I’ve been seeing clips of this for months, but they’re calling this the first “official trailer” about the Brit family that longed for WWE glory in the good’ol US of A.
Florence Pugh plays the girl who comes from a rough (“It’s all fake, isn’t it?”) wrasslin’ family. Lena Headey plays her Mum.
Stephen Merchant wrote and directed it and has a supporting role. Nick Frost is the wrestling patriarch, and The Rock is…himself.
February? Did WWE pick up distribution for “Fighting With My Family?”
Another “cute” hitman comedy, this one about a suicidal lad (Aneurin Barnard), despondent failed writer, all that, who tries and tries to off himself.
And fails at that, too. Well then, nothing for it but to hire Tom Wilkinson, “a professional assassin,” to do the deal.
Christopher Eccleston also stars.
There are a couple of funny lines in this dark trailer for what promises to be a dark scenario with jokey touches — “You’ve just signed your death warrant!” is a winner.
“Dead in a Week (Or Your Money Back)” is supposed to get a limited release Nov. 30.
But will it? I don’t see a US distributor lined up.
Dec. 16, Netflix premieres its recording of a “Springsteen on Broadway” performance — a storyteller, sans band, up close and personal.
Scripted? Of course. But it looks like the best way to get the poet without the bombast.
I watched the “I Am Paul Walker” retrospective documentary when it aired on Paramount Network last summer, and neglected to take notes and review it.
It felt incomplete.
But now the 90 minute version of this brisk film is coming out, with thirty minutes of “new” footage,” so I checked it out again in this longer cut.
It’s still warm and affectionate, a real appreciation of a guy his “Fast/Furious” franchise co-star Tyrese Gibson described as “the nicest dude on human feet…The guy every woman wanted to be with and every dude wanted to be like.”
But even at 90 minutes, “I Am Paul Walker” is seriously lacking in its collection of expert witnesses and in the pursuit of a more complete picture of the handsome blond screen icon who died on Nov. 30, 2013.
Filmmaker Adrian Buitenhuis got unlimited access to Walker’s large, adoring family. Well, most of it.
And he could generously sample a whirlwind decade and a half of TV interviews and lots of home movies of the beautiful Mormon boy who became a child almost-star before growing into the surfer/racer/snowboarder/scuba diver adrenaline junky hunk he became.
But Vin Diesel isn’t here. Nor Jordana Brewster, Walker’s love interest in those “Furious” movies. Gibson is the film’s MVP, because he was genuinely close to Walker, who spoke up for him when the studio (Universal) wanted Gibson’s character written out of “the family” entirely. Nobody else from the film franchise, aside from first “Furious” director Rob Cohen, appears on camera.
Walker’s teenage love Rebecca, the mother of his daughter, is also felt in her absence.
By fixating on the immediate family and upbringing, Buitenhuis gets lots of detail of Walker’s “take it or leave it” attitude to a film career that seemed to come easily, his need to get away and stay “grounded.” But there’s so much more to mine that “I Am Paul Walker” feels like a TV quickie rather than a forensic bio-documentary that took time to make.
When Walker died, stories started popping up — about overhearing a soldier and his fiance not being able to afford an engagement ring at a jewelry store, watching them leave and paying for the ring himself, not seeking attention or “credit,” just doing a generous and very human thing.
I heard that one, and having interviewed Walker a few times, it sounded absolutely authentic. The guy was that down to Earth.
“I Am Paul Walker” has a firefighter friend who recalls a flight Walker paid for and joined, financing a ROWW (Reach Out Worldwide) trip to earthquake-ravaged Haiti to work with firefighters and first responders, again ducking credit and attention for stuff like that.
A water baby who took roles (“Into the Blue”) just for the chance to work in the ocean, he was a big backer of shark preservationist and researcher Michael Domeier, who also appears in the film.
And what his big family tearfully remembers about Walker is, while flattering, also revealing. He was a rough and ready dude who shrugged off the “pretty boy” label, on and off the set. He got into fights, even when he was a child actor, burned through money (his family had to help) and used words like “gnarly” and “bro” like they were his natural language.
