Latest news with #Bond-villain
Irish Examiner
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
TV review: I was glad to see the closing credits of Mountainhead
I was in two minds about Mountainhead (Sky Atlantic and NOW). Every now and again I wished this movie was a series but mainly I was glad that I didn't have to spend more than 90 minutes with the main characters. I wanted it to be a series because it's directed by Jesse Armstrong, who was involved with The Thick of It and Succession, two of the best 21st century telly satires. But this one is about four super-rich tech titans, awful men who are happy to set the world on fire as long as their net worth is bigger than the next guy. In this case, the world is literally in flames as the four former frat-boys gather in a Bond-villain mountain retreat to play poker and rekindle their time in The Brewsters. I think that's a fraternity, we're not told. The chief villain is Venis – his social-media platform Traam has just released new features which make it too easy to produce deep-fake videos, which are then used to incite hatred and sectarianism across the globe. His goofy friend Jeff has an AI platform that could douse the flames by identifying any false videos, if only he'd make that technology available to Traam. Overseeing it all is Randall, AKA Papa Bear, which sees Steve Carrell in top Steve Carrell form, playing the original tech God, who likes to name-drop philosophers to justify making money no matter what. The fourth character is the host, Souper, the poorest of the group with a net worth of $550 million. Fans of Succession will like the look and feel of Mountainhead. You've got your fleets of private jets and expensive 4x4s, whisking middle-aged white people here and there. There are put-upon personal assistants making knowing glances at the camera. Everyone is terribly dressed, expensively. But there isn't enough fun. Succession and The Thick of It allowed their characters sufficient humanity and awareness to make jokes about themselves and each other. The four tech bros here are too consumed by themselves to get a decent laugh. There is oodles of acting talent here, but it's wasted with long monologues that could have been lifted from Elon Musk's twitter account. We don't need a telly drama to tell us that super-rich white American nerds are a danger to the planet, we can get that from the news. There are some very funny bits. Souper being parachuted in to head a coup in Argentina is a lovely touch; the bit where Venis tries to bond with his baby boy is gold; the scene around the sauna terrifyingly hilarious. But I was glad to see the closing credits and the back of The Brewsters.
The Guardian
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Andor season two review – the excellent Star Wars for grownups is as thrilling as ever (and funnier too)
Comrades! Welcome back to the revolution. Andor is the Star Wars TV show with the sharpest political acumen: yes, like everything in the franchise, it's about an underdog rebel movement fighting against a totalitarian empire in space, and it has plenty of thrilling battle sequences, but here there are no Jedi mind powers or cute green backwards-talking psychics. Under the hard-nosed stewardship of writer Tony Gilroy, Andor bins the magic and myth and replaces it with the reality of anti-fascist struggle, where the good guys are ready to risk their lives for freedom. It's the Star Wars spin-off with the strongest claim to being a proper drama – but, in season two's opening triple bill, it shows it can do sly, wry comedy too. We're a year on from where we left off, which is four years before the Death Star blows up at the end of the original movie – the point at which all the work done by our hero, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), pays off. We pick him up in an imperial military facility, where he's posing as a test pilot for a spacecraft he intends to nick. There's a classic Andor moment where Cassian meets the rebellion's woman on the inside, a junior technician who has gathered her courage to make her contribution, and knows the rage of her superiors will be directed at her once Cassian has flown off. 'If I die tonight, was it worth it?' she asks him, and gets a rousing speech in response, urgently whispered. But once it's revealed that the ship is more advanced than Cassian is used to and he doesn't know how to fly it properly – forward and reverse are not where he expects – it's clear that Andor has returned in an unusually playful mood. Soon Cassian is captured by a gang of inexperienced young mercenaries who are no danger to him, because being lost in a forest together without being able to agree who their leader is has turned them into a cross between the People's Front of Judea and the cast of Yellowjackets. We wait, amused and expectant, for Cassian to outwit them and escape. Meanwhile, in a meeting room atop a snowy Bond-villain mountain, Galactic Empire politicians are discussing the planet Ghorman and how best to extract its priceless deposits of 'deep substrate foliated calcite', the mining of which could cause the whole rock to break apart. Basically, they're going to