Film Review: The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley (dir by Alex Gibney)

Posted on March 22, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Oh my God, this was such a creepy documentary!

The Inventor tells the story of the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes, who, at one point, Forbes named the wealthiest self-made female billionaire in America, and who is currently facing criminal charges of defrauding not only her investors but also a countless number of doctors and patients. After dropping out of college, Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos, a Silicon Valley-based company that claimed it had devised a method that would revolutionize how blood was tested and which would lead to people leading longer and healthier lives. (“No one will have to say an early goodbye,” as Elizabeth put it.) It all had to do with a blood-testing device called the Edison, a device that Holmes designed, patented, and made a fortune by licensing. That the Edison didn’t actually do what Holmes claimed that it did put lives at risk and ultimately led to her downfall.

So, what makes The Inventor such a creepy documentary? A lot of it has to do with the fact that Elizabeth Holmes herself comes across as being so creepy. With her endless supply of black turtlenecks and her rather monotonous (not to mention notably deep) voice, she comes across as being a cult leader in the making. When we see archival footage of her being interviewed or of her giving a speech to her worshipful employees, she has the type of demented gleam in her eye that one would normally associate with a particularly enthusiastic Bond villain. When her former employees talk about her, they not only mention her drive and her dedication but they also mention the fact that she rarely blinked. In fact, she so rarely blinked that other people also felt as if they shouldn’t blink in her presence. Theranos was a company full of people with thousand-yard stares.

Despite the fact that, as many people point out, Elizabeth Holmes had no experience in the medical field and that the majority of her lies were easily exposed, she still had little trouble getting wealthy and powerful men to invest in her company. Among those who invested in Theranos and sat on its board of directors: two former secretaries of state, one former and one future secretary of defense, and several prominent businessmen. Though the documentary doesn’t explore this angle as perhaps it should have, it’s interesting to note that the majority of Holmes’s backers and defenders were 1) elderly and 2) male. The one female investor that Holmes tried to bring in easily saw through Holmes’s lies. On the other hand, former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz became enthusiastic backers of Holmes and her “vision.” Meanwhile, attorney David Boies — who was best-known for being Al Gore’s personal attorney and who later was hired to head up Harvey Weinstein’s defense team — is on hand to intimidate any Theranos employees who might be on the verge of turning into a whistleblower. Elizabeth Holmes may currently be an indicted pariah but, before that, she spent many years as a proud member of the American establishment.

In fact, several other members of the Establishment makes cameo appearances in The Inventor. At one point, we see Holmes being interviewed by Bill Clinton. At another point, Joe Biden stops by Theranos and praises the company. We see pictures of Elizabeth Holmes in the Oval Office, visiting with Barack Obama. Holmes is put on the covers of magazines. Numerous publications declare her to be the next Steve Jobs. She’s held up as the future of not just blood testing but also the future of business. It’s only after one reporter has the courage to actually investigate her claims and two employees risk their futures to tell the truth about what they saw at Theranos that Elizabeth Holmes is revealed to be a fabulist and a con artist. Was she ever sincere in her desire to make the world a better place or was that just another part of her carefully constructed persona? The Inventor is full of people still struggling to answer that question for themselves.

The Inventor was directed by Alex Gibney. Gibney previous directed the Going Clear, an expose of Scientology. Watching The Inventor, it’s hard not to make comparisons between Scientology and the cults of Silicon Valley. Watching Elizabeth Holmes give a speech to her employees is like watching that infamous video of Tom Cruise pay homage to L. Ron Hubbard. And just as Scientology takes advantage of those with a need to believe in something bigger than them, Elizabeth Holmes did the same thing. Everyone wanted the promises of Homes, Theranos, and the Edison machine to be true. They wanted it to be true so much that they became blind to the reality that was right in front of them.

The Inventor is a fascinating documentary about power, wealth, fraud, and the prison of belief. It can currently be seen on HBO.

Familiar Faces #10: Harold Sakata, Man of Many Hats!