Which they were.
His agent Matt Luber may be the most frank witness to testify here, a relationship fraught with fights over what he could and couldn’t talk Walker into doing.
“Superman?” Too cool to wear tights.
Presenter at the Golden Globes? “Can’t make it. Family.”
He wrestled Walker into “Running Scared,” which could have been a career-defining departure for Walker, already feeling trapped by the “Furious” commitments. Director Wayne Kramer remembers telling him, “You’re going to be McQueen in your 40s — get a few wrinkles, a little grit and age.”
Walker died at 40, a passenger in a friend’s high-end Porsche, a “widow-maker” of a sports car, just as it was for James Dean 60 years earlier.
Luber remembers Walker’s final film, the indie Dad-tries-to-save-his-newborn- baby-in-a-hurricane thriller “Hours,” as perhaps his finest and certainly the closest to Walker’s heart.
There are revelations here for his fans, such as his nickname (“The Vagrant”) for being a thrift-store shopping hippy surfer who liked fast cars and guns, for instance.
When he wanted to pay tribute to the military men in his family — grandad was a Pearl Harbor survivor (a diver), Dad earned a Purple Heart in Vietnam — there was nothing that could keep him out of Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers.”
“I’ll do it for free.”
And director Rob Cohen’s pivotal role in Walker’s rise, casting him in “The Skulls” (2000) before laying “The Fast and the Furious” (2001) at his feet, is covered.
But beloved cultural figures like Walker, taken too young, rarely get more than one screen documentary biography. Not everybody’s James Dean, an icon of his era, and even Heath Ledger has only seen one creditable documentary about his life.
That’s why it’s important to not let your one shot turn out incomplete. No doubt Buitenhuis approached the missing faces to try and talk them into making appearances in his film. They may have had reasons to avoid him and this subject.
But they almost certainly weren’t good reasons, and he should have done a better job of making them see that and talking them into lending their voices to this remembrance of the guy who had a hand in giving most of them the biggest breaks and biggest paydays of their careers.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast: Paul Walker, Tyrese Gibson, Rob Cohen, Matt Luber, Walker’s family
Credits: Directed by Adrian Buitenhuis. A Paramount Network release.
Running time: 1:30
Take a nice long drag on your imported or domestic brand cigarette.
Savor that last morsel of chocolate. And try not to make too much noise with the marvelously hand-crafted, shockingly cheap bracelets that grace discount stores and flea markets from Tuscon to Tampa.
They were all brought to you by kids, children as young as four, harvesting the tobacco and getting poisoned by the vile weed and all the herbicides and chemicals it takes to grow it, hands bloodied by sharp metal edges they file down bracelets so your wrist won’t suffer, mining the minerals that make your smart phone so…practical.
With “Invisible Hands,” filmmaker Shraysi Tandon has made a damning expose, and a documentary piece of advocacy journalism. She lays out the problem — 200 million children the world over, including North America, losing part of their childhood, missing out on education, suffering injuries of developmental issues for the work they’re doing. Millions of them are victims of human trafficking. Others are merely trapped in cycles of poverty in the indentured servitude of palm oil harvesting, cocoa picking, cobalt mining or clothing and jewelry manufacturing.
India to Indonesia, China to Ghana, Mexico to New Mexico, underage labor is making Walmart your low price leader, allowing Nestle, Cadbury and every other chocolatier to “keep costs down,” protecting the bottom line of many a multinational corporation; Nike, Apple, Dow and Old Navy among them.
Tandon, who has worked on the American business documentary series “Bloomberg Game Changers,” interviews Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi and watches him and his fellow Indian activists rescue children from sweatshops all over India.
We see these hands-on activists savagely beaten by gangs of paid thugs, threatened with death by the baseball cap wearing “entrepreneurs” who run the child-staffed clothing and jewelry, their hands bloodied by labor with sharp metals and out of date hand-stamping machines, little boys of 8 or 9 weeping when asked about the work because they, too, fear for their lives.
“Even animals can roam freely,” Satyarthi declares. “These children cannot.”