frack Ghorman to death. The rising star at the summit is Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), who has to decide whether owning the Ghorman project, with its likely death toll of 800,000, will serve her career ambitions. Before she has a chance to nail that down, however, she is part of the sort of domestic scene that Andor isn't afraid to include, even if it means putting the fight for intergalactic supremacy on hold. In the season one finale it was hinted that focused, calculating Dedra might enter into a symbiotic romantic relationship with callow, conniving failure Syril (Kyle Soller). And now here the two Empire loyalists are, cohabiting in a high-rise apartment with an extremely unwelcoming light-grey interior palette. This is excellent news because Syril is perhaps Andor's best character, representing the male emotional inadequates who tend to be a fascist movement's foot soldiers. Syril is the sort of man who, on Earth, would be posting aggressive, grandstanding political opinions from a computer in his mother's basement. Season one recognised this by having him actually move back in with his mother after a professional setback, and revealing her to be a textbook overprotective, vicariously ambitious mom played with fearsome comic smarts by the fabulous Kathryn Hunter. Now she is Dedra's new in-law, and she's on her way round for a lunch where the passive-aggression threatens to curdle the fondue. We visit two other locations that seem unconnected but won't stay that way for long. On the lush planet of Chandrila, comfortably wealthy senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly) is hosting a lavish wedding for her daughter, but the marriage is a grubby arranged affair that is about to tip Mon into betraying her upper-class lifestyle and leading the resistance instead. Meanwhile, far away in the wheat fields of Mina-Rau, Cassian's activist pals are trying to lay low while they await his return, but are subjected to an imperial inspection led by a smarmy officer who singles out Bix (Adria Arjona) for special attention. The power imbalance between them, with Bix recognising immediately that this man's apparent friendliness is loaded with a threat of sexual violence, reminds us that even when it's in a lighter mode, Andor is Star Wars for grownups. This rebellion is a serious business. Andor is on Disney+ now
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's A.G. Just Did Something So Corrupt She Should Be Fired Already
Pam Bondi was approved by the Senate to be attorney general on February 4. On February 5, she was sworn in. And on February 10, five days into her already ghastly tenure, she committed an act so electrically sleazy that in a normally ordered world, she'd be forced from office immediately. Why Bondi? Why is my wrath not limited to Emil Bove, the acting assistant attorney general? After all, it was Bove (apparently rhymes with 'no way') who wrote the instantly infamous memo ordering Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, to dismiss all charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams 'as soon as is practicable.' (Sassoon quit instead.) True enough, Bove's Bond-villain name and his broodingly pharaonic countenance help finger him as an easy bad guy. But read the damn memo. Here's how it starts: 'You [Sassoon] are directed, as authorized by the Attorney General, to dismiss the pending charges in United States vs. Adams.' As authorized by the attorney general. There it is. The top law enforcement officer of the United States, five days on the job, ordered that corruption charges, painstakingly assembled over a multiyear period by prosecutors in New York's Southern District, be dismissed. Why? Well, your average fair-minded person, presented with the facts as I've laid them out so far, would assume that said attorney general and her people had discovered new information that exculpated the mayor. That's how justice works in the movies, right? But not here. In fact, Bove's memo admits the opposite! It reads: 'The Justice Department has reached this conclusion without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based.' Couldn't be clearer. Bondi's decision—and please, please, call it that; Bondi's decision, not Bove's—had nothing to do with evidence. So what did it have to do with? Two factors. The first is timing. The memo states: 'It cannot be ignored that Mayor Adams criticized the prior Administration's immigration policies before the charges were filed.' That's a staggering sentence. It assumes an almost casual and universal corruption on the part of prosecutors in the Southern District generally, and the U.S. attorney in particular. This is an outrageous charge: that prosecutors are working to exact political revenge for presidents. That is a morality that Fox News and others have gotten millions of American to cynically buy into. It is not the real-life morality of the Southern District, which for decades has rightfully enjoyed an apolitical reputation. Even when there have been politically ambitious U.S. attorneys in charge who were clearly bringing cases that might benefit them politically—most obviously, Rudy Giuliani