Capsule Reviews in the Time of Coronavirus (15)

Another review "dump”...

From Executive Suite, to Margin Call and the Big Short, I’ve always enjoyed boardroom and financial dramas and shenanigans, both fictional and real. There has been an abundance of such shows and series recently, some of which I review below…

Dropout (Hulu)
First up is the Dropout, which follows the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced former CEO of Theranos, who earlier this year was convicted of fraud.

While Holmes, of course, did not initially set out to deceive, her fatal flaw was placing her ambition to be a billionaire and disruptor—like her idols Steve Jobs and Bill Gates—above her ability to deliver an actual working product, which she claimed would be a game-changing medical screening device based on a single drop of blood that she had been advised early on could never work. Instead, enabled by the belief in her own press and an inner circle and board of directors and venture capitalists who were charmed by this (apparently) charismatic telegenic blond, her priority to maintain her superstar aura and keep the company solvent took precedence over the technology.

Over the course of the series, the audience receives a fascinating peek into the world of Silicon Valley startups as we watch her continue to dig herself deeper in a hole as she moves forward prematurely without a functional product, forcing her to engage in a deception regarding the claims of her product, turning the work environment at Theranos paranoid and toxic.

Though it’s likely she would eventually have been found out, her downfall is accelerated by low level young staff who become whistleblowers when they not only realize that the touted technology is not working but that standard rival medical equipment is being used to actually do the work. Complicating matters is that one of the whistle blowers was Tyler Schultz, the grandson of a member of Holmes’ board, former secretary of state George Schultz. Tyler’s claims caused a rift between family members and, if not for the tenaciousness of the whistle blowers and the financial ability of Tyler’s family to fend off the aggressive tactics of Holmes’ lawyers, none of this might have come to light until much later.

Holmes’ awkwardness and psychopathy are well portrayed by Amanda Seyfried, who leads a talented supporting cast including Naveen Andrews as her much older svengali and COO, with whom she secretly had an intimate relationship, as well as Alan Ruck (as the Walgreens executive who championed the company’s partnership with Theranos), Sam Waterston as George Schultz, Stephen Fry, Anne Archer, Laura Metcalf, William H. Macy, Bill Irwin, and others.

WeCrashed (AppleTV+)
This series covers the rise and fall of Adam and Rebekah Neumann and their WeWork startup that at one point was inexplicably valued at $47 billion. This is another story that I was familiar with through articles and documentaries. Starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway, it says a lot about the Neumanns that I found Leto way less annoying than the real-life Neumann.

Neumann is a driven entrepreneur in search of money and an idea. While his brainchild, WeWork, is essentially a communal co-work space rental company, Neumann, a showman with the ability to dazzle and create a cult of personality through new agey double-talk, he somehow convinced investors who should have known better that his rental company was actually a tech company with potential for unlimited growth. Before reality (and long-term leases) sets in—along with a crash in the commercial rental market—Neumann and Rebekah burn through money like crazy to support their lifestyle (private jet and homes) as well as fulfill their goal to “elevate the world’s consciousness” and keep the company growing to unrealistic heights and proportions.

While everything ultimately crashed around them—and we see the devastating impact of the young employees at the company who not only lost their jobs but a lot of money that they leveraged believing that the were going to become millionaires (or billionaires) when the company went public—the Neumann’s themselves of course frustratingly seem to still come out ahead financially with golden parachutes.

Minx (HBOMax)
Set in the early 1970s with the women’s lib movement and sexual revolution underway, Minx is an HBO dramedy series that follows the start up of a Playgirl-like magazine by a shrewd porn magazine publisher named Doug Renetti (Jake Johnson) and a serious-minded and an earnest but uptight feminist and aspiring magazine writer named Joyce Prigger (Ophelia Lovibond). The series is the flip side of Boogie Nights: whereas the movie followed a cast of misfits who find some semblance of family in the adult industry but ultimately find themselves (mostly) trapped in the lives they’ve made for themselves, in Minx the characters find the magazine and Joyce’s arrival an opportunity for self-discovery and empowerment. (The show is similarly set in the San Fernando Valley during the same era).

Like Boogie Nights, the series and its production design perfectly capture the era of the 1970s and the San Fernando Valley setting. It’s got a great ensemble cast, which includes the diverse quirky staff at the magazine operation and the canny addition of Joyce’s sister Shelly, who is a married suburban mom but way more grounded, open-minded and easy-going to the more open sexuality of the era than her over-achieving sister Joyce.

I also give credit to the show for putting its money where its mouth is by being an equal-opportunity exploiter lol. There has been way more male full-frontal penises on display on this show than female nudity. Like all good series, the show gets better, richer and broadens its scope each episode. As someone with some experience in publishing, I found the portrayal of the realities of big magazine publishing from the perspective of business, distribution and censorship (as well as the Mob connections to magazine distribution) fascinating.

Just don’t watch it with the kids around!