“Their suffering is turned into our shoes, our clothes, our phones,” Harvard’s human trafficking expert Siddharth Kara adds.
And Tandon gets involved. She questions economists, academics and child welfare advocates, turns blunt with those in charge of child safety and anti-child labor enforcement officials and sets up a sting that shows just how cheap a child sold for work can be on the Horn of Africa.
The film shows the results of pressure that have forced companies such as Nike and Apple to at least make a show of acting more responsibly. The mining that drives the world’s cellular revolution is done by the very young in Congo and India, children enslaved and trapped in lives of drudgery and limited future all so that the rest of us can stand in line at the Apple store for the newest incarnation of the iPhone.
Tandon names names — showing montages of chocolatiers, irresponsible retailers like Walmart, which just don’t want to know (layers of companies have been built to insulate Big Brands from the stain of “Made with the Help of Enslaved Child Labor” labeling.
And she shows us the tobacco-stained hands of children wherever it is grown — including the US, which has antiquated child labor laws written in the 1930s with farm labor loopholes exploited not so much by small family farms, but by Big Agra and its client enablers.
If you grew up in the American South, in the “Heart of Tobaccoland,” as I did, you may not see the harm in that sort of work. Then Tandon shows us the chemicals that the leaves shove through the skin at rates far greater than any smoker would experience. You see the deadly chemicals and increasingly relaxed regulations — even in the US — that cause long term damage in children exposed to them at this age.
China’s vocational school “internship” scam (students marched off to do manual labor at the behest of factories that don’t want to pay) is exposed, the vast palm oil plantations of Indonesia are visited, where they don’t buy child-sized safety gear for the chemical application teams, “because that would be admitting that they use child labor.”
Children cannot negotiate for better working conditions or better salaries, cannot quit and have no control over what they’re being forced to do, many of Shraysi’s experts note. That makes them the easiest workforce to exploit.
And until the buying public takes up their cause, with our voices and our shopping choices, this is a cycle of poverty and exploitation that will not change.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast:Kailash Satyarthi, Ben Skinner, Mark Barenberg, Christian Frutiger, Siddharth Kara, Nicholas Kristof
Credits: Directed by Shraysi Tandon, screenplay by Shraysi Tandon and Chad Beck. A First Run Features release.
Running time: 1:14
Make an animated Christmas tale for kids and the world will beat a path to your door.
But for every “Christmas Carol,” every “Arthur Christmas” or “Polar Express,” there are a hundred also-rans. Even starring Mickey Mouse in “Mickey’s Christmas Carol” is no guarantee your movie won’t end up in the bargain bin, condemned to fill a little-watched seasonal queue on Netflix.
“Elliot: The Littlest Reindeer” gives us the crisp, clean lines of CGI animation, dazzling production design enhanced by sweeping, swooping tracking shots through a dazzling digital North Pole, and a voice cast that includes Martin Short, Samantha Bee, Josh Hutcherson and John Cleese.
What it doesn’t have is much of a story, or much that’s funny for that voice cast to say or do. Writer-director Jennifer Westcott word processed another “Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer” variation, without the warmth, wit or a classic children’s song to recommend it.
What she cooked up was a dull, oddly anti-reindeer riff on not letting birth or circumstance keep you from your dreams. “Elliot” has the usual snobby reindeer games business, a reindeer meat subplot and reindeer meat gags built into its “We’ve got to SAVE Christmas” agenda.
“I like reindeer. Good and GAMEY. I mean, good at GAMES!”
And that’s the funny stuff.
There’s a problem on the North Pole. The veteran reindeer immortalized by Clement C. Moore’s famous poem — Dasher, Blitzen, Comet, Cupid etc. — are retiring to the suburbs, defecting to Russia, joining ashrams to “find myself” or quitting to open “Blitzen’s Juice Bar” in the Florida Keys.
Santa has to round up new recruits. And that could be good news to Whittick’s Witty Bitty Farm and failing Petting Zoo in snowy North Dakota.
They have reindeer, a holiday favorite of the local kids, and their fastest and strongest are prime candidates for the Reindeer Games — a survival of the fittest elimination competition at Santa’s Workshop. DJ (voiced by Christopher Jacot) is sure he’s about to meet his destiny.