prosecuting corrupt Democratic bosses in the 1980s—it had to be admitted that the prosecutions were legit. Giuliani won convictions in those cases, and the city was better off. But this is an accusation—by the nation's top law-enforcement officer—that the Southern District is, or was, a priori corrupt. It's the kind of accusation, history instructs us, that is usually made by people who are guilty of exactly that which they allege. And it is an accusation lodged specifically at former U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. Yes, Williams was appointed by Biden. Yes, Williams is a Democrat. But what is his record of politically selective prosecutions? Well, let's see. He oversaw the indictment of former New York Lieutenant Governor Brian Benjamin—a Democrat and, for what it's worth, like Williams, a Black man (I mention this only because the right-wing media would surely claim the fact as relevant were it expedient to do so). He oversaw the indictment of Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey. In 2018, as an assistant U.S. attorney in the same Southern District, he helped secure the indictment and conviction of Sheldon Silver, the powerful former speaker of the New York State Assembly—and, yes, another fellow Democrat. And bear in mind, of course, that the investigation of Adams stretched back years. Read the indictment. It's more than 50 pages, and it tracks events going back to 2016. You don't assemble that in a week. Southern District investigators were obviously building an Adams case for years—probably before Williams was even named U.S. attorney, which happened in 2021, and long before Adams cozied up to Donald Trump. On top of all that, suspicion of corruption has swirled around Adams's head practically since he took office. The notion that the filing of the Adams indictment was somehow tied to his refusal to talk nice about Kamala Harris before the election is the kind of absurd conspiracy that used to be laughable in this country, consigned to the John Birch margins, before the right-wing media promoted this kind of thinking to the extent that it became imprintable on millions of fevered minds. But remember—that's only the first factor cited by Bove (and Bondi). The second, if you can believe it, is far more ridiculous. The indictment against Adams needs to be dropped posthaste, Bondi ordered, because it's distracting him from doing his job! I'm not joking: 'The pending prosecution has unduly restricted Mayor Adams' ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior Administration.' This is, to put it politely, not how the law works in this country. Remember that the Supreme Court ruled—unanimously—that even a sitting president can't be immune from civil litigation on the grounds that it will distract him from his duties. But that was about Bill Clinton, a scourge of the right. For a darling of the right, the rules appear to be different. Except that the dismissal of these charges carries a big asterisk. They were dismissed 'without prejudice,' meaning they can be refiled anytime Bondi—or Donald Trump—wants them to be. In other words, Mayor Adams is too busy fighting crime and immigration, but only for as long as Bondi and Trump think he's fighting it their way. Once he's not, cuff him. So things go in a nation where it is openly declared that some people are above the law. That was not supposed to be the United States (although often it has been, in the case of rich people). It was supposed to be places like Daniel Ortega's Nicaragua. But now it is the United States. I didn't declare it so. Trump did—more specifically, his White House counsel David Warrington did this week, in the form of a memo obtained by The Washington Post stating that it is now the official policy of the Trump administration that the president and vice president (What? Why?) and their top lawyers 'can discuss ongoing criminal and civil cases with the attorney general and her deputies.' In other words, Trump—or Vance—can make one phone call and set any investigation they wish in motion, or get one quashed. In other words, they are the law. But don't forget the central role here of Bondi: 'As authorized by the attorney general.' She has proven in a week that she will corrupt her office to any point and in any way that Trump desires. Don't take it from me. Take it from Sassoon—a Republican and a Federalist Society member who, far from thinking Adams innocent, was about to file a superseding indictment charging him with even more corruption, including tampering with evidence. And take it from the five Justice Department prosecutors who followed Sassoon with their resignations. This is a crisis. A legal and constitutional crisis of a sort seen only a few times in this country's history. And yet the squashing of the Adams case will pass, as all these things pass, with nary a peep from elected Republicans because a serial liar with a mighty propaganda machine working overtime for him has convinced half the country that up is down, that honor is venality, and that integrity is just a ruse for suckers who believe all that garbage from our schoolbooks. This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.
