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Why ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ Would Be the Movie of Our Time
The Psychology Behind Justin Bieber Urinating in a Mop Bucket
Remember When the Patriot Act Debate Was All About Library Records?
Could Kobe Bryant Win the Tour de France?
I Am Luscious, and Other Campaign Slogans
Escaped From the Asylum!
Will Rising Mortgage Rates Put an End to the Housing Recovery?

Why ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ Would Be the Movie of Our Time

Posted: 10 Jul 2013 04:45 PM PDT

Just the possibility of a Guillermo del Toro-directed Slaughterhouse-Five sent the interwebs into a buzz, after his announcement to the Daily Telegraph. "The studio will make it when it's my next movie," del Toro said, "but how can I commit to it being my next movie until there's a screenplay? Charlie Kaufman is a very expensive writer!"

Fair point, Guillermo. But beyond financial constraints, the time is ripe for a new Slaughterhouse-Five. In his piece (PDF) "Billy Pilgrim—Even More a Man of Our Times," English professor David Landerwerken argues that in post-September 11th America, the static meekness of protagonist Billy Pilgrim may be even more representative of the nation's mood now than when the novel debuted in 1969.

Of course good things are always happening somewhere, but polls have a way of making you cringe.

A quick refresher ("spoiler alerts" expire 44 years later): Slaughterhouse-Five follows the life of World War II prisoner of war Billy Pilgrim, who is "unstuck" in time, which creates the novel's disrupted narrative. A despondent man, Pilgrim witnesses the horrific bombing of Dresden, returns and suffers from what now would be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder, and claims to a radio audience that, in 1967, he was abducted and taken to the planet Tralfamadore. There, the Tralfamadorians taught him their philosophy: Life is unlinear; when one dies, why mourn? He's alive in a different moment.

To Landerwerken, we are all Billy Pilgrim. Living in an environment of "seemingly endless wars," an inexplicable economy, and disillusion with government prompts Pilgrim-esque defeatism. "America has adopted the Tralfamadorian philosophy that justifies apathy," Landerwerken writes. "We have lost our sense of individual agency and feel powerless and impotent, the 'listless playing things of enormous focus.'" Apathy and an acceptance of helplessness make us seek refuge in distractions, become engrossed in apocalyptic-themed entertainment, and are symptoms of America's increasing suicide epidemic.

While Landerweken takes a depressing outlook on things, it's hard to make a generally compelling counterargument. Of course good things are always happening somewhere, but polls have a way of making you cringe. In August 2011, 46 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll stated that neither side was winning the War on Terror and expressed frustration with the way things were going. Yet another Gallup poll found 64 percent of respondents want their children to avoid a career in politics and that in the 2012 election white votes declined by two million—the first drop in numbers since 1996.

When the original Slaughterhouse-Five film premiered in 1972, the anti-war message was part of a larger national discussion, with Vietnam protests at a violent height. If Slaughterhouse-Five is to be made now, it's entering a very different environment. Describing the mood of a small protest this spring, Wilson Ring of the Associated Press writes:

While the war in Iraq is over for the United States, the war in Afghanistan continues, largely off the public radar as it fades from front pages and the top of television newscasts. In a way similar to how U.S. service members continue to fight overseas, the small groups of protesters still regularly protest, their voices all but lost in the chatter of a country focused on other things.

Film has the ability to serve as a mirror to the times, possibly forcing the audience to acknowledge its own sense of morality through the experiences of a fictional character. Perhaps we will go to the theater, observe Billy Pilgrim, and be shaken from national apathy. Or, perhaps, us Tralfamadorians will watch, eat our popcorn, and go home to digest some more Netflix. So it goes.

The Psychology Behind Justin Bieber Urinating in a Mop Bucket

Posted: 10 Jul 2013 12:52 PM PDT

Nineteen-year-old swag-demon Justin Bieber, who maintains a massive and fiercely loyal Twitter following, is a pop star and recording artist of some repute, considers himself Canadian, was recently caught peeing in a mop bucket. “Caught” is maybe the wrong word, but video has surfaced of an incident earlier this year at a New York City nightclub. “Incident” is also maybe the wrong word because this is a video of one of Justin Bieber’s friends—who call themselves “The Wildboyz”—filming him while he pees in a mop bucket rather than in a traditional urine receptacle.

Outside of the obvious answers—Bieber is 19 and 19-year-olds often urinate in places they shouldn’t; Bieber is Bieber; “That’s the coolest spot to piss,” as the narrator of the video says—why is Justin Bieber peeing in a mop bucket instead of a urinal or a toilet? And what does it all mean?