Posted on March 21, 2019 by gary loggins

cracked rear viewer

Most of you know burly Harold Sakata for his role as the steel-hat-flinging Oddjob in GOLDFINGER , the third movie in the James Bond franchise. But Mr. Sakata did much more than that one iconic part. In fact, you could say that Harold Sakata wore many hats during his colorful career, and not just on the Silver Screen!

He wasn’t always known as Harold “Oddjob” Sakata, his given name being Toshiyuki Sakata. Born in Holualoa, Hawaii in 1920, Harold was raised in a large family – six brothers and four sisters! Believe it of not, as a teen he was a scrawny 113 pounds, until he took up weightlifting at age 18. Harold bulked right up, and after a stint in the Army during WWII, he became a top powerlifter, so good he made the U.S Weightlifting team at the 1948 Summer Olympic Games in London, where he won the…

View original post 803 more words

Film Review: Captain Marvel (dir by Anna Bolden and Ryan Fleck)

Posted on March 21, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Captain Marvel was …. well, it was okay.

I know that’s potentially a controversial opinion. Since the movie was released last week, I’ve seen it described as being the greatest comic book movie ever made. I’ve also seen it described as being, if not the worst film of all time, than certainly the worst chapter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Really, it depends on who you ask and how they voted in 2016. Myself, I would argue that both sides are incorrect. Captain Marvel is neither the greatest nor the worst movie ever made. Instead …. it’s okay. It’s a middle of the road MCU film, one that has more in common with the first Thor, Ant-Man, and The Incredible Hulk than with Black Panther or Doctor Strange. It has its moments but there’s a reason why everyone’s favorite character is a cat who only has about 15 minutes of screen time.

Brie Larson plays Vers, who is an elite warrior for the Kree Empire. The Kree are an alien race. We know they’re aliens because they have blue blood and their planet looks like a more cheerful version of Blade Runner. The Kree are at war with another group of aliens, the Skrulls. The Skrulls are green shape-shifters and, for some reason, they have Australian accents.

Anyways, Vers can’t remember anything about her past but she’s haunted by nightmares that suggest that she might not be a Kree at all. Instead, she might be an Earthling! Vers gets a chance to investigate that possibility when, while escaping the forces of the Skrull general Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), Vers plummets to Earth and ends up crashing into a Blockbuster Video. Working with a youngish Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), Vers sets out to discover the truth about her past.

Ever since this film was first announced, Brie Larson has been the target of a lot of unfair criticism. A lot of it has centered around the fact that Larson rarely smiles in the film but you know what? Brie Larson’s resting bitch face is the most empowering thing about Captain Marvel. Vers is a warrior and she’s on a mission. She has no reason to smile and giggle and jump around like some sort of manic pixie dream girl. When Vers responded to a man telling her to smile by stealing his motorcycle, I wanted to jump up and cheer. I mean, hell yeah! Not only did she refuse to be pushed around but she also got a sweet ride out of it! Seriously, the next guy who tells me that I need to smile more is losing his car.

Actually, regardless of what some people on twitter seem to believe, Vers does smile in the film. She smiles when she’s talking to her best friend, Maria Rambeau (Lashanna Lynch). She smiles when she’s talking to Maria’s daughter, Monica (Akira Akbar). She smiles when there aren’t any men — or Skrulls — around, demanding all of the attention. Both Maria and Vers are smiling because, finally, they can both be themselves. It’s a scene that, like Vers stealing that motorcycle, feels far more honest and empowering than some of the film’s other more obvious and on-the-nose girl power moments. Maria is a rather underused character, which is a shame because the brief scenes between Maria and Vers are some of the best scenes in the film.

That said, I still had mixed feelings about Brie Larson’s overall performance. As good as Larson has been in so many other films, she often comes across as rather wooden and awkward here. Larson delivers almost all of her lines in a rather flat monotone and she’s not helped by some painfully clunky dialogue. Larson’s awkwardness is painfully obvious whenever she shares a scene with more experienced co-stars like Jackson, Mendelsohn, Jude Law, or Annette Bening. Bening practically steals the entire film, to the extent that I would have preferred the film has been about her rather than Vers.