But the movie isn’t about him. It’s about the pony — “Miniature HORSE!” — Elliot (Josh Hutcherson), who trains and trains with his pal Hazel the goat (Samantha Bee) for that day when he’ll crack the reindeer sleigh-pulling monopoly.
Hazel repeats the bromides of Coach (Darren Frost), who owns the failing farm and trains the reindeer (not Elliot) with “Success trains, failure complains.” “If it’s important, you’ll find a way. If not, you’ll find an excuse.”
Elliot believes “Big dreamers dream BIG,” and won’t let go of that dream, no matter what the Braveheart-painted Shetland pony Clyde (Jeff Dunham) says. “That’s what ye get for tryin’ to be something you’re not,” he growls in a dark Scots burr.
Elliot and Hazel stow away when Coach takes DJ north for the three day competition and fake their way in with phony antlers and an assumed name (Glitzen). Elliot gets his shot.
But Santa’s got a reporter (Morena Baccarin) nosing around and a bit of a coverup underway. No, there won’t be a repeat of “what happened last year. We have nooo problems with the reindeer…Everything is UNDER control.”
The head elf (Martin Short) is trying to keep a lid on things and keep the “jerk” reindeer in line — “Save your whining for the sports psychologist!” But about “last year…” And about those mechanical sleighs being stockpiled.
The sight gags include the Witty Bitty Farm’s annual “running of the goats,” and other attempts at humor involve cheating Russians (sneaking extra “magic cookies” to enable their reindeer to fly long) and elf-expletives.
“Oh, sugar cookie!”
“Oh for the love of Keebler!”
Bee’s goat gets into the magic cookies, and gets caught eating a can.
“Goats eating cans is a VICIOUS stereotype!”
At least she has something to play. Hiring Monty Python’s Cleese and wasting him like this is borderline criminal.
None of it is any funnier than a greased North Pole climbing contest, which is also tossed in here.
The main villain is Ms. Lutzinka (Martin Short again), a vamping Eastern European who covets the Witty Bitty farm — and its livestock. She gets the funniest line, which I’ll repeat as there are no other candidates.
“I like reindeer. Good and GAMEY. I mean, good at GAMES!”
Lump “Littlest Reindeer” in with “The Star” and every other released and forgotten animated half-hearted holiday hit that never was.
It’s pretty enough, with enough incidents and “action” to hold the attention of those too young to get Global Warming and reindeer (and goat, horse and llama) meat dehydration gags. And pretty much charmless to any viewer over six.
MPAA Rating: PG for some suggestive and rude humor
Cast: The voices of Josh Hutcherson, John Cleese, Samantha Bee, Martin Short, Jeff Dunham, Morena Baccarin
Credits: Written and directed by Jennifer Westcott . A Screen Media release.
Running time: 1:29
You know those thrillers where the bad guys talks a lot? Too much? Like, constantly?
Hate those. And that’s what “Blood Brother” is.
That’s Jack Kesy’s character, the psychopathic ex-con Jake, in a nutshell — once a “blood brother” to his fellow teen hoodlum Sonny (Trey Songz), now an ex-con, just freed from prison all set up to live on the take from an armored car robbery he and his mates stumbled into as teens.
He’s got cash. He’s done his time, and really, 15 years for committing his first murder, as a teen? He got off easy.
But Jake is back to take out the guys in his teen gang, a man with “demons” determined that his “blood brother” Sonny go “through hell” just as he has. And while he’s at it, he’s going to talk. And talk. And amble. And saunter. Because this IS New Orleans, after all.
“You’re LOSING me, Jake!”
Yes, you are.
What might have been a lean little crime-spree thriller of the “This time’s it’s PERSONAL” variety is talked and (slowly) walked to death.
I rather liked writer-turned-director John Pogue’s “The Quiet Ones.” That must have been due to Oren Moverman’s script. Or maybe it was the Triumph TR6 that played into the period piece’s plot that stuck with me (used to own one).