Some people suffer from pauresis, which is a phobia of or an inability to urinate in the presence of others. Doing so in an unexpected place—like, say, late at night in a mop bucket in a kitchen at a night club, rather than a restroom, which tends to get crowded late at night when patrons have been consuming alcohol for hours—would make sense from a pauresis-sufferer’s standpoint. However, Bieber is peeing in front of multiple people in the video, so this is clearly not an issue. “The victims of ‘shy bladder syndrome’ have a fear of leaving the house and being unable to find a ‘safe’ toilet,” writes Dr. Mark Borigini, a rheumatologist, at Psychology Today. ”They are thought by some to have an anxiety disorder, a type of social phobia, and yet it is rarely discussed by the sufferer.” There is a problem, Borgini continues, with how restrooms in this country are located, which often exacerbates the fears of those with pauresis. That Bieber is peeing in a mop bucket in a kitchen sink may support this claim, but Bieber himself appears not to be afflicted.

After the most recent high-profile case of male urination (the U.S. marines who urinated on Taliban corpses early last year), some psychologists started asking questions that could be applied broadly. Generally: Why pee on something? As Dr. Lynne McCormack, now a psychology professor at the University of Newcastle in Australia, said:

They get caught up in the adrenalin and the group mentality, because when you're in a group individual responsibility decreases—there's a collective conscience that seems to somehow be lessened. If you were to ask each of those men individually have them separate from their group, they would probably be as appalled by their own behavior as the general public, but in a group people get caught up.

Not everyone was peeing in this video, but everything else—group mentality, lowering of the collective conscience, appalling behavior—check, check, check. And while all of what McCormack continues to say is in reference to war zones and men peeing on the corpses of people they’ve killed in battle, it also seems to apply to Bieber and company:

It's common in any society that's broken down. I think where you don't have the constraints of conscience, morality and the infrastructure to deal with behavior that is non-acceptable to the group, you will find this sort of behavior.

After Bieber urinated in the bucket, he sprayed water on a picture of Hillary Clinton’s husband and said: “F**k Bill Clinton.”

Remember When the Patriot Act Debate Was All About Library Records?

Posted: 10 Jul 2013 12:00 PM PDT

In the months following the October 2001 passage of the Patriot Act there was a heated public debate about the very provision of the law that we now know the government is using to vacuum up phone records of American citizens on a massive scale.

“A chilling intrusion” declared one op-ed in the Baltimore Sun. But the consternation didn’t focus on anything like the mass collection of phone records. Instead, the debate centered on something else: library records.

Salon ran a picture of a virtual Uncle Sam gazing at a startled library patron under the headline, “He knows what you’ve been checking out.” In one of many similar stories, the San Francisco Chronicle warned, “FBI checking out Americans’ reading habits.”

The concern stemmed from the Patriot Act’s Section 215, which, in the case of a terrorism investigation, allows the FBI to ask a secret court to order production of “any tangible things” from a third party like a person or business. The law said this could include records, papers, documents, or books.

In a speech before casting the sole dissenting vote against the Patriot Act, Sen. Russ Feingold did zero in on Section 215 as “an enormous expansion of authority.”

Civil liberties groups and librarians’ associations, which have long been fiercely protective of reader privacy, quickly raised fears of the FBI using that authority to snoop on circulation records. The section even became known as the “library provision.”

Yet as the Guardian and others revealed last month, the government has invoked the same provision to collect metadata on phone traffic of the majority of all Americans—a far larger intrusion than anything civil libertarians warned about in their initial response.

“A person might uncharitably think of us as lacking in imagination,” says Lee Tien, a longtime attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

In a speech before casting the sole dissenting vote in the Senate against the Patriot Act, Sen. Russ Feingold did zero in on Section 215 as “an enormous expansion of authority” with “minimal judicial supervision.”

But even Feingold did not conceive of the provision being used for bulk data collection, merely mentioning the possibility of individualized cases—for example, compelling “a library to release circulation records.”

Civil liberties advocates said in interviews there is a simple reason for the disconnect: In the period immediately after the Patriot Act passed, few if any observers believed Section 215 could authorize any kind of ongoing, large-scale collection of phone data.

They argue that only a radical and incorrect interpretation of the law allows the mass surveillance program the NSA has erected on the foundation of Section 215. The ACLU contends in a lawsuit filed last month that Section 215 does not legitimately authorize the metadata program.

The reason libraries became a focal point, Tien says, is that, “People could see that those kinds of records were very seriously connected to First Amendment activity and the librarians were going to war on it.”

Even before the Patriot Act passed, the American Library Association warned members of Congress that the business records provision under consideration would “eviscerate long-standing state laws and place the confidentiality of all library users at risk.”

“The library groups have a very well-informed and active lobby,” says Elizabeth Goiten, who co-directs the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program.

So has the government ever used Section 215 to get library records? We don’t know.

Testifying before Congress in March 2011, a Justice Department official said Section 215 “has never been used against a library to obtain circulation records.”

