In the mood for some light-hearted socioeconomic probing and debunking? A new HD trailer for the Freakonomics movie has just gone online{
Published in 2005, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything was a surprise international bestseller. It saw New York Times journo Stephen J Dubner team with University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt to apply economic theory to bizarre subjects. They exposed cheating in the world of Sumo wrestling, and the relationship between the Ku Klux Klan and estate agents, to the tune of several million copies sold. Superfreakonomics followed last year.
The film looks to be firmly from the Michael Moore school, and has the unusual distinction of being a portmanteau documentary, with a different team tackling a chapter each. Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden) tackles the social repercussions of naming babies; Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing (Jesus Camp) look at bribing kids to achieve in school; Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight) gets the controversial segment on the effect of legalised abortion on American crime rates; Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) gets the Sumos; and it's all tied together (with animations and interjections by the book's authors) by King of Kong's Seth Gordon.
The KKK / estate agents equation doesn't seem to have made it to the screen, which is a shame. As is the fact that there isn't a UK release date yet. The film has already done the festival rounds, and gets a limited mainstream release in the States in November.