Latest news with #Hugo
Scroll.in
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
Start the week with a film: ‘Mountainhead' is a grim satire about tech billionaires
The world hasn't yet recovered from the blockbuster series Succession. Meanwhile, the show's creator Jesse Armstrong has moved on to films, making his directing debut with a grim satire about tech billionaires. Mountainhead, which is out on JioHotstar, is a tract for the times. Written and directed by Armstrong, Mountainhead has characters who breathe a rarefied air that lets them believe that they can run the planet. Spoiler alert: they actually do. Four very rich men visibly modelled on Silicon Valley luminaries gather at a mountainside retreat for what is meant to be an 'intellectual salon'. The house is owned by lifestyle app founder Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), who is worth only $521 million, not as much as his 'best buds' Venis (Cory Michael Smith), Randall (Steve Carell) and Jeff (Ramy Youssef). It's a 'no deals, no meals, no high heels' occasion, Hugo says, one of the many hollow statements made over two days. The world beyond the mansion is spiralling out of control, thanks to artificial intelligence-powered disinformation flowing from Venis's social media site Traam. As riots rage and countries are pushed to the brink, Venis smirks, while Hugo and Randall debate the possible benefits. Only Jeff appears to be concerned about the real-world consequences of deepfakery. Or is Jeff's dissenting views, which lead to him being labelled a traitor, a reflection of the quartet's tendency to roast each other whenever they assemble? Words fly thick and fast, with enough insults to fill a book. Extraordinarily entitled, self-obsessed and rude as a result, the men speak their hearts out on bothersome government regulations and the inability of mortals to understand what they have created. The film's title is a play on Ayn Rand's libertarian bible The Fountainhead, which is namechecked by Jeff at one point. Despite the carefully controlled temperature on the inside, the thin air on the outside seeps into the house, setting off chaos. The veneer of friendship barely conceals competitiveness between the men, for whom comparing net worth is serious business. The confined setting plays to Jesse Armstrong's strengths. The 109-minute film's critique of amoral Silicon Valley culture, while a bit overstretched, is carried out through strongly etched characters and superbly judged performances. Ramy Youssef is brilliant as the casually dressed, politically aware Jeff, who appears to have wandered in from a jog. Cory Michael Smith nails the smooth-faced and soulless social media site owner whose resemblance to a certain someone is chilling. The savage exchanges are initially hilarious, but the humour is soon overtaken by tragedy, and then fear. That too is intentional in a movie in which grandiose pronouncements have the ring of shocking truth about the world inhabited by billions but controlled by the billionaires. Play Also start the week with these films:
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Climate
- Yahoo
Hugo, Florence, and Cape Verde: Why we name hurricanes
Thirty-five years ago, the worst storm to hit the Queen City made landfall. Even though Hugo was a category one hurricane by the time it hit Charlotte, it carried winds close to 100 mph with it. The winds were so strong they wiped out almost the entirety of the city's tree canopy and left 85% of Charlotte's residents without power. Four people in the metro were killed, it took months before life for most Charlotteans went back to normal. Duke Energy told us last fall that since Hugo, their storm response team has grown -- communication, technology and meteorology have all improved. But they face one problem: so many people are moving to Charlotte. So while emergency responders prepare to keep up with the boom, there's more people that will need protection from storms like Hugo, which was what's called a 'Cape Verde storm.' When we get to the months of September and October, we arrive at our most dangerous time. Not only is it prime time for hurricanes, more start forming off of the coast of Africa. These Cape Verde storms develop near those islands and travel across the entire warm ocean, strengthening with each mile they travel. By the time they reach the U.S. mainland, they are monsters. Hurricane Florence in September of 2018 was also known as a Cape Verde storm, and the Carolinas are still dealing with the impacts from that. Florence is a good reminder that each