But as with so much else about the Patriot Act, how often or even whether the government has obtained library records is secret. Section 215 imposes a gag order on people or businesses who are compelled to produce records.

The FBI has also used a separate Patriot Act provision, issuing what is known as a national security letter, to seek library patron records. One such episode prompted a successful court challenge by Connecticut librarians in 2005-06.

The government itself didn’t get around to using Section 215 to vacuum up phone metadata until five years after the Patriot Act passed, in 2006, according to a new Washington Post report. The government had been sweeping up metadata since after 9/11 but apparently was doing so without a court order.

USA Today revealed that warrantless surveillance in 2006. Around the same time, according to the Post, the telecoms asked the NSA to get a court order for the data, believing that it would offer them more protection.

On May 24, 2006, two weeks after the USA Today report, the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court decided to redefine relevant business records under Section 215 “as the entirety of a telephone company’s call database,” according to the Post.

Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, says that she has for years worried about bulk collection of metadata, but believed the government might be justifying it using other provisions in the Patriot Act.

“It was a really novel idea on the part of the government that they could use 215 to get bulk phone records,” she says.

As part of the Patriot Act re-authorization of 2006, Congress changed some of the wording in Section 215. But because the government’s interpretation of the law is still secret, it’s not clear whether the changes made any difference in the court’s ultimate authorization of the metadata program.

This post originally appeared on ProPublica, a Pacific Standard partner site.

Could Kobe Bryant Win the Tour de France?

Posted: 10 Jul 2013 09:04 AM PDT

Kobe Bryant points and clicks and the sports world goes apoplectic. The Laker for Life (so far), known as much for insulting his own teammates as for making shots, got some off-season press for himself this week by loudly unfollowing ex-teammate Dwight Howard on Twitter, after Howard quit Bryant’s team for rival Houston. This apparently passes for drama in basketball now. Remember when NBA divas used to be more funny with their theatrics, and less dire?

Is Kobe smart to keep betting on his famous arrogance over a more Tim Duncan (or Lionel Messi)-esque humility?

Workplace psychology studies say no. About this time last year, organizational psychologist Stanley Silverman of the University of Akron presented a paper on what he called the Workplace Arrogance Scale. Silverman claimed to have concocted a way to calculate how much of an ass a person was being to office colleagues, particularly subordinates. Then Silverman and his co-authors looked at the effects of arrogance on performance.

Performance dropped the more arrogant the boss was. In a release on the paper’s publication, he called arrogance “less a personality trait than a series of behaviors, which can be addressed through coaching if the arrogant boss is willing to change.”

But what about sports? Curiously, sports psychology is fairly thin on research analyzing the influence of a player’s self-regard on his or her odds of reaching a championship. Self confidence, the flip side of arrogance, is a common trait taught in sports psychology, however. And the line between the two, which has been widely studied, still isn’t clear. Certainly lots of people with swelled heads have won gold medals. Start with Kobe: jerk that he seems intent to be, he’s won his share of rings.

This week, however, a counter example popped up: a little-known endurance athlete, Nairo Quintana.

Quintana, a Colombian bicycle racer, is currently in seventh place in this year’s Tour de France, which is underway for the next two weeks. The child of a disabled fruit vendor in the small town of Combita—this story turns Dickensian very fast—Quintana’s cycling career began when his family bought him a bicycle to go to school as a small child. School was 10 miles away. Over an Andean mountain pass.

One day, the diminutive rider (he’s 5’5″ and 126 pounds, according to his Tour de France bio) decided to see if he could keep up with some local racers on his daily ride. He told Cycling News:

They started accelerating and accelerating and they couldn't drop me," he recalls with just a hint of pride in his quietly spoken voice. "So I got home, I told my dad, and he was very pleased. He bought me a racing bike and then we went on to village races.

It’s that “hint of pride in his quietly spoken voice” that has Quintana in the headlines recently. In a sport still recovering from the Lance Armstrong scandal—himself no poster boy for reticence—Europe has fallen in love with Quintana’s everyman demeanor. He’s stealing headlines from the race leaders, and gets applause to rival the veterans each day, when the tour officials present him with his “best young rider” jersey, which he appears to have locked down before the race has even hit its midpoint.

It also helps that he’s blisteringly fast. Just a few years after his discovery on a school commute, he’s spent the last year tearing apart some of the world’s best-known racers on some of the world’s steepest, gnarliest mountain roads.

But it’s his humility that you read about daily here in Europe. To get an idea of this guy’s manner, compared to the usual pro athlete’s bluster, here he is giving a rare interview two weeks ago.

