Tag Archives: Alex Gibney

I Answer the Question,”What Have You Been Watching?”

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I’ve noticed how this pandemic has added a new collection of common statements and questions among people with whom my wife and I socialize, distantly. The common, nearly universal statements are along the lines of, “My god! Did hear what he said/did today?” But a common question I never before heard so frequently, is “What are you watching?”

Those with the luxury of not having to home-school, maintain full-time work obligations or tend to an ill relative have been maxing out their couch potato quota. Being both Catholic and a small town Midwesterner who grew up surrounded by Lutherans, I still have a dim view of people who watch TV in the middle of the day. The tube only comes on after … you’ve earned it. Daytime TV watching was for shut-in old ladies and alcoholics. It’s still that simple.

But after dinner, after putting up a couple hundred bales of hay … or pretending to pay attention in school, a guy out in Montevideo could kick back free of guilt.

So it is today. When paying attention to what is really happening can drive you nuts faster than insipid soaps and sit-coms.

With that in mind, and purely as a distraction, I’ve worked up a list of What I’ve Been Watching, and Listening To since the corral gate closed.

The Plot Against America (HBO). Not exactly light or escapist, but a terrific adaptation of the Phillip Roth novel, wherein (our guy) Charles Lindbergh beats FDR in the 1940 election, cozies up to Hitler and unleashes torrent of pent-up facism and anti-semitism across the land, specifically on a working class Jewish family and their neighbors in Newark, New Jersey. John Turturro and Winona Ryder are the only two name “stars”. But the production heft of the show comes from the presence of producer/writer David Simon, of “The Wire” fame and also “The Deuce”. The six-part series quite pointedly diverts from Roth’s novel in its ending. (Here’s a spoiler alert interview with Simon on his thinking.) But in its telling, the verisimilitude of the sets, locations, props are first-class Hollywood … with plotting and dialogue compliments of one of the country’s greatest novelists. It’s a statement on who covers pop culture today that “The Tiger King”, the depressing equivalent of being trapped in an elevator with a dozen MAGA grifters, received overwhelmingly more press attention. (I’ve had exactly no one tell me they watched “Plot Against … ” .)

Ozark (Netflix). Clearly the writing team behind this series spent a lot of time dissecting “Breaking Bad” for what made it so compelling. And they decided one magic ingredient was … ever escalating stress and tension. I’ve been a fan since the get-go, maybe from spending some time in the ‘Zarks and sprawling Lake of the Ozarks. (I have my souvenir “Big Johnson’s Halfway Inn” t-shirt.) But maybe mostly because it’s always had Jason Bateman and Laura Linney, two excellent if just-below-the-radar actors. (Bateman has directed several episodes.) The adventures of a corporate numbers guy from Chicago getting cross-wise with the mob and being forced to flee to oblivion … i.e. the Ozarks … where he proceeds to mix up the Missus, the kids and everyone he meets with local heroin dealers, hillbilly trailer trash, the Kansas City mob and the inevitable psychotic Mexican drug cartel, all while running a cheesy floating casino has always been fingernail-chewing fun. But it got even more desperate this season. Not to give too much away, but let’s just say Mrs. Marty Byrde (Linney) develops ambitions of her own. Favorite supporting characters: Darlene, the not so loving spouse of the local poppy farmer, and of course Ruth, Marty’s aide de camp, a child of trash with the feral cunning of El Chapo.

Westworld (HBO). The first season of this series was close to classic television. But then you get Anthony Hopkins in anything and you’ll be convinced it’s Criterion Collection stuff. The way season #1 played with the soon-to-arrive dilemma over what really is consciousness, and then, if something inorganic displays consciousness is it therefore “human”? made for a remarkably intelligent mainstream TV show. Thanks, I strongly suspect, to familial connections to acclaimed film director Christopher “Dunkirk”, “The Dark Knight Rises”, “Inception” Nolan, (his brother Jonathan and wife Lisa Joy run “Westworld”), the show has always worked off an impressive budget. (If you’re a studio exec, it can’t hurt to keep Big Nolan happy.) That said, the second season was a mess. Besides the fundamental dramatic problem of diluting suspense by having every character you gun down, chop up or set afire “rebooted” by a refreshed algorithm, the entire season was pretty much all gunning and chopping and jumping back and forth in time. The “Westworld” on-line chat rooms didn’t seem to mind. But what I felt was a series floundering and searching for the next leap up into serious, speculative science. And that element arrived four episodes into this season’s run. The almost-already-here question of gigantic data bases knowing so much more about you than you yourself know finally showed it’s face. Worse, the data bases and algorithms know so much they can “predict” your future. In effect you are living the life they permit you to live. And have I mentioned the budget for this thing? Stunning production design. I’m hanging with it.