(Again, it’s easy to compare this film to the first Thor. Just as it took the MCU a while to figure out what to do with Thor, one gets the feeling that they’re still not quite sure who Captain Marvel is supposed to be.)

The film’s main weakness is that, when compared to the more recent MCU films. there’s no sense of wonder to Captain Marvel. Compare the blandness of the Kree homeworld to the vivid worlds of Guardians of the Galaxy or Thor: Ragnarok. Ben Mendelsohn brings a little bit of depth to General Talos but, beyond the shape-shifting, there’s not much to the Skrulls, either. When Captain Marvel flies into space, there’s nothing transcendent about the moment. It’s actually kind of boring. Whereas previous MCU films made space feel alive, the universe feels flat in Captain Marvel.

To cite just one example, one of the film’s biggest battle scenes is over the possession of a lunchbox. The villains think that there’s something important in the lunchbox. However, what they don’t know is that Vers has already emptied the lunchbox and is just using it to distract them. For some reason, directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Bolden show Captain Marvel emptying the lunchbox before the big battle. As a result, there’s no stakes to the battle and, from the start, we know that it doesn’t matter who wins. When, after a lengthy fight, the lunchbox is revealed to be empty, Brie Larson mutters a weak one liner that has no impact because there was never any suspense to begin with. This is pretty basic stuff and it’s somewhat shocking that this film manages to screw it up.

Despite those flaws, Captain Marvel is occasionally diverting. Samuel L. Jackson brings flair to even the lamest of lines and Clark Gregg has a welcome cameo as Phil Coulson. Annette Bening plays two different roles and she kicks major ass in both of them. (One of her characters is named Intelligence, which leads to this hilariously awkward exchange of dialogue between Larson and Bening: “Vers.” “Intelligence.”) Despite being buried under a ton of makeup and prosthetics, Ben Mendelsohn does a good job and Jude Law is amusingly arrogant as Vers’s mentor. Hopefully, Lashawn Lynch will get a bigger role in a future MCU film.

And then there’s the cat.

The cat is named Goose and …, well, look, I won’t spoil it. Let’s just say that he’s a very special cat and he steals every scene. In this film, we discover that Nick Fury loves cats, as well he should!

Anyway, Captain Marvel is okay. There’s a few good scenes and there’s a few clunky ones and finally, there’s Goose and that stolen motorcycle. One gets the feeling that the most remembered scenes will probably be the ones that were inserted during the end credits. Captain Marvel will return in Avengers: Endgame and I hope that she doesn’t smile once.

Triple Frontier, Review By Case Wright

Posted on March 20, 2019 by casewright

5c90294e802b2.image

The heist movie or treasure hunt movie is always the same and always pretty fun. It’s not supposed to be Shakespeare; it’s supposed to pull you in and be a thrill ride. This iteration is all about the down and out Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans who decide to seek their fortune the old fashioned way: ripping off a drug kingpin! In true heist genre fashion, everything works out great!

The characters came across as real Veterans to me. After some research, the writer- Mark Boal was embedded with a platoon in Iraq and he also wrote The Hurt Locker. The characters in Triple Frontier were like the men I knew: strong, divorced, and liked to joke. Ben Affleck’s character Tom struck me as especially realistic. He loved his daughter, but there was a distance because he was just not suited for civilian life. She wanted him home, but he always wanted to be away. You could see on her face that she knew the moment his buddies came calling that he was already gone.

Oscar Isaac plays Pope who has a gig doing private security/law enforcement in South America. He is in pursuit of Lorea, a drug boss, who is causing all kinds of problems. Yada Yada Yada. Pope finds the location of Lorea’s hideout which has hundreds of millions of dollars stashed inside, but he needs a team to kill Lorea, Lorea’s men, get the cash, and get out of the country. He turns to his former squad to pull off the heist. They need a little cajoling, but they come around. There isn’t a lot of dialogue after they agree to the heist, which makes sense. They committed and now transitioned to soldier-mode. The heist starts off with success in sight, but it’s not long before everything goes wrong and they are in a fight for their lives.