And yet. So he’s a great person. And a terrific story. But, unlike Bryant, Quintana hasn’t won anything major yet, despite his talent. (He’s won many less prestigious races.) After a particularly strong showing early in this year’s Tour, some commentaries suggest Quintana, were he less respectful of his coach’s orders, could be faster than his team captain—the rider the team helps reach the podium. Would more of a Bryant-like chip on his shoulder have put Quintana in the mix for this year’s Tour de France?

It’s an under-studied question, despite the massive interest in sports psychology. Certainly his reticent character, his lack of the swagger Bryant has always put to good competitive use, doesn’t imply a lack of confidence. He’s racing in the Tour de France, one of the world’s most prestigious sporting events.

Also one of its most demanding. Basketball is hotly competitive, and physical, but cycling fast up mountains is more accurately called cruel. To win, Quintana attaches himself to his rival’s wheel and matches his pace. As the road steepens, he slowly, inexorably, increases the pace, until his opponent feels like his legs are made of flaming straw and his lungs seem to have stopped working. Until he’s essentially suffocating. Last week, Quintana did this while leading the 200-rider field in the race up a steep Pyrenean mountain. On the fifth of five climbs, more than 100 miles into the race, in mid-summer, his opponents looking like they were about to pass out from either lack of oxygen or muscle pain, Quintana looked to his team captain, the veteran Alejandro Valverde, and with Valverde’s assent pushed the pedals just fractions of a percentage faster. A dozen world-class athletes surrounding him all seemed to swallow their tongues. A few wobbled slightly, and nearly fell over. Quintana danced a few yards forward, and no one followed. Then he eased a few yards back. Everyone looked relieved. Then he danced back out in front. He was taunting everyone, burning their legs to cinders on Valverde’s behalf. Torture is only slightly too strong a term for it, and that only because the other riders, in theory, could have always just stopped riding. It was like watching Game of Thrones.

Self-confident? Certainly. But arrogant? Unclear.

So we have a question worth study. Does an arrogant team member cost you wins, the way an arrogant boss, per the University of Akron findings, costs you profits? Should coaches teach kids to be more like Kobe, or more like Quintana?

In terms of character, it’s no contest. A game of H.O.R.S.E. with Bryant sounds stressful; a lazy Sunday ride in the park with Quintana sounds inviting.

But if the goal is victory? Quintana isn’t going to win the title he’s competing for this year. Kobe didn’t either, though.

I Am Luscious, and Other Campaign Slogans

Posted: 10 Jul 2013 08:00 AM PDT

I have a new idea to increase civic engagement, and it is all about vegan food.

Some background for the non-hipsters out there. So all three of you, listen up. There is a vegan restaurant with locations, unsurprisingly, in Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, and Berkeley, the birthing centers of true hipster culture. The fun (or perhaps failure, depending on your perspective) of this chain is how they name their dishes: Each is a personal, positive, declarative statement. Instead of rice with lentils, you’ll order the “I Am Humble.” Feel like hummus and pesto? You’ll dine on the “I Am Abundant.”

If you’re a rain-on-your-parade curmudgeon like me, you’ll do your best to avoid ordering the dishes by their given names. Instead of confidently telling my server, “I Am Terrific,” I prefer to spend three minutes describing the dish, which is, as the name fails to indicate, made of kelp noodles. One of my very favorite dining companions suggested that I should “pick my battles,” but the opportunity to avoid announcing, “I Am Liberated” (another kelp noodle dish) is well worth the time I spend boorishly pointing at the menu.

Instead of politicians beating around the bush, maybe they should directly and confidently own their self-promotion and be specific.

As I glanced around the restaurant on one of my recent visits (and yes, despite my aversion to the names of the dishes, I frequent this establishment), I noticed that notwithstanding my Debbie Downer demeanor, the rest of the patrons really did look humble, filled with abundance, terrific, and liberated. This got me thinking: Could this naming technique be an effective tool on political campaigns?

As hipsters and non-hipsters alike know, civic engagement in the United States is low. Few of us—vegans, carnivores, or omnivores—feel particularly invested in our political candidates or elected officials. As a result, far too few of us show up to the polls or mail in ballots. Many of our elected officials, those charged with representing all of their constituents, are elected by a small percentage of those constituents. A representative democracy functions best when our elected officials actually represent us, not just a small portion of us.

So how can we get more people excited about political issues and campaigns? Many political campaigns feel like one long infomercial; politicians tell us why they are “open-hearted,” “gentle,” “warm,” or “fantastic,” just to pick a few dishes from the breakfast options.

Perhaps we should take a cue from the vegan establishment. Instead of politicians beating around the bush, maybe they should directly and confidently own their self-promotion and be specific.