Citizen K (Streaming on iTunes and others.) Even if you’ve heard of “the oligarchs”, the Russian tycoons who leapt in and seized control of huge chunks of the economy after the fall of the Soviet Union, you probably haven’t spent as much time with any one specific character as you do in this new documentary by Alex Gibney, Oscar-winner for “Taxi to the Dark Side”, plus “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief”, “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” and nearly a dozen others. The character here is one of the original oligarchs, Mikhail Khordokovsky, a guy who managed to corner a massive chunk of the Russian oil industry when benighted Boris Yeltsin came to the early-90s oligarchs for a loan to stave of economic collapse … and win reelection. It is simply impossible to watch Donld Trump operate and not see the guiding, mentoring hand of Vladimir Putin in his flagrant abuse of the truth and creation of a constant, competing alternative reality. Putin is the master. But unlike Trump, who is both a fool and lazy, Putin is disciplined and remorseless. Here, as Gibney tells the story of the war between Putin and Khodorkovsky, (essentially all the original oligarchs have been ruined if not killed and replaced by new oligarchs who owe everything to Putin), we understand the average Russian’s “helpless serf” need for a “strong man” to protect them from chaos. Excellent stuff.

Also, a couple podcasts that have moved up my list of faves.

“Hacks on Tap” Ex-Obama advisor David Axelrod and ex-GOP strategist Mike Murphy take 45 minutes a couple times a week to zing each other and try … try … to make some sense of the Trump administration dumpster fire. Murphy long ago bailed on any idiot who would support a certifiable nut job for the White House, so don’t expect any MAGA zealotry. But these two old pros know “the game” inside and out. Likewise they’re on speaking terms with everyone in the game today who isn’t wearing a scarlet “T” on their chest. Recent conversations brought in guests like ex-Obama Chief of Staff and ex-Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who managed the entire show without dropping an F-bomb, and longtime GOP campaign operative Mark McKinnon, (the guy with the big hat on Showtime’s “The Circus.) The consensus of the latter was that Joe Biden needs to actually do this “fireside chat” idea that’s been kicking around. Sit down for an hour every week with Oprah, or David Letterman or, hell, Gail Collins from The New York Times and show America the guy this crew knows to be a regular, decent — empathetic — human being.

“The New Abnormal” Ten, twenty, thirty years from now the line, “Everything Trump Touches Dies” will be stamped like a watermark on this era, and credit will have to go to the guy who authored it, former Republican “master of the dark arts” Rick Wilson. Wilson has had two best-sellers — so far — ripping Trump, the Trump cult formerly known as the Republican party and TrumpNation, a matched set of new ones. The first book, “Everything Trump Touches Dies”, was as close to what I’d imagine Hunter Thompson doing with Trump as anything out there. And now — via his side hustle gig with The Daily Beast — (always behind the paywall) — Wilson, who lives down on the Redneck Riviera in the Florida panhandle and loves guns as much horses — has teamed up with uber New Yorker Molly-Jong Fast to deconstruct as much of Trump’s self-serving blithering as two humans can without risking strokes. The show just launched this week. But given Wilson’s high-profile on cable pundit-fests — (on MSNBC he once referred to Trump’s best-seller as “The Shart of the Deal”, a line that went over the head of the female host but cracked up other, cruder panelists) — this thing will catch on quick. And always wait for the end, where Wilson and Molly offer their picks for “Fuck That Guy” … of the week. (Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a truly contemptible low-life, got Wilson’s nod.)

