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Gulf Today
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
In ‘Mountainhead,' billionaire tech bros watch world burn
At the beginning of 'Mountainhead,' written and directed by Jesse Armstrong of 'Succession' fame and premiering Saturday on HBO, three multibillionaire tech bros make their way by private plane, helicopter and SUV caravan to join a fourth in a big modernist house on an isolated, snowy mountaintop for a weekend of poker and drugs — 'no deals, no meals, no high heels.' One might wish for an avalanche, were there anything higher to fall on them. Venis (Cory Michael Smith), the world's richest man — imagine Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg put in a blender, as perhaps you have — commands a social media site with, wait for it, 4 billion subscribers, and has just released new 'content tools' that allow for super high-res 'unfalsifiable deepfakes.' As a result, the sectarian world is going up in flames. Jeff (Ramy Youssef), a rival who had poached members of Venis' team, has an AI algorithm capable of filtering out the bad information which Venis, closing the digital barn door after the cow is out, wants to acquire; but Jeff, for reasons of profit, power and/or ego, is not going to let it go. Randall (Steve Carell), their gray-haired guru — they call him 'Papa Bear,' though Jeff also dubs him 'Dark Money Gandalf' — controls a lot of international infrastructure, including military. Preoccupied with his mortality — told by his latest oncologist that his cancer is incurable, he responds, 'You are not a very intelligent person' — he's hoping to upload his consciousness to the grid, a possibility Venis assures him is only five years off as long as he can get his hands on Jeff's AI. The relatively inoffensive Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), whose house it is, hopes to expand the meditation app he created, into a lifestyle super app — offering 'posture correction, therapy and a brand new color' — with his friends' investment of 'a b-nut,' i.e., a billion dollars. They call him 'Souper,' for 'soup kitchen,' because he is worth only $521 million. He's the runt of the litter, and the comedy relief. For no given reason, they call themselves the Brewsters — perhaps just so they can crow 'cock-a-doodle-brew.' They are full of themselves — 'The great thing about me,' says Randall, 'is that I know everyone and do everything' — and basically insecure. They rewrite their fundamental nihilism into the belief that their business is good for mankind, whatever the actual human cost. 'You're always going to get some people dead,' Randall says. 'Nothing means anything,' Venis says, 'and everything's funny and cool.' (But he does miss his mother and, in a particularly creepy interlude, his baby is brought up the mountain for an uncomfortable minute.) In the only scene to take them out of the house, the four travel to the crest of a mountain, where Hugo writes each man's net worth in lipstick on his chest, they don hierarchical headgear and shout, 'Mountain god accelerator legacy manifestation!' into the valley below, each adding a wish. It is, seemingly, something they have done before. Randall name-checks philosophers — Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Plato, Marcus Aurelius — he misunderstands to his advantage and drops references to the Catiline Conspiracy and the Battle of Actium to make base actions sound important and dignified. He calls the president a 'simpleton' — one assumes Armstrong is reflecting on the current one — but for all their power, money and influence, they all lack wisdom. And if recent years have taught us anything, it's that these things are not mutually exclusive. Venis thinks the violence engulfing the globe, which cannot touch him, may prove cathartic; Randall is 'excited about these atrocities.' They discuss taking over 'failing nations' to 'show them how it's done.' (In perhaps the film's funniest line, Hugo, who has been working on his house, muses, 'I don't know if I want to run Argentina on my own — not on the back of a major construction project.') They trade in gobbledygook phrases like 'AI dooming and decelerationist alarmism,' 'compound distillation effect' and 'bootstrap to a corporate monarchy, cyber-state it to the singularity, eat the chaos,' which for all I know is just Armstrong quoting things people of this sort have actually said. It seems possible. Tribune News Servicea
New Statesman
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Mountainhead is a tech-bro horror show