In place of mind-numbing political theme periods (“This week is education week” or “July is jobs month”), we could insist candidates give us three reasons why they do, or do not, satisfy a set of dishes. Let’s make Mondays during a campaign cycle “Magical Mondays” (named after a veggie burger, of course) and require those seeking our votes to tell us, specifically, what is really magical about them. Expect “Transformed Tuesdays” (a taco dish). Politicians should give us three concrete ways in which they will transform the jurisdiction they seek to represent. Skipping to the end of the week, Fridays will be “Fantastic Fridays” (a cashew crepe). Candidates will give us three reasons why their administration will be fantastic.

If these candidates fail to conjure up any magic, explain a transformation, or convince us that at least some things can be fantastic, well, it is time for them to clear the table.

You get the idea. So until this proposal catches on nationwide, as it no doubt will, I wish you Peace (a sesame bagel).

Escaped From the Asylum!

Posted: 10 Jul 2013 06:00 AM PDT

Five years ago, long before he would write his feature film about a two-headed shark, H. Perry Horton was an MFA graduate with a failed literary magazine under his belt and a job sorting film titles at a rare surviving video store in Portland, Oregon, that offers up big-budget Hollywood films alongside obscure cult favorites. As he shelved, Horton started eyeing some similarities in a slew of brand-new releases. These movies had never hit theaters. They arrived with no big-studio marketing push, but they didn't come from any indie cult pedigree, either. They all had pulpy titles. They gave top billing to forgotten actors and aging sex symbols. Many relied on the use of "Mega"—as in Mega Piranha, Mega-Fault, and Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.

After some digging, Horton discovered that the movies were all from the same studio: the Asylum, a Burbank, California-based company that scrapes out a seemingly endless quantity of bottom-of-the-barrel creature features, topless-teen comedies, and "mockbuster" rip-offs. Transfixed, Horton created a special "Asylum" section in the shop and launched a fan blog that documented the films spurting from the studio. Then, in 2011, something magical happened: The Asylum commissioned him to write his own film, an ancient-curse thriller called A Haunting in Salem. Then he wrote 2-Headed Shark Attack. And Shark Week. And 40 Days and Nights. And 100 Degrees Below Zero.

Sharknado. “It’s exactly what you think it is—a tornado full of sharks,” Ward explains. “That movie cannot be bad.”

For a typical film, the Asylum floats a concept to its stable of writers. They blast back a slew of 100-word pitches. If the Asylum chooses Horton's concept, he bangs out a draft in 10 days, then hands it off to a producer; revisions are made, then the Asylum shoots the film, fast.

In 2-Headed Shark Attack, "Carmen Electra is a doctor," Horton tells me with a mix of glee and disdain. The question is: For the love of God, why?

"The short answer is: We don't know," says David Michael Latt, the Asylum's co-founder and head of physical production, who pushes as many as 25 films into production each year. "It's not like we said, 'There aren't enough crappy B-level movies out there, so we must corner that market!' We don't really know the consumer. The consumer is too big and too fractionalized. All we know is we're making a film for Netflix, and they tell us what they want."

IN THE AGE OF Internet streaming and mouse-click piracy, we appear to be living in a world of unlimited choices, all screened directly into our homes on demand. It's just that many of those choices are of the sort churned out by modern B movie producers like the Asylum—high concept, low budget, and mega everything, except good.

When B movies first rose in the wake of the Great Depression, moviegoers had no choice but to take in the crap. Theaters started screening double features to lure people in with "the perception of more value for the money," says Blair Davis, an assistant professor in the Media and Cinema Studies program at DePaul University. But not all features were created equal. Under a regime called block booking, Hollywood studios cut costs by forcing theaters to buy a shoestring-budget B movie attached to a star-studded A-level movie. When the U.S. Supreme Court busted up the monopolistic practice in 1948's United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., independent production houses—like the 1950s-era American International Pictures, where director Roger Corman made his name—set up shop to exclusively churn out low-grade films. Drive-in-movie-theater owners of the post-war era snapped up the cheap fare to pacify captive viewers stuck in their cars. "As long as people were heading to the snack bar," Davis says, "exhibitors didn't care."

Today, the dynamic between low-budget producer and content-hungry distributor has flipped. Netflix doesn't just stream films—it wills them into existence. The composition of contemporary B movies is dictated by middlemen like Netflix and Redbox, international direct-to-DVD distributors, and cable networks like Syfy, all of which pad their offerings with Asylum originals tailored to their needs. If a Japanese DVD company wants a submarine, and Blockbuster needs a monster, the Asylum will make a sailors-meet-sea creature movie, then tweak the concept further to sell to all its potential platforms. The nimble creative process is "cashing in on this shifting moment in film consumption between the demise of the video store and the rise of streaming," says Davis.