In any event, that wasn’t a movie that had much in the line of pace to recommend it, and while Pogue’s writing credits (“U.S. Marshals,” the “Rollerball” remake) moved along, “Blood Brother” does not.
Too many pauses for delivering a pithy observation.
“Thought I had friends I could rely on,” Jakes growls.
“On these streets, all you’ve got is the guy next to you. And if they guy next to you wants to take you straight to Hell, you just ask, ‘When do we leave?'” the hero, Sonny, narrates.
It’s so slow of foot that when Sonny, who has to cover up his involvement in that long-ago heist from his partner (Joy Lofton), he doesn’t ask for minutes or hours head-start. He wants a day, “tomorrow morning.” Because nobody, not even the cops in The Big Easy, feels much in the line of urgency.
Jake gets out of prison, goes home to his racist family and insults Sonny (who has shown up to drive him home) in ways that maybe Sonny ought to see this coming. He’s paid Jake back, he figures.
“Payback’s just getting started!”
The old gang gathers to split the cash. Everything seems hunky dory, despite the fact that Jake was the only one to do hard time. But Sonny lets Jake get in just close enough — to him, his ex-wife (Tanee McCall) and the ex-wife’s sister Darcy (China Anne McClain) — to drop the hammer on him.
Let the killing spree begin. Let Jake steal Sonny’s vintage Buick Skylark (Again with the classic cars?). But let Jake take a break from the throat slashing and shooting to play a game of pickup basketball. Just to impress Darcy, you understand.
“You don’t know me,” she flirts.
“That could change,” he promises, shrugging off the “little mistake” that put him in the joint.
With all this yacking between gritty New Orleans locations (hints of an accent pop out, here and there), the odd solid line emerges.
To Sonny’s partner — “You L, G B or T?”
To Sonny, sorely tested by Jake’s mayhem — “You in Hell yet?”
To Sonny again, when what looks like the final showdown is going down “in the club.”
“You didn’t come up in this butcher shop like a dumb little lamb chop, didya?”
Songz, seen in “Baggage Claim” and “Preacher’s Kid,” is still more of a singer than an actor. Solid presence, but Fetty Wap, who has a cameo as a gang leader, suggests more menace.
Ex-child star McClain fails to get across any sense of the terror that is supposed to hit her character when she realizes letting an ex-con flirt with you has dire consequences.
But Kesy is scary and a bit crazy-eyed, wearing his tats and a grill and carrying himself like a rough customer fresh out of stir.
It’s a pity he has to talk so much.
MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, language throughout, some drug use and sexual content
Cast: Trey Songz, Jack Kesy, China Anne McClain, Chelle Ramos, Tanee McCall, Ron Killings, Fetty Wap
Credits: Directed by John Pogue, script by Michael Finch, Karl Gajdusek Charles Murray. A Lionsgate/WWE release.
Running time: 1:26
The first trailer was sort of a “Hmmm, could it work?”
But the latest one suggests “Why not?” So we’ll go into “Mary Poppins Returns” with that in our hearts. We will. Emily Blunt tries to make us forget Julia Andrews.
Disney has an embargo on reviews that expires some days from now, so Bob’s your Uncle and Mum’s the Word until then.
Note the cute cameo from one of America’s greatest hoofers in this trailer, BTW. ‘e was in the original film, ‘e was. Guvnor.
Dec. 19, in theaters everywhere.
The Exotic East rarely seems more exotic than in the first 30 minutes or so of “People’s Republic of Desire,” a new documentary about online life in China built around the Chinese obsession with live streaming “hostesses” and “hosts.”
It’s wacky. You scratch your head at the training ground, a veritable digital brothel (quite chaste) where aspiring hostesses learn the art. You wonder who on Earth would spend money for “gifts” that impress these young women (and young men), and are also meant to impress their fellow “fans” with how “rich” you are.
Then it all starts to look and sound eerily familiar. The sales pitch, the affected air of superiority, the vocal fry in the girlish voice of Shen Man, a 21 year old “nurse” turned singer (I should put quotes on that, too.) who interacts and entertains from her elaborate home web studio, and pulls in $40,000 a month, seems almost…American.
