IN: Dame Helen Lydia Mirren,  (nee Mironoff; born 26 July 1945) is an English actor. Mirren began her acting career with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1967, and is one of the few performers who have achieved the Triple Crown of Acting. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2007 for her performance as Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen and received the Olivier Award for Best Actress and Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for the same role in The Audience. Mirren's other Academy Award nominations include The Madness of King George (1994), Gosford Park (2001) and The Last Station (2009).

Mirren's first film of the 2000s was Joel Hershman's Greenfingers (2000), a comedy based on the true story about the award-winning prisoners of HMP Leyhill, a minimum-security prison. Mirren portrayed a devoted plantswoman in the film, who coaches a team of prison gardeners, led by Clive Owen, to victory at a prestigious flower show. The project garnered largely lukewarm reviews from critics, who felt that it added "nothing new to this already saturated genre" of British feel-good films. The same year, she began work on the mystery film The Pledge, actor Sean Penn's second directorial effort, in which she played a child psychologist. A critical success, the ensemble film tanked at the box office. Also the year, she filmed the American-Icelandic satirical drama No Such Thing opposite Sarah Polley. Directed by Hal Hartley, Mirren portrayed a soulless television producer in the film, who strives for sensationalistic stories. It was largely panned by critics.  Her biggest critical and commercial success, released in 2001, became Robert Altman's all-star ensemble mystery film Gosford Park. An homage to writer Agatha Christie's whodunit style, the story follows a party of wealthy Britons and an American, and their servants, who gather for a shooting weekend at an English country house, resulting in an unexpected murder. Widely acclaimed by critics, it received multiple awards and nominations, including a second Academy Award nomination and first Screen Actors Guild Award win for Mirren's portrayal of the sternly devoted head servant Mrs. Wilson. Mirren's last film that year was Fred Schepisi's dramedy film Last Orders opposite Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins.  In 2003, Mirren starred in Nigel Cole's comedy Calendar Girls, inspired by the true story of a group of Yorkshire women who produced a nude calendar to raise money for Leukaemia Research under the auspices of the Women's Institutes. Mirren was initially resistant to join the project, at first dismissing it as another middling British picture, but rethought her decision upon learning of the casting of co-star Julie Walters. The film garnered generally positive reactions by film critics, and grossed $96,000,000 worldwide. In addition, the picture earned Satellite, Golden Globe, and European Film Award nominations for Mirren. Her other film that year was the Showtime television film The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone opposite Olivier Martinez, and Anne Bancroft, based on the 1950 novel of the same title by Tennessee Williams.

Did she have any films that didn't do well?

OUT: Greenfingers


IN: Rene Noel Theophile Girard (; French: [ZiRaR]; 25 December 1923 - 4 November 2015) was a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science whose work belongs to the tradition of anthropological philosophy. Girard was the author of nearly thirty books, with his writings spanning many academic domains.

The mimetic theory has also been applied in the study of economics, most notably in La violence de la monnaie (1982) by Michel Aglietta and Andre Orlean. Orlean was also a contributor to the volume Rene Girard in Les cahiers de l'Herne ("Pour une approche girardienne de l'homo oeconomicus"). According to the philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg:  In La violence de la monnaie, Aglietta and Orlean follow Girard in suggesting that the basic relation of exchange can be interpreted as a conflict of 'doubles', each mediating the desire of the Other. Like Lucien Goldmann, they see a connection between Girard's theory of mimetic desire and the Marxian theory of commodity fetishism. In their theory, the market takes the place of the sacred in modern life as the chief institutional mechanism stabilizing the otherwise explosive conflicts of desiring subjects.  In an interview with the Unesco Courier, anthropologist and social theorist Mark Anspach (editor of the Rene Girard issue of Les Cahiers de l'Herne) explains that Aglietta and Orlean (who were very critical of economic rationality) see the classical theory of economics as a myth. According to Anspach, the vicious circle of violence and vengeance generated by mimetic rivalry gives rise to the gift economy, as a means to overcome it and achieve a peaceful reciprocity: "Instead of waiting for your neighbour to come steal your yams, you offer them to him today, and it is up to him to do the same for you tomorrow. Once you have made a gift, he is obliged to make a return gift. Now you have set in motion a positive circularity." Since the gift may be so large as to be humiliating, a second stage of development--"economic rationality"--is required: this liberates the seller and the buyer of any other obligations than to give money. Thus reciprocal violence is eliminated by the sacrifice, obligations of vengeance by the gift, and finally the possibly dangerous gift by "economic rationality." This rationality, however, creates new victims, as globalization is increasingly revealing.

What is Girard's view about economics?

OUT:
Girard's theory of mimetic desire and the Marxian theory of commodity fetishism.