a helicopter touching down in a cardboard slum.

The film should be noted for its use of music.  One long "hustling" montage (on a train) is accompanied by M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes."  Not only is M.I.A., born in former British colony Sri Lanka, a poster child for the political and economic implications of colonialism, the lyrics of the song include references to hustling, trains, and Third World democracy.  Rarely does a song fit so snugly into the narrative, mood, and thematic concern of a film.  If only American audiences hadn't heard the song first in the Pineapple Express trailer.  Besides "Paper Planes," M.I.A. collaborated with the film's composer, A.R. Rahman, on another one of the film's songs, and NYMag reports Fox Searchlight will push the soundtrack for an Oscar.

FJI profiled director Danny Boyle, and you can read Executive Editor Kevin Lally's review of the film here.