Obsessed with Elizabeth Holmes

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At the moment I’m struggling with an Elizabeth Holmes obsession. No, not that kind of obsession. Rather the kind that can not understand how people like Rupert Murdoch, Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State George Shultz, nutjob Amway heiress Betsy DeVos, the Cox family of Cox Communications, the Waltons of WalMart, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, super-lawyer David Boies were conned by a twenty-something blonde with a weird voice who never blinked.

The story Holmes is all over the place at the moment. There’s a podcast, “The Dropout”, an HBO documentary “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” by Alex Gibney,  the book most of this is based on, “Bad Blood”, by Wall Street Journal writer John Carreyou and soon … a Hollywood movie with Jennifer Lawrence as Holmes, (to be directed by Adam McKay of “The Big Short” and “Vice”.)

Reduced to its most basic, Holmes claimed to have created a home espresso-size machine that could take a blood sample from a pinprick and run 200 analyses pretty much while you waited. Tapping the above-mentioned luminaries and more, she pocketed $900 million in investments, set up shop in Silicon Valley, hired dozens of employees, (as many marketing and branding gurus as scientists and engineers), and began building the intense cover-gal cult of blonde and blue-eyed Elizabeth … i.e. the long-awaited female Steve Jobs.

Everything about Holmes and her company, Theranos, is now in ruin. The $900 million is gone — $300 million to lawyers she was once paying at the rate of $1 million a month — and Holmes is facing charges of criminal fraud that could toss her in jail for 20 years. (Although, given what’s happened with Paul Manafort, she too may get off with probation for her “otherwise blameless life.”)

My copy of “Bad Blood” just arrived. But I watched Gibney’s doc, listened to a couple of hours of the podcast and inhaled a half-dozen Vanity Fair-like features. It’s an amazing, Hollywood-worthy story. (And the lead character is blonde!) But even after all that, I’m still left asking, “How?”

How did major league figures like Shultz, Kissinger, Boies, Slim, Murdoch and others buy into this con? Murdoch in particular invested $120 million. (DeVos was good for $100 million. Shultz, Kissinger and Boies were board members.)  On what possible basis?

I used to assume that before a canny old bastard like Murdoch threw down as much as a 20% tip he’d made damn sure he got everything and more than he was paying for. As in, for example, the best scientist-engineers he could find, with orders to Holmes that they were coming into her lab to verify that the machine — which she named “Edison”, after you know who — actually worked, or at the very least that there was bona fide science showing the concept was doable.

Clearly, none of that happened.

Being a wretched cynic and part-time pervert, my first theory was that the weird but-still-sort-of-attractive blonde was “encouraging” the old dogs with private, Robert Kraft-like consultations, even though at their age you’d worry that Shultz and Kissinger might have a stroke at the mere thought of it.

But apparently that isn’t true, either. The best explanation to date of this stunning gullibility on the part of some of the absolute lions of Spy vs Spy vs Spy insider diplomacy, international investment and skullduggery is that … she won them over, and kept them won over despite mounting evidence of fraud, purely on the basis of her family pedigree and Jobs-inspired bullshit.

In her family history there is a genuine medical hero, with a hospital named after him in Cincinnati and then there were her D.C.-based parents/power couple. (Her father was for a time — wait for it — an executive at Enron.) Somehow, maybe because when you get to a certain status in life you get lazy and place more value and trust in the pedigrees of who you know than real-time due diligence, the Shultzs, Kissingers, Boies, Waltons and Murdochs lent their name, reputation and money based on social association instead of gimlet-eyed investigation.

All to a con that on the face of it seemed far too good to be true.

Not that I worry for a second about any of them, you understand. It’s just that if these types of people — Harvey Weinstein’s go-to-guy Boies in particular sticks in my mind — are so judgmentally sloppy and easily deluded by a character like Holmes how can they purport to have any credibility on any other subject?

Part of the explanation for their immunity from shame and reputational disgrace is of course that most of them have their own media offices and control their own press. Stories such as this are fascinating because they are so rarely revealed to the public, much less so widely disseminated.

Still, not one of them hired an actual expert to find out if there was anything behind the bullshit … coming from the dropout child of pedigreed parents?

The revolution can’t come soon enough.