Succession (HBOMax)
Yes, I’m a late comer to this series, now in its third season. I tried it once a few years back and couldn’t quite get into it. But this time around I got more caught up in this Shakespearean-level family drama surrounding media giant Logan Roy (the bigger than life Brian Cox) and his children and senior level employees, who all try to position themselves and ingratiate themselves to the senior Roy as the successor to his company. Indeed, the black comedy is a very conscious riff on “King Lear” (as well as partly inspired by Rupert Murdock). I have to admit, however, that I can take the show only in small doses since the characters are pretty horrible people lol.

A Visit to WB's Second Century Building

Re-discovering Hedy Lamarr

I’ve been on a bit of a Hedy Lamarr kick recently. While Lamar (born Hedwig Kiesler) was still vaguely a part of the pop culture landscape when I was growing up, I don’t recall her films popping up much on television when I was a kid or the revival theater circuit when I was in college. As a result, this made her an abstract presence—a remote figure famous for being famous. So aside from her name, I was pretty oblivious to her work as an actress or personal biography. In fact, she probably was more familiar to me as the brand image of a computer program I used for many years called CorelDraw—her likeness was used on the application's package for many years. (A screen shot of the box cover is included in the images at the end of this post—in 1998, a few years before her passing in 2000, she settled a lawsuit with the company over this unlicensed use of her image.)

In 2017, however, she popped onto my radar—and everyone else’s—due to a documentary produced by Susan Sarandon about the actress called Bombshell: Hedy Lamarr (eventually featured in an episode of the PBS series, American Masters). The film covers her fascinating life: born to a well-to-do Viennese Jewish family (the father was from Ukraine) that had converted to Catholicism, she appeared nude as a teen actress in a groundbreaking Czech film called Ecstacy where she also was featured in a scene what is considered the first portrayal on screen of an orgasm (which primarily consisted of close ups of her face in the throes of passion); she then married a Jewish munitions manufacturer, one of the richest men in Austria, who counted Nazi Germany and fascist Italy as clients; then left her husband and an unhappy marriage to flee Europe and eventually booked passage to the U.S. where she was signed on route by Louis B. Mayer at MGM before even landing ashore.

More notably, as was more publicly known only late in her life, Lamarr was also a gifted intellect and inventor who, with music film composer George Antheil, patented the technology that in later years served as the foundation for modern day wifi and GPS. Though this technology was not used until well after the patent had formally expired, before she passed, Lamarr was officially recognized and honored for her groundbreaking scientific work and, after her death, posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

As her personal life reveals, she was a woman who followed her own path, passions and impulses, yet tragically felt trapped (and cursed) by her beauty. For these reasons, despite her brilliant intellect, having been defined and admired her entire life because of her looks, she sadly spent her final years in seclusion, unable to age gracefully in the public eye.

More recently, after enjoying the coffee table book, Glamour and Style: The Beauty of Hedy Lamarr, by Stephen Michael Shearer, about the actress’s life and career (the writer also earlier wrote a full-length biography), I decided to track down and watch whatever of her films I could find. These included: Algiers (1938) with Charles Boyer; Comrade X with Clark Gable (1940); Come Live with Me (1941) with Jimmy Stewart; Tortilla Flat (1942) with John Garfield and Spencer Tracy; H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941) with Robert Young; The Strange Woman (1946) with George Sanders; and Dishonored Lady (1947).

While I can’t quite say that Lamarr’s dazzling looks successfully made up for any acting deficiencies, she nevertheless possessed a glowing screen presence when it was allowed to shine through—in the films I watched, I found her more delightful in lighter fare when she got to be more playful, vulnerable and human—such as Comrade X, Come Live With Me, H.M. Pulham, Esq. and Dishonored Lady. On the whole, however, the studios didn’t seem to know what to do with her and the quality of her films reflect that. Her European allure (and accent) limited her to “exotic” roles, such as a Portuguese immigrant in Tortilla Flat and native girls in White Cargo and Lady of the Tropics, where she sometimes sported dark skin coloring while speaking with her native light Austrian accent. She also had the misfortune to be an also-ran among the European actresses in Hollywood: Comrade X was a knockoff meant to capitalize on Greta Garbo’s Ninotchka, while Algiers was a precursor to Casablanca (in fact, the filmmakers reportedly initially wanted Lamarr for the role that Ingrid Bergman ultimately filled).

As a result, most of Lamarr’s films consist of B-movie and kitschy melodramas that haven’t aged well (this includes the film she produced as a star vehicle for herself, the Strange Woman, considered one of her best performances). And with apologies to actors like Charles Boyer, George Sanders, Spencer Tracy and Dennis O’Keefe (anyone?), it didn’t help that (in my view at least) she wasn’t paired with leading men with the same level of sizzle or provided much onscreen chemistry. Of the films I saw, my favorites were Comrade X with Gable, a conscious knock off of Ninotchka as I mentioned above; Come Live With Me, a somewhat caustic romantic comedy with Jimmy Stewart; and Dishonorable Woman, another melodrama that’s a mashup between a psychological drama (or, more accurately, psychological babble) and a wrongly-accused-of-murder thriller. That all said, I do hope to catch more of her films, particularly Samson and Delilah, her biggest hit, though her career declined after that temporary peak.