The film is shot really beautifully and has some high-priced songs for a Netflix program. Everything seemed very real. Even the way the characters carried themselves and flowed through Lorea’s hideout was seamless. They moved the way we are trained to move through rooms. I am always looking for that in action films. Are they not having muzzle-awareness (pointing there weapon accidentally at a friendly)? Are they holding the rifle close to their face? Are they aiming right? The answers to those questions were yes. J.C. Chandor should be really proud of himself for the realism.

What kept pulling me into the story wasn’t the action (which was excellent BTW); it was that these men were like the ones I knew. The team itself was representative of who does our killing for us: salt of the earth…men. I like seeing women in action films and I am already excited about Black Widow, but the infantry in real life is male. They are regular guys who are asked to do terrible terrible things. When those terrible things are done, we cast the men aside. The story concludes a lot like the war itself did with a lot of loss and not a lot to show for it. This film has a political statement between the explosions and it’s worth listening to it.

* I included Mary Pop Poppins by the True Loves in my review. The song embodies the heist genre like no other. Also, they are Seattleites!!!!

RIP 20th Century-Fox (1935-2019)

Posted on March 20, 2019 by gary loggins

cracked rear viewer

The failing Fox Film Corporation merged with Darryl F. Zanuck’s independent 20th Century Pictures in 1935, and quickly joined the ranks of the major studios of the day (MGM, Paramount, Warners, Universal, Columbia). Over the decades, the trumpet blows sounding the logo for 20th Century-Fox became familiar to film fans around the world. Now, the studio has been purchased outright by The Walt Disney Company, and will be just another subsidiary to the House The Mouse Built. In tribute to 20th Century-Fox, Cracked Rear Viewer presents a small but glittering gallery of stars and films from the vault of that magnificent movie making machine, 20th Century-Fox:

20th Century-Fox’s first release was the bizarre drama “Dante’s Inferno” starring Spencer Tracy

Sweet little Shirley Temple was Fox’s biggest star of the 1930’s

Warner Oland as sleuth Charlie Chan was popular with audiences and critics alike (here with Boris Karloff in “Charlie Chan…

View original post 394 more words

Scenes That I Love: The Ending of Eight Men Out

Posted on March 19, 2019 by Dazzling Erin

In just a few more hours, the 2019 MLB regular season will begin when the Mariners’s Ichiro Suzuki tosses out the first pitch of the season. The Mariners and the A’s will be playing a pair of games in Japan, at the Tokyo Dome. In America, it will be around four in the morning when that first pitch is thrown so I’ll probably miss it.

Even if I might not be able to watch the opening pitch, I can still watch my favorite baseball movie, Eight Men Out. Eight Men Out is about the 1919 World Series and how eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of conspiring with gamblers to throw the championship. While everyone agrees that most of the players were guilty, Eight Men Out suggests that both Shoeless Joe Jackson and Buck Weaver were wrongly accused and, unlike the other players, should not have been banned from playing in the major leagues.

The final scene of Eight Men Out takes place several years after the scandal. A group of baseball fans think that they’ve spotted Shoeless Joe playing for a semi-professional team. While they debate whether or not that’s really Shoeless Joe, Jackson’s old teammate, Buck Weaver, tells them that there will never be another player as great as Joe Jackson. John Cusack plays Weaver while D.B. Sweeney plays Jackson.

Finally, it’s time for baseball!

GO RANGERS!

Insomnia File #39: Disclosure (dir by Barry Levinson)

Posted on March 19, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!

On Tuesday, if you were having trouble getting to sleep around one in the morning, you could have turned over to Cinemax and watched the 1994 film, Disclosure.

The majority of Disclosure takes place at DigiCorp, which is some sort of technology company that Bob Garvin (Donald Sutherland) founded because, as the movie explains it, he only has $100 million dollars but still dreams of being a billionaire someday. With a huge merger approaching, Garvin announces that he will be promoting Meredith Johnson (Demi Moore) to run the new CD-ROM division. This shocks a lot of people, as everyone was expecting the promotion to go to Tom Sanders (Michael Douglas). However, Garvin explains that, ever since his daughter died, he’s wanted to promote a woman.