Sky Here in my TV critic's penthouse, with its giant bags of snacks, hand-knitted throws and wraparound 24/7 flatscreens, Jesse 'Succession' Armstrong has at last chucked me some more red meat to chew on in the form of Mountainhead, a film he has both written and directed. Obviously, I couldn't be more pleased. The stomach has been rumbling for a while now. I still miss his last lot of monsters; part of me will always mourn Tom Wambsgans. But it has to be said that the new bunch are too unambiguously cold – yes, even by the standards of the Roys – for maximum enjoyment. Also, for those of a nervous disposition, I would just quietly note that it's not beyond the bounds of possibility the dystopian future it so terrifyingly depicts could arrive in – checks smart watch, ignoring its advice to 'take a moment' – ooh, about six hours' time. It goes like this. Four tech bros, some of the richest men in the world, are weekending at Mountainhead, a rebarbative looking architect-designed house in deepest snowy Utah (it's named for Ayn Rand, as I'm sure you've guessed); their host is its owner, the the poorest of them (yet to make his first billion), Hugo Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman), whose brainchild is a wellness app called Slowzo. The gathering is a reunion: these men-children, who once masturbated together on a biscuit, call themselves the Brewsters; they like bragging, banter, poker and working themselves up into a frenzy about transhumanism and freedom of speech. But behind the group hug, tension crackles like an old dial-up connection. The oldest, Randall (Steve Carell), is pretending his cancer is cured. His one-time protégé, Venis (Cory Michael Smith), is twitchily trying to ignore the fact that the launch of an AI feature on his social network, Traam, has broadcast so much disinformation that the world is rapidly descending into violence and chaos. Venis, in turn, is desperate to make up with Jeff (Ramy Youssef), whose own AI business is able to tell audiences what's real, and what's not. He's desperate to buy it. But alas, they fell out when they appeared on, yes, a podcast. As 'genocide-adjacent' events occur everywhere from India to Uzbekistan, and Argentina and Italy default on their debts, Jeff's stock is rising rapidly, even as his conscience is vaguely pricked (to locate such a conscience involves much scrolling). He's not selling. The dialogue is sharper than a premium Japanese knife, and often very funny. Jeff asks Hugo, aka Soups (a nickname that's short for soup kitchen, because they think he's such a failure), if his antiseptic house was 'designed by Ayn Bland'. Venis tells Randall, who wants to know if his company has a timeline for uploading human consciousness and if so, can he be first up, that, yes, 'Daddy' can be number one 'on the grid', but only after it has been tested on 'a mouse, a pig, and ten morons'. The attention to detail, rich-living-wise, is unimpeachable. Hugo's staff have a whole turbot ready for 'picking' – picking fish are all the rage – as well as about 8,000 sliders, and every kind of olive, fruit, artisan ham and cheese you can think of. The house (obvs) has a full-size bowling alley, a cinema and – most important of all – water pressure that gives you bruises when you shower. But, it almost goes without saying, no one's happy. The anhedonia of the rich, of which I'm lately only half-convinced, is made explicit when the four of them don matching orange ski suits as if they were prisoners. And, as my granny used to say, much shall have more, of course. The first half of Mountainhead is better than the second, when greed and Musk-like excess takes over, and it all gets a bit Lord of Flies, only with cigars, saunas and the possibility of a pre-pardon from the US president. Still, I stuck with it, and you will, too. Partly, it's the transfixing amorality, an abyss you detect in Bezos, Zuckerberg and all the others who are suddenly so pumped and obeisant to Trump. But the performances are magnetically pitch perfect as well: Carell in his knitwear, Michael Smith with his waxy, Jared Kushner face. It's a 90-minute horror show. All I'd say is: best not to watch it just before bedtime. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Mountainhead Sky Atlantic [See also: 'The Bombing of Pan Am 103' is poignant and fascinating] Related
Los Angeles Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In ‘Mountainhead,' billionaire tech bros watch the world burn
At the beginning of 'Mountainhead,' written and directed by Jesse Armstrong of 'Succession' fame and premiering Saturday on HBO, three multibillionaire tech bros make their way by private plane, helicopter and SUV caravan to join a fourth in a big modernist house on an isolated, snowy mountaintop for a weekend of poker and drugs — 'no deals, no meals, no high heels.' One might wish for an avalanche, were there anything higher to fall on them. Venis (Cory Michael Smith), the world's richest man — imagine Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg put in a blender, as perhaps you have — commands a social media site with, wait for it, four billion subscribers, and has just released new 'content tools' that allow for super high-res 'unfalsifiable deep fakes.' As a result, the sectarian world is going up in flames. Jeff (Ramy Youssef), a rival who had poached members of