Anyway, given the forgettable and outdated nature of her films and roles, I can understand to some degree why Lamarr is not as well remembered as many of her Hollywood contemporaries. Nevertheless, given that she was for a time considered “the most beautiful woman in the world”—an image no doubt ultimately impossible to live up to—and the fact that she also turned out to have an incredibly brilliant mind, I’m glad that the life and legacy of Lamarr has been rediscovered and remembered.

Capsule Reviews in the Time of Coronavirus (14)

This is a “review dump” of sorts—several reviews I wrote of various comics and books I’ve read over the past year but sat on as I found the “right” time to post them. Rather than sit on them longer, I decided to finally post them…

Valerian: The Complete Collection, Volume 1 (Kindle edition)
by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières

Back in January, I noted the passing of French bandes-dessinée cartoonist Jean-Claude Mézières who, along with co-creator and writer Pierre Christin, chronicled the adventures of time traveling space cop Valerian and his comely sidekick, Laureline. (The series, also sometimes known as Valerian and Laureline, was brought to the screen in 2017 by director and Valerian fan Luc Busson) The sci-fi fantasy series ran from 1967 to 2010 and was popular and successful in its native France and internationally. Though not as well known in the U.S., it nevertheless has been often cited as an influence on films like Star Wars, Alien and the Fifth Element, particularly in their production design.

I’ve picked up a few of the sporadic graphic album English-language releases of the series over the years, but recently discovered that a complete English-language collection of the series began in 2017, likely initially tied to the film’s release. I picked up the Kindle edition of Volume I, collecting the first four stories. The first, “Bad Dreams,” is an origin of sorts, with Mézières and Christin still finding their way—Valerian travels to 11th century France in search of a rogue time traveler and is rescued along the way by the smart and resourceful Laureline, a French peasant girl. When she discovers his identity as a space traveler, he takes her with him into the future, where she becomes his partner. (She was not created to be a long term character until they wrote the series and realized what they had stumbled upon). In one of the other stories, “Earth in Flames,” they travel to1986 New York City, in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event that has struck earth and created the future Valerian lives in.

The book also includes several nice text pieces in front, including a comprehensive overview and history of the series and an interview with Christin and Mézières by filmmaker Luc Busson.

Valerian is a fun, breezy epic space opera/adventure series with a strong humanist and progressive bent. The Europeans have a great tradition in the genre and are great draftsmen, blending strong illustration technique with a cartoony style, so the series is a sight to behold. Apparently, the collection was completed in seven volumes.

The Tolkien Years of the Brothers Hildebrandt (Kindle edition)
by Greg Hildebrandt and Tim Hildebrandt 

I became a lifelong Lord of the Rings fan when I first read J.R.R. Tolkien’s the Hobbit, followed by the trilogy. I discovered it at the perfect time in my life, when I was around 13 years old as a junior high school student in the first part of the 1970s, just as it first hit the U.S. mainstream zeitgeist.

The Hildebrandt brothers no doubt helped boost the series with their immensely popular calendars of 1976, ‘77 and ‘78. While I don’t recall that I got the calendars myself (I now wonder why I didn’t request them as Christmas presents!), I remember poring over them in bookstores. Together with Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated film, the Hildebrandt brothers’ interpretation of Middle Earth greatly informed the way I envisioned Middle Earth in my own mind. (I have sketchbooks full of Middle Earth drawings influenced both by the Hildebrandts and Bakshi.)

So it was a thrill to discover this book, the Tolkien Years of the Brothers Hildebrandt, that compiles all the pieces from the calendars and offers detailed production notes and personal reminiscences by Greg Hildebrandt, Jr., who as a child watched his father and uncle paint these pieces, often serving as a model for the paintings. The book includes a generous number of rough sketches and their original photo references as well. I was too young to purchase all the calendars, so having all the pieces in this collection bring back wonderful memories of my early love of the series.

King of Spies by Mark Millar and Matteo Scalera
I randomly stumbled across this graphic novel in my local comic-book store, having not been aware of it previously. I found the art and storyline compelling and I wasn’t disappointed—the graphic novel collects the 4-issue arc originally published by Image.

Millar is a popular and prolific comic-book writer—his credits include work on major characters like the X-Men and Superman, and creator-owned work like Kingsman, which of course has been turned into a popular film franchise. (One of his projects influenced the Marvel film, Captain America: Civil War.)

King of Spies follows the last days of a top British spy named Roland King. Upon learning he has six months to live before succumbing to cancer, he decides it’s time to clean up the mess he’s helped make in the world, turning against the people he served and protected working as a willing pawn in their not always pure political ends and agendas. He also seeks redemption for the havoc and pain he’s caused to his family, particularly his ex-wife and estranged son who’s followed in his footsteps and is among those in the intelligence community now working to stop King. One could easily see Sean Connery in this role (or Jeff Bridges, who stars in a new streaming series called the Old Man—though I haven’t seen it yet, it seems to have a similar vibe).

There is great momentum, violence, raw energy, cheekiness and narrative force in the story, in large part thanks to the bravura art and storytelling of artist Matteo Scalera. The story left me pumped and breathless!

In 2017, Netflix bought Millar’s comics universe—but it was still a surprise to see Netflix’s imprint on the spine of the book. I understand it’s under development at Netflix.