Belgium

The Most Gratuitous Use of the Word "Belgium" in a Serious Screenplay. It's very prestigious."
...
"I see," said Arthur, ... "so what do you get for using the name of a perfectly innocent if slightly dull European country gratuitously in a Serious Screenplay?"

-- Life, The Universe, and Everything. (U S Edition)

Perhaps true dullness isn't apparent at first sight, but I did think Belgium was rather nice. Not earth-shatteringly nice, but nice in a mild sort of way. Almost, one might say, but not quite unlike a good cup of tea.

The Millionaire has No Clothes

"All my life I had the choice between hate and love. I chose love and I am here"
- A R Rahman

Good for him, and congratulations on the Oscars. Ditto for Resul Pookkutty. It's great to see good people doing well.

But, as those who may have talked to the Hatter in the last couple of months know, he's not a fan of Slumdog Millionaire. And no, not because he thinks it showed Mumbai or India in a poor light. Why then is the Hatter raining on the party? Read on.

To start with, the movie left the Hatter rather puzzled. There were just too many things out of place. Dev Patel is a debutant, so one musn't be too harsh on him, but he didn't exactly convince anyone of his acting abilities. He managed to look, talk, and hold himself, shall we say, like a young Brit actor rather than a young Mumbai slumdweller. For an edgy, realistic movie as it claimed to be, Slumdog Millionaire alternated between overstatement and simple implausibility. The discerning viewer would have felt more discomfort at that than any of the alleged shocking scenes in the movie.

Forget the portrayal of Mumbai, the slums aren't exactly pretty. Forget the poverty porn - this is a British movie after all, and they probably need that just like Hollywood movies need gratuitous sex. The movie still feels wierd, and all wrong.

Getting your hands on a copy of Q & A, the book that started it all, is definitely worth it. Reading it answered a lot of the Hatter's questions. It seems like Vikas Swarup wanted to write like Rushdie, but couldn't bring himself to actually do. Starting with the name of the protagonist - Ram Mohammed Thomas - to the situations - the voodoo story for example - to the style, everything is evocative of Magic Realism, specifically the Rushdie variety, except that Swarup cannot seem to bring himself to go the whole hog. Thus, Thomas holds his "sister"'s hand through a convenient hole in the wall which Rushdie wouldn't have needed. Make no mistake, this is a magic realist novel in realist garb.

In the grammar of Magic Realism, a lot of things make sense - the sheer implausibility of the situation, everything that's nasty about Mumbai manifesting in the life of one kid, the truckload of coincidences that are well beyond plausible, and the like.

Danny Boyle seems to have taken out some of the key (wannabe) genre-signalling elements of the story - the protagonist's name for instance, some of the stories, and couple of the more interesting coincidences - the protagonist going on the show to kill the host, for example. I'd guess he probably did that in the (vain) attempt to make the movie fit his edgy style better. The result is similar to trying to force-fit a Haiku into Iambic pentameter. It just doesn't sound right.

Cliched formulism? Check.
Bad acting? Check.
Missing the point of most of the book? Check.
Delivering an off-key result? Check.

Exactly how bad should a movie be to be fawned over so much these days?

Copulas and Circles

The villain has been found! And he's Chinese to boot! Now we can all relax and start hoping that the recession will go away soon. Once the witch is hanged, the town can get on with their lives ...

Or so the economics world thinks. An article in Wired discusses how the financial world used the Gaussian Copula function (now now, no giggles please) to estimate the degree of correlation between two mortgages - so, as we all by now, they could be diced into allegedly uncorrelated tranches and reassembled into AAA rated securities by magic. And from there began the great slide from which the global economy doesn't seem to be recovering any time soon.

Only, it wouldn't matter which function you use, the real problem in the whole story is the assumption that correlation between CDS prices and actual risk was solid.

Ok, I'll say that again in English. Certain securities called CDSs are bought and sold, which are essentially insurance against the risk that borrowers will default on loans. What Li did was use the correlation of prices of two different CDSs as an estimate of the correlation of their underlying risk, with some mathematical jugglery thrown in for good measure (or to confuse the non-quant MBA types, take your pick). Pricing a security based on prices of securities isn't good logic - that, folks is the financial equivalent of the good old logical fallacy of the circular argument. And as good circular arguments do, this one came apart when reality sneezed.

Not convinced? Consider the textbook example of circular argument

I believe in the existence of [insert favourite divine being] because it says so in [insert favourite religious text]

I know [favourite religious text] is true because it is the word of [favourite divine being]


The fallacy there is obvious to most, except to fundies, to whom that sounds perfectly logical.

Apparently, it wasn't obvious to the Wall Street types when they saw it, but in terms of their religion - the Market.