Venis' team, has an AI algorithm capable of filtering out the bad information which Venis, closing the digital barn door after the cow is out, wants to acquire; but Jeff, for reasons of profit, power and/or ego, is not going to let it go. Randall (Steve Carell), their gray-haired guru — they call him 'Papa Bear,' though Jeff also dubs him 'Dark Money Gandalf' — controls a lot of international infrastructure, including military. Preoccupied with his mortality — told by his latest oncologist that his cancer is incurable, he responds, 'You are not a very intelligent person' — he's hoping to upload his consciousness to the grid, a possibility Venis assures him is only five years off as long as he can get his hands on Jeff's AI. The relatively inoffensive Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), whose house it is, hopes to expand the meditation app he created, into a lifestyle super app — offering 'posture correction, therapy and a brand new color' — with his friends' investment of 'a b-nut,' i.e., a billion dollars. They call him 'Souper,' for 'soup kitchen,' because he is worth only $521 million. He's the runt of the litter, and the comedy relief. For no given reason, they call themselves the Brewsters — perhaps just so they can crow 'cock-a-doodle-brew.' They are full of themselves — 'The great thing about me,' says Randall, 'is that I know everyone and do everything' — and basically insecure. They rewrite their fundamental nihilism into the belief that their business is good for mankind, whatever the actual human cost. 'You're always going to get some people dead,' Randall says. 'Nothing means anything,' Venis says, 'and everything's funny and cool.' (But he does miss his mother and, in a particularly creepy interlude, his baby is brought up the mountain for an uncomfortable minute.) In the only scene to take them out of the house, the four travel to the crest of a mountain, where Hugo writes each man's net worth in lipstick on his chest, they don hierarchical headgear and shout, 'Mountain god accelerator legacy manifestation!' into the valley below, each adding a wish. It is, seemingly, something they have done before. Randall name-checks philosophers — Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Plato, Marcus Aurelius — he misunderstands to his advantage and drops references to the Catiline Conspiracy and the Battle of Actium to make base actions sound important and dignified. He calls the president a 'simpleton' — one assumes Armstrong is reflecting on the current one — but for all their power, money and influence, they all lack wisdom. And if recent years have taught us anything, it's that these things are not mutually exclusive. Venis thinks the violence engulfing the globe, which cannot touch him, may prove cathartic; Randall is 'excited about these atrocities.' They discuss taking over 'failing nations' to 'show them how it's done.' (In perhaps the film's funniest line, Hugo, who has been working on his house, muses, 'I don't know if I want to run Argentina on my own — not on the back of a major construction project.') They trade in gobbledygook phrases like 'AI dooming and decelerationist alarmism,' 'compound distillation effect' and 'bootstrap to a corporate monarchy, cyber-state it to the singularity, eat the chaos,' which for all I know is just Armstrong quoting things people of this sort have actually said. It seems possible. As the only one with a sense of humor and a semblance of perspective, Jeff is the most sympathetic of this toxic crew. He tracks the worsening world situation with some empathetic concern, but even though he holds the key to end the madness, he does not seem in a hurry to turn it. (Mostly he is concerned with his girlfriend, who is in Mexico, not so much because of the unrest, but because he fears she's having sex.) Still, he stands a little apart, to his peril. The first half of the film proceeds essentially as a play for four characters. Apart from Hugo's asking for 'help with the cold cuts' or inquiring whether everyone's cool with reusing plates, there is a scarcely a line in which people talk like people; it is all theatrical declaration. To some extent it fits the coldness of the quartet — they hug and hoot and occasionally express a droplet of emotion, but the friendship on which they insist is competitive, transactional and illusory. They are not good company, but for those of us less than impressed by the whole 'move fast and break things' thing, or not willing to bow down before ChatGPT and OpenAI or the actual tech billionaires deforming the world, there is some fun in watching them fall apart. In some ways, 'Mountainhead' (rhymes with 'Fountainhead') feels as much a public service as an entertainment. So thanks for that, Jesse Armstrong. When, in the farcical, action-oriented second half, some attempt to execute a … plot, they bumble and argue and push each other to the front. It is an old kind of movie comedy, and works pretty much as intended.