(Presumably, if a male relative had died, Tom would have gotten the promotion. I have to admit that I kept waiting for the film to get back to the subject of Garvin’s dead daughter but, apparently, that was just an odd throw-away line.)

Tom and Meredith have a history. They were once lovers, though Tom is now happily married to Susan (Caroline Goodall) and has a family. Meredith takes one look at a picture of Susan and says that Tom must miss being able to take his lover from behind whenever he felt like it. Tom says, “Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me.” No, actually, he says, “No, no, no, no, no, no…..” It all ends with Tom fleeing Meredith’s office while Meredith, in her bra, chases after him, shouting threats all the way. The only witness to this is a cleaning lady who sadly shakes her head before returning to her dusting.

Tom is so traumatized by the experience that he has a bizarre nightmare in which Donald Sutherland says that he likes his suit and then attempts to lick his face. Tom’s trauma continues when he goes to work the next day and discovers that Meredith has accused him of sexual harassment! Tom responds by suing the company and it’s time for an epic courtroom battle, one that will deal with one of the most important issues of our time….

….except that never happens. Here’s what is weird. For all the talk about abuse of power and all the scenes of a remorseful Tom apologizing to both his wife and his secretary for his past behavior, the whole sexual harassment plot turns out to be a red herring.

Instead, the film turns into this weird techno thriller, one that involves Tom trying to figure out how to make a better CD-ROM. That may have been a big deal back in 1994 but today, you watch the film and you think, “Who cares?” (Even better is a scene where Garvin brags about how his company is on the cutting edge of fax technology.) Once Tom realizes that Meredith only accused him of sexual harassment to keep him from building the perfect CD-ROM, we get a scene of him using a virtual reality headset to search through the companies files. At one point, he spots a bot with Demi Moore’s face destroying files and he shouts out, “She’s in the system!” It’s just strange.

The film’s plot is often incoherent but the cast keeps things amusing. Michael Douglas spends the first half of the movie looking either annoyed or terrified. Things pick up for him in the 2nd half of the movie. Whenever he gets good news from his lawyer, he jumps up in the air and goes, “Yessssssss!” and it’s so dorky that it’s kind of endearing. Meanwhile, Demi Moore doesn’t even try to make Meredith into a credible character, which is actually just the right approach to take to this material. There’s no room for subtlety in a film as melodramatic as this. Finally, Donald Sutherland is his usual avuncular self, smirking at all the right moments and suggesting that he finds the movie to be just as amusing as we do. For all of its plot holes and problematic subtext, Disclosure is an entertainingly stupid film. A lot of the credit for the entertaining part has to go to the cast.

As I said, Disclosure is just strange.. As with most films from the 90s, its sexual politics are all over the place. On the one hand, Tom learns that even inadvertent sexism can make the women who wok with him feel unsafe. On the other hand, the only woman with any hint of a personality is portrayed as being pure evil. In no way, shape, or form is this a movie to be taken seriously. Instead, this is just a weird film that cries out, “1994!”

Previous Insomnia Files:

Spring Breakdown #7: FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (dir by Chris Smith)

Posted on March 17, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

So, last night, I finally watched FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, the Netflix documentary about the infamous Fyre Festial.

As you may remember, the Fyre Festival was supposed to be the greatest party of 2017. Influencers played it up on Instagram. A commercial for it, one that featured the world’s top models on a beautiful island, was pretty much inescapable on Facebook. It was going to be the greatest musical festival of all time, with luxury villas and yachts and private chefs and …. Blink-182? Even before the entire festival was revealed to be a massive fraud, I have to admit that I was kind of like, “All this for Blink-182?”

Anyway, the festival did turn out to be a disaster. A lot of people paid a lot of money to end up on the beach, staying in rain-soaked FEMA tents and eating pre-packaged sandwiches. The bands cancelled so there wasn’t even any music. After the festival was officially canceled, several people found themselves stranded on the island. Those of us who weren’t there followed the drama on twitter. We joked about the Lord of the of Flies. One of my favorite tweets about the whole mess compared it to an episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. “The Gang Puts On A Music Festival.”