storm has its own characteristics - that there is no single specific type of storm. They come in all shapes and sizes and each offer different kinds of deadly threats. Consider this - in that year of 2018 we also had Hurricane Michael that slammed into Florida as a category five storm. Florence was a 'mere' category one when it hit Wrightsville Beach. Who claimed more lives? Florence. Why? Michael raced through the south. Florence moved through our region at an astonishingly slow two miles per hour. That's why they get a name, each storm is different: different sizes, different shapes, different speeds, and many different ways they can threaten your family and your property. And all it takes is just one. The time to be ready is now. (VIDEO: Asheville-based businesses struggle to recover months after Hurricane Helene)
The Irish Sun
4 days ago
- Sport
- The Irish Sun
Ronan Kelleher adamant Leinster on the revenge trail in ‘massive test' against Scarlets in United Rugby Championship
RÓNAN KELLEHER knows Leinster played their part in Scarlets being in the play-offs — and now he is out to put them out. Kelleher was one of the few frontline players picked when the province played in Llanelli last month, a week before their Advertisement 2 Rónan Kelleher during the Leinster Rugby Squad Training at UCD Credit: Tyler Miller/Sportsfile 2 Leinster lost to the Scarlets earlier this season Credit: Chris Fairweather/Sportsfile The hooker was handed the honour of being captain for the first time but he will have mixed memories of the occasion given his side suffered a shock 35-22 defeat. That helped the Welsh outfit claim the last place in the play-off but there should only be one outcome when the top seed meets the bottom seed at home. Kelleher said: 'Off the back of that they got into the play-offs and I thought they were really good on the day. 'I thought we were poor in parts as well, but we know how much of a threat they can cause. Having played in it, you obviously get it first hand. Advertisement Read More on Leinster Rugby 'We took a lot of learnings from that game, what we did wrong, what we need to get right the next day and I think that is going to be a massive challenge this weekend. 'They have some good players. Obviously in the In the aftermath of That did not go according to plan with the Advertisement Most read in Rugby Union He said: 'You naturally are thinking when you're watching it, 'It could have been us', but obviously this year wasn't to be. 'There's nothing we can do about it now, just focus on something that we can control, which is this competition really and we'll focus on next year, next year.' 'Jack Crowley he's coming for you' jokes Peter O'Mahony's wife Jess as son practices his rugby skills Irrespective of what happens this weekend, though, Kelleher's season will extend well into July, His call-up came five days after the Saints loss, with the wait a little more agonising for his housemate Advertisement Kelleher said: 'I finished up training, grabbed the gear bag, ran home. 'I live with Hugo Keenan, so it was the two of us just watching it together. It was tense. 'It was actually funny because it was one of those things. You hadn't really put much thought into it really, obviously it was in the back of your mind, but you hadn't actually thought about it at all. 'But when I left, I was like 'Jeez, it's happening in the next half an hour', but it obviously dragged on a bit. Advertisement 'It was pretty nervy, the two of us just on the couch watching it. I was absolutely delighted once my name was called. I was thrilled. 'We had to wait another couple of minutes until Hugo's name was called, so we could both celebrate together. 'It was great, I was absolutely delighted. My family as well were absolutely thrilled, over the moon. It was unreal. 'As soon as my name was announced, my phone started buzzing. I had to throw it away until Hugo's thing. Advertisement 'It was pretty surreal to be honest, but it was unbelievable.' The Lions gathered in London for a day and Kelleher said: 'Everyone was dead sound. It's just a funny concept obviously because you're enemies for the three or four years in the build-up and then you come together and you have to get close quickly. 'But it's very much been focused on the here and now. 'We had the disappointment in Europe and now all our eyes are on this competition and trying to win this one.' Advertisement
The Age
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
Succession creator skewers Silicon Valley with dark tech satire