Throw in a few would-be rappers and an NBA has-been or two, give her a big bottom, and this on-line entrepreneur could be the Chinese Kardashian.
Then there’s Big Li, the chain-smoking screamer/weeper who sings along with the pop songs he plays, hits the fake “applause” or “laughter” button on his keyboard a little too often, who begs and cajoles his fans and “bosses” — well-heeled fans who lavish gifts on their favorites to make reputations for themselves — to buy buy BUY.
He’s Glenn Beck or Alex Jones without the InfoWars politics.
Director Hao Wu — he did “The Road to ‘Fame,'” about Chinese kids staging the musical “Fame” — focuses on these two, a few select fans and big bucks sponsors — over the course of a couple of years and two big popularity contests put on by the social media/game network YY. That’s the platform that all this streaming, gifting and transfer of wealth takes place on.
Hostess coach Dabao instructs her charges — “Keep your fans happy, make yourself look good…keep them engaged. Get gifts.”
And her star pupil, Shen Man, does her proud. She’s supporting her do-nothing dad and stepmother, uses a high-end Neuman microphone for her streaming cast, gets matching pink Maserati and Bentley automobiles (pictures shared, naturally), logs on and instantly 15,000 users join her.
“How big are your breasts?” one wants to know.
“Seeking one-night stand,” another suggests.
We see gawky boys talking about their online ideal and girls calling her their “role model.”
There’s a guy online with her all the time. Her sugar daddy?
“I swear by my breasts, he’s not my boyfriend,” she pleads, in Chinese with English subtitles. “If he is, may they stop growing!”
“People’s Republic of Desire” touches on the stuff that gets by Chinese censors — talking heads on a news show lamenting the end of upward social mobility in China and the rising ennui and despair of the hundreds of millions of working poor.
“Losers,” a certain US politician might call them. “Diaosi,” they call themselves — unattractive, not much to offer, they live vicariously through their favorite hosts or pine for the attention of their lusted-after hostesses.
Big Li is a self-described diaosi who made it big. Every host wants the attention of Tuhao — slang for China’s uncouth monied bourgeois. These fat cats — loan sharks, “privateers” and others of ill-gotten wealth — make names for themselves on YY championing and gifting their favorites. Gauche boors, “Duke” and “King” they call themselves, including the morbidly obese Songge. They throw around their money and get to hang with web celebrities which in turn makes them celebrated.
Hao Wu’s film charts the rise and fall of the hosts and hostesses, zeroing in on that make-or-break 15 day Annual YY Competition in which those hosts compete for attention and votes that translate to money. Best Female Hostess, best male host, best male idol, female idol etc. are named — based solely on money.
Wu saves his visit to the actual YY headquarters, where the REAL money is being made, for the third act. But along the way, both Big Li and Shen Man sees their reputations (such as they are) trashed, take desperate measures to get back their fame and restore their income, and like entrepreneurs everywhere — spend ridiculous amounts of time currying favor and raising promises of capital from their tuhao.
This fascinating deep-dive into Chinese online life captures frank admissions of “I’d sleep with you for money, but I already have money” and retinues back-slapping away the pain of rejection and declining fame.
There’s all this smoking smoking smoking, and young people stressing over nothing and going broke over nonsense.
Just like you see in the United States or anywhere else the web thrives and acquisitive capitalism feeds.
MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, sex talk
Cast: Shen Man, Dabao, Big Li,
Credits: Written and directed by Hao Wu. An Independent Lens release.
Running time: 1:35
Alex Winter‘s “Trust Machine: The Story of Blockchain” is the best 85 minute primer you will ever get on Bitcoin, its many imitators and the potentially world-changing technology that makes cryptocurrencies possible.
As Winter’s legion of expert witnesses explain, this isn’t just about “democratizing” money. It’s about the tech that points toward a decentralized world of personalized power grids, impenetrable personal (online) identity and power quite literally in the hands of the people.