At surviving brick-and-mortar stores like H. Perry Horton's, renters gravitate toward the big-studio releases shelved at eye level. But on Netflix, "You click through and see all the titles—new Hollywood releases mixed in with direct-to-video," Davis says, all crammed into a grid of thumbnail posters. Filtering in low-budget films with the high-budget versions "fuels this perception that there's a wealth of new content." And in the endlessly filterable world of Netflix, where your preferences are sorted into hyper-specific genres, a full page of results for horror films with nightmare-vacation plotlines makes you feel like Netflix is tailoring its product just for you. "The bottom line is that it's there, and you saw it," Davis says—even if you didn't actually watch it.

When Latt runs down the list of the Asylum films slated for production in the first half of this year, it sounds like a list of hot-button search terms: zombies, sharks, haunted houses, talking dogs. It's almost as if the Asylum doesn't even have to make the movie—but it does, for "just a little bit less" than what they will collect from the Netflix-Redbox-Syfy group of middlemen who are likely to buy it. It doesn't matter how unwatchable it is.

Asylum [see the SlideDeck]

ONE FRIDAY IN APRIL, I drove out to a preposterous mansion in Sherman Oaks to see how the sausage gets made. "We're producing a feature called Bone Alone," Asylum executive director Courtney Hagen told me when she set me up with the day's call sheet. "A movie with puppies. Oh, I guess it's called Holiday Heist now—thank God."

Last fall, the Asylum pushed out Golden Winter, in which talking puppies save Christmas. This spring, it started production on Holiday Heist, a slight permutation—adult talking dogs save Christmas. "Goofy traps. Silly puffs of flour and hot sauce. Cute dogs. Lots of cute dogs," says the film's 25-year-old line producer, Devin Ward. "Six- to eight-year-olds will love it."

"It's not like we said, 'There aren't enough crappy B-level movies out there, so we must corner that market!' All we know is we're making a film for Netflix, and they tell us what they want."

Ward is responsible for keeping Holiday Heist cheap, which means a skeleton crew, a clipped shooting schedule, and fewer dogs. The 2008 big-studio film Marley & Me employed 22 dog actors to play its titular yellow lab; the Asylum makes do with one. More often than not, that dog is Hooligan, a nine-year-old salt-and-pepper cattle dog who will be playing Holiday Heist's lead character, Bone, with the help of Hooligan Hounds trainers Vickie and Jamie Day. Previously, the Asylum has turned Hooligan into the living dead (in Zombie Apocalypse), morphed his mouth with CGI to hurl verbal threats at a litter of puppies (in Golden Winter), and directed him to crawl under the blankets in a young woman's bed in order to—Vickie Day would rather not go into it.

This time, she's also brought in Torpedo, a blind Boston terrier, to round out the cast. "I'm really proud of what I've accomplished, but it's another talking-dog movie," she says, in a break from teaching Torpedo how to rip apart wrapped presents on command. "They know what they're doing. It's tongue in cheek. The filmmakers are all laughing."

The films themselves tend to play it straight, even when they're patently absurd. "I wish we could be more self-aware when we're making these movies, but it's, like, a rule," says Jeffery Lando, another ultra-low-budget filmmaker, who directs movies for the Syfy network (though not, so far, through the Asylum). Like Horton, Lando fell into the gig after making a bid for critical relevance—he worked as a cinematographer on indies for a decade, but came away demoralized by the emotional and financial fallout of making labors of love that no one ever saw. At Syfy, Lando follows a strict formula for its movies of the week: an eight-act plot structure, laced with kills every seven minutes, plus a plot recap disguised as dialogue an hour into the feature to brief viewers who are just tuning in. "But the main rule is: You don't go for the funny," Lando says. "You're not supposed to make fun of the movie."

The sheen of seriousness is another trick for maximizing the film's reach. In Susan Sontag's 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp,'" she drew an aesthetic line between "naïve and deliberate" camp films. "Pure Camp is always naïve," she wrote. "Camp which knows itself to be Camp ('camping') is usually less satisfying." Taking the naive route allows low-budget films to appeal to both informed genre-movie nerds who get laughs out of feeling superior to the film, and unsuspecting mainstream viewers who are right at the film's level—and believe it or not, those people exist. When Lando jumped on Twitter during the premiere of a new Syfy movie, he was surprised to find that some people out there were actually terrified by a sharktopus. Then there are those viewers who are dumb enough to watch the movie, but smart enough to be offended. Ward describes a typical Asylum critique: "I hope everyone involved in this production dies and their families die."

The important thing is that someone watched it—or, at least, clicked on the movie-poster thumbnail. When it comes to a title like Sharknado—Ward's latest Asylum film—the poster is the movie. "It's exactly what you think it is—a tornado full of sharks," he explains. "That movie cannot be bad." The tagline for Sharknado is simply: "Enough said." Sometimes the poster is actually superior to the film, as one Redbox renter said in an ostensibly negative review of 2-Headed Shark Attack. And it just wouldn't make sense for things to work the other way around. On its blog, the company instructs fans to add its titles to their Netflix queues to gin up the perception of "public demand" for the movie, and they couldn't care less whether that demand translates into actual viewings. "This isn't about trying to get you to watch our movie," they wrote. "This is about gaming the system. This is about taking a stand. Against math."