We are not long in the company of billionaires Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), Randy (Steve Carell), Jeff (Ramy Youssef) and Ven (Cory Michael Smith) before we realise their poker weekend – a 'tech bro' getaway at Hugo's multimillion-dollar winter estate – is a metaphorical game of chance on which the fate of the world might pivot. It could be a nod to the scene in Ingmar Bergman's 1957 masterpiece, The Seventh Seal, in which a knight returns from the Crusades and challenges Death to a game of chess. Or it could simply be ripped from recent headlines, and the wrecking ball of global geopolitics and its goal-kickers Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel. Take your pick. What is certain is that we are on the set of Mountainhead, the feature film directorial debut of Succession writer/director Jesse Armstrong, and that much in the same way Succession picked the bones of the world's media dynasties, Mountainhead cuts deep into both the intersection of power, politics and Silicon Valley, and the globe-shaking personalities who populate it. Unlike Succession, where the fictional world of the Roy family played out at what felt like an excruciatingly glacial place, Mountainhead aspires to plug into a fast-moving story, not just in terms of how quickly AI is changing the world around us, but also in terms of how unexpectedly and brutally big tech is intersecting with politics. When Armstrong sat down to write Mountainhead, billionaire Tesla owner Elon Musk was only just taking his first steps leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). As the film launches, barely half-a-year later, Musk's foray into political budget-keeping has put Telsa to the torch, and the 53-year-old billionaire has returned to the company, wounded, to refocus on his shareholders. 'To some degree these tech people will be rich forever, but the way in which Musk was kicked off the board of PayPal early in his career by Thiel, the way [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman was kicked off his board and then over a weekend was then reinstated, the way the Tesla share price rocketed and dropped with [Musk's] involvement with DOGE... the roller coaster is moving very rapidly,' Armstrong says. 'That is true both in terms of share price, and also in terms of [the manner in which] personal reputations get made and destroyed so quickly,' adds the 54-year-old UK-born screenwriter-turned-director. 'There's a real incredibly fast metabolism to the reputations that are being made and destroyed in the tech world right now.' Loading There is also something uncomfortably predictive about the story of Mountainhead. This is, plainly, a satire. Much more so than Succession. And yet, it lives in the shadow of real-world headlines about big tech nudging into government, and oligarchy superseding democracy. Like Succession, it's funny, but only until it's in deadly earnest. Without giving away too much of the story, Hugo (Schwartzman) plays host to three of his tech bros – Randy (Carell), who is a deal-maker but is grappling with some personal news; Ven (Smith), who owns a ubiquitous social media platform; and Jeff (Youssef), who owns a potentially transformative AI – on a weekend, as the enmeshing of their business dealings and global geopolitics takes an unexpected turn. 'I don't have a crystal ball, but I think if you read a bunch of stuff in an area, and there's inferred or stated 100 things that happen in this movie, and you're throwing darts, you're going to end up hitting it a bunch of times,' Armstrong explains, during our visit to the show's set in Utah's ski country. 'You do have that weird slightly, oh, f---, yeah, that was in the show. It does have this weird resonance. But I think it's just because if you're doing good research, and you suppose 100 things, 10 of them might happen in the next 12 months.' Armstrong's magnum opus, Succession, always had a prevailing sense that it was the Murdoch family rendered in hand-carved soap, but in truth it was just as much about Rupert, Lachlan and Elisabeth as it was about the personalities and pivots of other media dynasties, such as the Redstones, the Sulzbergers and even the Hearsts. Loading Mountainhead, too, can play hide and seek in the shadows to a point, but it's also not difficult to sense echoes of real-life big tech players in Randy, Hugo, Ven and Jeff. Exactly who, and how much, is the penumbra in which Armstrong clearly likes to play. 'The thing that appealed to me was an attitude and a tone of voice, which is shared by many tech people,' says Armstrong. 