Telegraph
07-03-2025
- General
- Telegraph
Female brewers are back – 500 years since their heyday
In the Middle Ages, beer was a staple part of the diet and brewing was a woman's game. English alewives would brew the beer for their household and sell a portion to their neighbours. This side hustle might supplement the family income for married women, or provide a vital financial lifeline for those who were single or widowed. 'Women have always been present in the history of beer in the UK,' says historian Dr Christina Wade,the author of a new book Filthy Queens: A History of Beer in Ireland. 'Scholarly consensus is that factors like the increased demand for ale after the Black Death coupled with the rise of guilds and use of hops resulted in many women being pushed out of commercial brewing in favour of men over a period of centuries.' Those lucky enough to survive the plague epidemic saw their quality of life improve. With a smaller workforce available, wages were higher and prices went down. People started to move to urban centres and developed a taste for drinking in alehouses rather than at home – the ancestors of our modern pubs. Gradually, this led to the commercialisation of ale and men sniffed an opportunity to make a tidy profit from brewing for the first time. Over the centuries that followed, the brewing industry slowly developed and was regulated and taxed for the first time. Women brewing in the traditional way were marginalised and even slandered as men sought to divert the profits to their own pockets. In 1540, the women of Chester were banned from selling ale, for fear that they would use their sexual wiles to spread immorality. Countless alewives were accused of cheating their customers. By the 19th century, many women ran pubs and alehouses, but female brewers were incredibly rare. Huge commercial breweries had sprung up in England and were dominating the global beer market, but they were staffed only by men, until women stepped in to pick up the slack during the world wars. That didn't stick, and it is only in living memory that women have been making a decisive return to the brewhouse. Sara Barton was one of the early pioneers. She became one of Courage Brewery's first female production managers in 1988, eventually moving on to found Brewsters Brewery in Lincolnshire. Her talent was quickly recognised and Brewsters stacked up countless industry accolades. In 2012, she was the first woman to be named Brewer of the Year by the British Guild of Beer Writers. Barton didn't pull up the ladder behind her. She started Project Venus in 2011 with Sophie de Ronde, the head brewer at Burnt Mill in Suffolk. Together, they created a professional network and much-needed source of support for women brewing in the UK. Using collaborative brew days as a focal point, de Ronde took the endeavour further, founding the International Women's Collaborative Brew Day (IWCBD). Female brewers and members of the public come together to brew beers that raise money in support of women's charities. Collaboration brews have been taking place since 2014, centred around International Women's Day on March 8. 'I think for women in the industry, IWCBD has been huge,' says de Ronde. 'There are certainly people that have started working in brewing after joining a brew day. It has opened up the doors.' Equality has not yet been achieved, but new female brewers are able to stand on the shoulders of giants such as Barton and de Ronde and benefit from the networks that they established. 'While the industry still has its challenges in terms of representation, I've found that women are actively lifting each other up,' says Lara Lopes, head brewer at Round Corner Brewing in Melton Mowbray. 'That's been invaluable to me. The industry is evolving, and I'm excited to be part of that change.' Lopes is at the forefront of the new wave, winning Brewers Journal' s coveted Young Brewer of the Year award in 2022. Her background as a mechanical engineer meant that the precision, problem-solving and creativity of brewing quickly drew her in. 'I love that brewing was historically a female-led craft,' says the Brazilian-born Lopes. 'I see it as a reminder that we're not breaking new ground; we're reclaiming our place in an industry that women helped build.' Alice Batham grew up in breweries; she remembers her dad putting her and her sisters in the empty fermenting vessels of the iconic Bathams Brewery in the Black Country when they were children. But it was not a done deal that she would follow him into the family business. 'There was never any pressure or obligation,' Batham recalls. 'My parents wanted me and my sisters to enter the business of our own accord.' Batham is now the head brewer at Bathams, the sixth generation to lead production at the family business which has been operating since 1877. After a masters in brewing science, her first job was working under Barton at Brewsters. 'I learnt so much from Sara,' Batham says. 'She has so much insight having worked in the industry most of her career. She gave me the freedom to try new processes and develop recipes which I really valued.' Having learnt her trade at other breweries, Batham made the decision to return to Bathams during Covid – the family was in shock at having to close the brewery and small chain of pubs for the first time since the 19th century. She feels a connection with female brewers of the past in a way that few others can, since it was her great, great, great-grandmother who initially started home-brewing the foundation of Bathams' much-loved recipes. 'Brewing beer from recipes passed down through generations feels incredibly special,' she says. 'There have been moments of underlying misogyny throughout my career so far, but on the whole, the industry has been incredibly welcoming. Sometimes men can be condescending if they see me doing manual work – I tend to take little notice of those outdated attitudes.' There is still work to be done, and young brewers are taking up the challenge enthusiastically. Sophie Ashdown is the production director at Buxton Brewery. She feels that brewing has challenged her to grow. 'The barrier for me was not feeling heard when I first started out, and learning how to overcome that. I had to make my voice louder. Being a woman in a male-dominated industry has built me up and given me more confidence to speak up and help make change.' Chelsea Craigie has spent four years working her way up to becoming a brewer at Double Barrelled Brewing in Reading. She started out behind the bar in brewery taprooms, and wanted to know more about how beer was produced. 'Back then we were only a team of four people,' says Craigie. 'So I was getting involved on canning days. I thought it was super cool. It used to blow my mind that you could make a beer from start to finish.' Learning from the other brewers and then taking her general certificate of brewing has given her a lot of background knowledge, but it isn't always plain sailing. 'I've been quite lucky because everyone at Double Barrelled is really good at respecting everyone's opinions. It doesn't matter if you're female or not. But there are times when people turn up to pick up a pallet and they say, 'Where's the brewer?' or 'Who can drive a forklift?' I think that's definitely just because I'm a woman.' It seems like the female brewers are doing everything right, as they have done for centuries. It's just men's attitudes that need to catch up.