If the Asylum's films are naive camp, its marketing strategy is all deliberate. "It's a parody of the studio system," Latt says. "We're making fun of the commerce side of this. You made your movie for $200 million? I'll make it for 20 bucks."

Consider the Asylum's line of "mockbusters," designed to ride the coattails of the zillion-dollar publicity pushes for big-studio films. When DreamWorks studios came out with Transformers in 2007, the Asylum raced out Transmorphers. When Columbia Pictures released Battle: Los Angeles in 2011, the Asylum countered with Battle of Los Angeles. When mockbusters trip legal threats from the big studios—and they usually do—the Asylum will fuss with the cover art and change the titles to pacify the lawyers, then thank the studios for throwing more publicity their way.

When the Asylum caught legal heat last year for planning to release a low-budget fantasy DVD called Age of the Hobbits the same week Peter Jackson's three-hour epic hit theaters, it changed the name to Clash of the Empires, then released a statement that said: "We continue to believe that this frivolous lawsuit was filed to divert attention from the adverse publicity and poor reviews received by 'The Hobbit' movie."

Whenever a studio points out that the Asylum's films are too similar to its own, the Asylum is there to remind the studio the similarities actually run a lot deeper than they think. The big studios are also selling viewers the same concept-driven shlock—they're just funneling a lot more money into it. As Horton puts it: "Battleship is a $200-million film based on a board game." And when the big publicity push is over, Battleship will be sitting right next to the Asylum's shoestring-budget American Warships in the Netflix queue. Which movie looks stupid now?

Will Rising Mortgage Rates Put an End to the Housing Recovery?

Posted: 10 Jul 2013 04:00 AM PDT

Last Friday, while most Americans shook off their post-Fourth of July hangovers, the United States economy quietly set a record. Interest rates for mortgages rose at the highest one-day rate in at least 10 years, and perhaps in the recorded history of the mortgage market, according to Mortgage News Daily. If you got a quote for a mortgage rate on Wednesday, by Friday it was roughly 0.375 percent higher. The average rate is now pushing close to five percent, from a low of around 3.25 percent just two months earlier.

The reason for all of this? The Federal Reserve. For the past several months, the Fed has been itching to "taper" their monetary stimulus by pulling back on the purchase of mortgage-backed securities, which they now devour at the rate of $85 billion a month. These purchases keep long-term mortgage rates low, and any halt to the exercise would reverse that trend. In this case, just the threat of a taper has caused all interest rates, but especially mortgage rates, to skyrocket. This mortgage rate chart from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank tells the story:

The Fed has hinted at tapering its stimulus because of what it sees as underlying strength in the U.S. economy; the trigger for Friday's massive rate increase was a better-than-expected jobs report. So the impact of the rate rise depends on your view of the state of the nation.

Paul Krugman believes rising mortgage rates will have a negative effect, and it's hard to disagree. Despite improving housing fundamentals, higher mortgage rates mean more expensive monthly payments, perhaps enough to keep itinerant buyers away. The general rule is that a one percent increase in mortgage rates equals a 10 percent reduction in affordability, so we've seen around a 17 percent reduction in just two months. There is evidence to suggest that a similar rate spike in 1994 had an impact on home sales and prices (others see 1994 as an anomaly). Certainly, the rate shock has slowed a boom in mortgage refinances; if new rates are not much lower than a borrower's current rate, then they are not likely to go through the hassle of redoing their loan. This takes away a modest but legitimate stimulus for the economy; refis lower monthly payments and put more money into homeowners' pockets. And refinances are a major profit center for banks, as they enjoy fees from every new loan; with refi applications down sharply, mortgage lenders are laying off lower-level employees en masse.

Other experts shrug at rising mortgage rates; not surprisingly, this includes leading mortgage lenders like Wells Fargo. They claim that rising home prices bring more homes out from underwater (when they owe more on the mortgage than the house is worth) and allows them to refinance. Goldman Sachs analysts add that mortgages are historically cheap even at five percent, and that housing is still relatively affordable even with the run-up in prices and interest rates. And if rates are rising because the economy is actually improving, buyers who are confident in their economic situation could enter the market, and they may accelerate their decision to get in before rates rise further. Douglas Duncan, the chief economist at Fannie Mae, distilled this viewpoint to its essence by saying, "There's no strong correlation between interest rates and home prices."

However, Bill McBride, the analyst who writes the influential blog Calculated Risk, pointed out a key difference between this era and those that came before it: the rise of investor purchases of single-family homes.

Ending Wall Street speculation in housing before it got bigger could be a positive, but areas like Las Vegas and Phoenix do not need another housing collapse right now.