'Then the specifics are shared out among them ... a bit of history, a tone of voice [but ultimately] a group of people who are fictional. 'It can be fun to play those games, and I did a ton of research. So there are fragments in there where you're like, oh, yeah, that's that [or] did he get that story from that? 'In Succession as well, I would openly steal good story shapes,' Armstrong says. 'But the fun thing about stealing is then you can change them as you want. You don't have to respect the reality of what specifically happened. It's a fun game, but in the end, it won't lead you to anything any deeper if you want to play that game with this, I don't think.' For Armstrong, both as a writer and director, everything pivots on a tone of voice. 'If I don't have that, I can't do it,' he says. 'All the research in the world wouldn't let me write somebody if I didn't know how they would order in a restaurant or talk privately to a romantic partner. 'Once you've got their voice and that voice plays out in private, public, business, romantic, intellectual, therapy, once you've got the voice, I can go anywhere. 'My knowledge still about this world is not going to be comparable with somebody who works in tech or even a really good tech journalist,' he adds. 'But once you're confident in the tone of voice or the facts, the stories that you want to tell become graspable.' 'The form of this is very similar to Succession, but also completely different.' Jesse Armstrong One of the challenges in Armstrong's writing is just how close to the flame he likes to make the satire fly. Succession turned into a compelling example of a kind of uncertainty principle: that it was, in theory, satirical, and certainly made its audience laugh at times, but that it was equally dark and dramatic, at times devastatingly so. Mountainhead dances that dance, too, though it delivers its funny moments with a more conventionally humorous punch. 'I don't think too much about in some ways how the audience will receive it,' he explains. 'Although obviously, in general, that's constantly what you're thinking about when you're writing and directing. [In terms of] how they'll navigate the space between the real and the fictional, once I've done my work setting up the world, that's [for] them to think about.' Armstrong did consider setting Mountainhead in the Succession universe by including a scene in which ATN, the fictional news network owed by the Roy family, would be seen in the background on a screen. 'And then, as it developed, I thought that it was really subtly tonally different,' Armstrong says. 'And maybe that is the answer to the question in terms of the relationship ... one's relationship to the real world is interesting. And this obviously relates to the real world and so did Succession. It's just finding a comfortable distance.' What is critical, perhaps, is to remember that Armstrong's creative DNA is naturally comedic. He was a writer on some of Britain's most significant political comedies, such as the television series, The Thick of It, and its spin-off film, In the Loop. 'It's often my way into something to find the bit which feels mad and ridiculous,' Armstrong says. 'In a certain way, I think the subject matter chooses the form, and then you write the form. And the form of this is very similar to Succession, but also completely different. 'You can try and formulate the rules for that, but essentially, they just come out as you write that these people speak like this and their logic can take them to this place. So, [certain] things are allowed, and they're not allowed in another piece. And it's both very technical but also beyond your control once you've set up the maths of the situation.' Important too, perhaps, is that despite the gravity of the piece overall – or, at least, the gravity of its implications – Armstrong is, essentially, still an optimist. In one scene, Jeff offers this depressing prediction for us: 'Earth is like an all-you-can-eat buffet; no one's going to stop until we clear all the hot plates.' It does not have to be so, says Armstrong. Loading 'I do feel I am personally optimistic,' he says. 'And that line that Ramy has, I do feel a bit like that. I feel certain pity for us in that we can't really help ourselves, that the stuff that's there, we take and we use, and our ability to take and use stuff, maybe our only hope is that we can keep mitigating that at a fast enough rate that our destructive tendencies can be tempered. And I also worry that we won't be able to do that, but I can only hope we do. I'm a bit like the guys in the film, I'm a techno-optimist.'