It’s heady stuff, and Winter — Bill of the “Bill & Ted” movies in an earlier life — is the perfect explainer and surrogate for the audience. The director of “Deep Web,” “The Panama Papers” and “Downloaded” is emerging as a top tier documentary storyteller, an Alex Gibney for the cloud computing age — seeking out good communicators to interview, asking the right questions off camera and figuring out which fuzzy concepts need graphics to help break down the facts into something the layperson can understand.
His technique is to throw a LOT of voices and faces at the viewer, carving off complex ideas into edible bits. That’s harder on those reviewing his films than those simply watching and learning from them.
There’s British hacker, activist and self-described “Internet busybody” Lauri Love, an “on the spectrum” thinker who warns about the ways the web is being “used to control…to manipulate,” as “a tool of accumulation of power.”
It’s all the data mining and abuse social media companies and hydra-headed entities like Google employ to keep individuals in their thrall.
And here comes Blockchain, the data management/”transaction tracking” technology willed to life by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto as a response to the global financial meltdown of 2008.
Want to avoid the interconnected currency-exchanges manipulated by market “gamblers” who bring the world’s economy to near ruin, decade after decade? Take the power out of “too big to fail” institutions like banks and market manipulators like Goldman Sachs. Put it in the hands of every single person with money.
Venture capitalists like Tim Draper, cryptocurrency mavens such as Mark Jeffrey, journalists like Laura Shin of Forbes, Cal Tech quantum physicist Spiros Michalakis and musicians like Imogen Heap and Gramatik all extol the virtues of Blockchain, not just as a means of moving money around, but as a method by which individuals, from Kansas City to Kenya, Iceland to India, can take greater control of their lives, their identities and their future.
Puerto Rico’s power grid is wiped out by Hurricane Irma? Decentralize the antiquated “grid” with personal solar and wind power generation, linked by Blockchain, so that not every piece of the chain is not knocked out at once.
The business model for making a living as a musician is broken? Blockchain can connect musicians to fans more profitably than Napster, more efficiently than Spotify and give the artist control over what they create.
Winter’s film, narrated by Rosario Dawson, briskly skips through early Internet history and likens bitcoin to those early days of the world wide web. As Winter serves up a parade of Big Bankers (Jamie Dimon of JP Chase) and business TV talking heads (Jim Cramer, et al), ridiculing bitcoin and its tidal wave of crypto-knockoffs with the phrases “Ponzi Scheme” and endless comparisons to “Tulipmania” in 17th century Holland, he shows us a timeline.
Yes, there have been bubbles — several. Yes, there are con artists out there looking for ways to get their digital paws on your stash. Ordinary people from all corners of the world are stacking computers and linking them to “mine” the currency (better explained in the movie than I could hope to venture — basically, “improving the speed of verifying transactions” on the web with computing power, and being rewarded for it).
But Blockchain, the core technology, “the flux capacitor of bitcoin,” which is “not a thing, but a process,” is sound and revolutionary and could and should impact everything from water and energy to money and music.
Winter’s cast of interviewees are a blend of bitcoin evangelists and Blockchain explainers and theorists, with the many naysayers lumped mostly into montages, clip after clip of dismissal and derision from those who either aren’t grasping the totality of it or have a vested interest in maintaining the current system.
But when banking is explained as “just ‘cloud storage for money,'” when several theorists get into how Blockchain solved “The Byzantine Generals Problem,” when the technology’s seemingly foolproof autonomy and cryptographic impenetrability is summed up as “Your trust is in the laws of math, the building blocks of the universe,” and Blockhain is labeled “a bureaucrat that’s incorruptible,” you start to get it.
As venture capitalists like Tim Draper are worth watching and hearing out as they anoint it as “the next big thing” (five years ago) and have yet to be proven wrong, maybe the days of listening to the CNBC shouters, the Warren Buffetts and Jamie Dimons, the benefactors of the current system — during boom and bust — are at an end.
Whatever you bet on bitcoin, don’t make the mistake of betting against Blockchain.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast: Narrated by Rosario Dawson, with Tim Draper, Lauri Love, Bill Tai, Gramatik, Vinay Gupta, Imogen Heap, many others
Credits: Directed by Alex Winter. A SingularDTV release.
Running time: 1:24