THIS TREND HAS BEEN in force for well over a year: hedge funds and private equity firms, stocked with billions of dollars from Wall Street, have entered the most distressed markets in the country—places like Phoenix, Atlanta, and Las Vegas—and attempted to scoop up as many discounted properties as possible. The analyst Campbell HousingPulse believes that, in April, 68 percent of all distressed homes nationwide sold to these types of investors, who plan to rent them out for a few years before selling. This strategy allows profits from the rental revenue streams in the near term, and from higher home prices when they eventually sell.

The idea of the same people who created the housing bubble coming back to become your landlord is nerve-wracking enough. But this institutional money may be distorting the entire housing market. Some claim investor purchases reflect the long-term average, and that there's nothing to worry about. But Wall Street investors are focused on very specific geographic markets. And home prices in these areas have surged much more rapidly than in the rest of the country. According to the April 2013 Case-Shiller home price index, prices are up 22 percent year-over-year in Phoenix and Las Vegas and 21 percent in Atlanta, while they're up around just 12 percent nationally. Home prices well outpace income growth in these areas. Meanwhile, no actual purchases by people who intend to live in the homes seem to account for the price gains in Las Vegas, for example; the number of primary residence purchasers is actually down from two years ago. This suggests a run-up in housing prices that is artificial, fueled by speculation from Wall Street investors, setting up the affected regions for yet another crash.

Needless to say, those with a vested interest in this scheme disagree. Blackstone, the hedge fund most deeply involved in rental purchases, with 29,000 homes in 13 metropolitan areas, completely denies any role in creating price spikes, arguing that the fund accounts for merely 0.4 percent of total home sales in the last year. But again, the problem is the proliferation in select markets, so national figures are somewhat irrelevant (in those markets, the percentage of purchases is exponentially higher, perhaps even a majority). Blackstone further believes it performs a valuable service in restoring blighted homes and finding families to occupy them.

But Blackstone doesn't scoop up distressed homes out of good fellowship; they intend to make lots of money. And the meteoric rise in interest rates has played havoc with the strategy. Hedge funds like Blackstone typically pay cash for homes, so mortgage rates aren't the problem. However, they do finance their deals by borrowing capital from large financial institutions like Deutsche Bank. The deals make sense because investors capture a "spread" between the low cost of borrowing from Wall Street and the high rate of return on rental revenue and home price appreciation (some predicted returns of 14 to 27 percent annually).

But suddenly, the cost of borrowing money has jumped at all levels, while at the same time, the proliferation of investors trying to rent out homes has depressed gains in rents. Because investors bought so quickly to stay ahead of competition, they have spent lots of time renovating and finding tenants, rather than collecting rental payments. Meanwhile, home prices have skyrocketed, increasing the initial investment. So what once was a can't-miss deal now includes higher prices for home purchases, steeper costs to borrow the capital to make the purchases, and far lower rents, with increased competition leading to more vacancies. In this perfect storm, the investors can get far better returns elsewhere.

For this reason, investors who once rushed into the single-family rental market have just as quickly begun to rush out. Carrington Holdings, one of the bigger hedge funds in the space, decided to move on in late May. "We just don't see the returns there that are adequate to incentivize us to continue to invest," said CEO Bruce Rose, who also decried the "stupid money" that jumped into the market without a good strategy. Carrington is not alone. Multiple surveys show investor purchases slowing in the spring months, with fewer offers for distressed properties. Investors have tried to dump their properties by creating publicly traded real estate investment trusts (REITs), but they have drawn little interest, with some new REITs halting their initial public offerings.

This brings us to the critical question of how this reduction in investor demand, combined with soaring mortgage rates, will impact the housing market. Certainly, key markets where investor purchases dominated will see large fall-offs in demand, and prices should fall as well, or at least grow much more slowly. And since those markets outpaced national price increases, that could hurt the overall figures. Ending Wall Street speculation in housing before it got bigger could be a positive, but areas like Las Vegas and Phoenix do not need another housing collapse right now.

If you believe investor purchases are trivial, and that housing follows economic performance, then perhaps the market can sail through these challenges and continue to improve. But if you think investors have driven demand, and subsequently price increases, and that traditional homeowners won't replace that shortfall; if you think that some investors will try to dump the properties they've already purchased because they cannot rent them, adding to supply; if you think that reductions in home affordability will push prospective buyers off the fence; if you think that just seeing home prices outpace rents alone indicates the return of a housing bubble, then you may just believe that the modest housing recovery is about to stall.

We will not know the precise outcome for a while, as housing data typically lags a couple of months behind. But the potential for a slowdown in what has been one of the main economic bright spots of the past 18 months ought to concern everyone. Ultimately, we're about to find out just how durable this economy is; watch the housing data this fall for the answer.

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