At the time, very few people had much sympathy for anyone involved in the Fyre Festival. Not only did the organizers seem to be a group of insufferable douchebags but so did the people who paid thousands for dollars for a FEMA tent, a cheese sandwich, and Blink-182. Having now watched the Netflix documentary …. well, I still don’t have much sympathy for the organizers or the participants.

I do have sympathy for the people who actually lived in the island. They were taken advantage of and most of them received no financial compensation for the work that they put into the festival. While we were all laughing on twitter, one poor restaurant owner lost a fortune feeding all of the people who were stranded in the Bahamas. While we were making jokes, the people who actually did all the work went unpaid.

The documentary starts with festival organizer Billy McFarland and celebrity co-sponsor Ja Rule annoying Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajowski, and Hailey Baldwin on an island that once belonged to drug lord Pablo Escobar and it ends with McFarland heading for federal prison. Billy McFarland emerges as a professional con man who built his success by exploiting people’s desire to be a part of an “exclusive” club. Before Fyre, McFarland ran a credit card company. Even after the disaster of the Fyre Festival, McFarland continued to use the Fyre e-mail list to try to sell VIP access that he couldn’t actually provide. Even when under indictment, McFarland allows himself to be filmed while he brags about “hustling.” He really can’t help himself.

Ultimately, this documentary works best as a portrait of the power of fame. From the start, it’s obvious that the festival is going to be a disaster. Everyone who is interviewed states that, at no point, did they think Fyre would be a success. (One person explains that it takes at least a year to set up a successful music festival. Fyre tried to do it in a matter of weeks.) But, because Billy McFarland paid Kendall Jenner and a bunch of other social media superstars to promote the festival, people who should have known better paid a lot of money for a tent and a stale sandwich. McFarland may not have known how to put on a music festival but he definitely knew how to exploit our celebrity-obsessed culture.

During the documentary, one of the festival’s organizers — Andy — tells a story about how he was prepared to give a customs official oral sex in order to get him to release a delivery of Evian water. Reportedly, due to the success of the documentary and the popularity of that anecdote, Andy will be getting his own reality show. That seems like a fitting coda for the whole thing.

St. Patrick’s Day Treat: POT O’GOLD (Complete 1941 Movie)

Posted on March 17, 2019 by gary loggins

cracked rear viewer

POT O’GOLD Is a fun little comedy-musical starring Jimmy Stewart, who goes to work for his music hating uncle after his music store closes, and gets involved in a feud with a clan of Irish musicians. Jimmy falls in love with the pretty daughter Molly – and since she’s played by Paulette Goddard, who can blame him! Directed by comedy vet George Marshall and featuring Charles Winninger and Horace Heidt’s Orchestra, enjoy POT O’GOLD!:

Happy St. Patrick’s Day from Cracked Rear Viewer!

View original post

A Wee Bit O’Blarney with Cagney & O’Brien: BOY MEETS GIRL (Warner Brothers 1938)

Posted on March 16, 2019 by gary loggins

cracked rear viewer

Tomorrow’s the day when everybody’s Irish, and America celebrates St. Patrick’s Day! The green beer will flow and copious amounts of Jameson will be consumed, the corned beef and cabbage will be piled high, and “Danny Boy” will be sung by drunks in every pub across the land. Come Monday, offices everywhere will be unproductive, as all you amateur Irishmen will be nursing hangovers of Emerald Isle proportions. They say laughter is the best medicine, so my suggestion is to start your workday watching an underrated screwball comedy called BOY MEETS GIRL, starring James Cagney and Pat O’Brien, both members in good standing of “Hollywood’s Irish Mafia”!

Jimmy and Pat play a pair of wacky screenwriters working for Royal Studios on a vehicle for fading cowboy star Dick Foran. Pretentious producer Ralph Bellamy has enough problems without these two jokers, as rumor has it Royal is about to be sold…

View original post 493 more words