Sydney Morning Herald
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Four tech bros are carving up a world in chaos. This time, it's fiction
We are not long in the company of billionaires Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), Randy (Steve Carell), Jeff (Ramy Youssef) and Ven (Cory Michael Smith) before we realise their poker weekend – a 'tech bro' getaway at Hugo's multimillion-dollar winter estate – is a metaphorical game of chance on which the fate of the world might pivot. It could be a nod to the scene in Ingmar Bergman's 1957 masterpiece, The Seventh Seal, in which a knight returns from the Crusades and challenges Death to a game of chess. Or it could simply be ripped from recent headlines, and the wrecking ball of global geopolitics and its goal-kickers Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel. Take your pick. What is certain is that we are on the set of Mountainhead, the feature film directorial debut of Succession writer/director Jesse Armstrong, and that much in the same way Succession picked the bones of the world's media dynasties, Mountainhead cuts deep into both the intersection of power, politics and Silicon Valley, and the globe-shaking personalities who populate it. Unlike Succession, where the fictional world of the Roy family played out at what felt like an excruciatingly glacial place, Mountainhead aspires to plug into a fast-moving story, not just in terms of how quickly AI is changing the world around us, but also in terms of how unexpectedly and brutally big tech is intersecting with politics. When Armstrong sat down to write Mountainhead, billionaire Tesla owner Elon Musk was only just taking his first steps leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). As the film launches, barely half-a-year later, Musk's foray into political budget-keeping has put Telsa to the torch, and the 53-year-old billionaire has returned to the company, wounded, to refocus on his shareholders. 'To some degree these tech people will be rich forever, but the way in which Musk was kicked off the board of PayPal early in his career by Thiel, the way [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman was kicked off his board and then over a weekend was then reinstated, the way the Tesla share price rocketed and dropped with [Musk's] involvement with DOGE... the roller coaster is moving very rapidly,' Armstrong says. 'That is true both in terms of share price, and also in terms of [the manner in which] personal reputations get made and destroyed so quickly,' adds the 54-year-old UK-born screenwriter-turned-director. 'There's a real incredibly fast metabolism to the reputations that are being made and destroyed in the tech world right now.' Loading There is also something uncomfortably predictive about the story of Mountainhead. This is, plainly, a satire. Much more so than Succession. And yet, it lives in the shadow of real-world headlines about big tech nudging into government, and oligarchy superseding democracy. Like Succession, it's funny, but only until it's in deadly earnest. Without giving away too much of the story, Hugo (Schwartzman) plays host to three of his tech bros – Randy (Carell), who is a deal-maker but is grappling with some personal news; Ven (Smith), who owns a ubiquitous social media platform; and Jeff (Youssef), who owns a potentially transformative AI – on a weekend, as the enmeshing of their business dealings and global geopolitics takes an unexpected turn. 'I don't have a crystal ball, but I think if you read a bunch of stuff in an area, and there's inferred or stated 100 things that happen in this movie, and you're throwing darts, you're going to end up hitting it a bunch of times,' Armstrong explains, during our visit to the show's set in Utah's ski country. 'You do have that weird slightly, oh, f---, yeah, that was in the show. It does have this weird resonance. But I think it's just because if you're doing good research, and you suppose 100 things, 10 of them might happen in the next 12 months.' Armstrong's magnum opus, Succession, always had a prevailing sense that it was the Murdoch family rendered in hand-carved soap, but in truth it was just as much about Rupert, Lachlan and Elisabeth as it was about the personalities and pivots of other media dynasties, such as the Redstones, the Sulzbergers and even the Hearsts. Loading Mountainhead, too, can play hide and seek in the shadows to a point, but it's also not difficult to sense echoes of real-life big tech players in Randy, Hugo, Ven and Jeff. Exactly who, and how much, is the penumbra in which Armstrong clearly likes to play. 'The thing that appealed to me was an attitude and a tone of voice, which is shared by many tech people,' says Armstrong. 'Then the specifics are shared out among them ... a bit of history, a tone of voice [but ultimately] a group of people who are fictional. 'It can be fun to play those games, and I did a ton of research. So there are fragments in there where you're like, oh, yeah, that's that [or] did he get that story from that? 'In Succession as well, I would openly steal good story shapes,' Armstrong says. 'But the fun thing about stealing is then you can change them as you want. You don't have to respect the reality of what specifically happened. It's a fun game, but in the end, it won't lead you to anything any deeper if you want to play that game with this, I don't think.' For Armstrong, both as a writer and director, everything pivots on a tone of voice. 'If I don't have that, I can't do it,' he says. 'All the research in the world wouldn't let me write somebody if I didn't know how they would order in a restaurant or talk privately to a romantic partner. 'Once you've got their voice and that voice plays out in private, public, business, romantic, intellectual, therapy, once you've got the voice, I can go anywhere. 'My knowledge still about this world is not going to be comparable with somebody who works in tech or even a really good tech journalist,' he adds. 'But once you're confident in the tone of voice or the facts, the stories that you want to tell become graspable.' 'The form of this is very similar to Succession, but also completely different.' Jesse Armstrong One of the challenges in Armstrong's writing is just how close to the flame he likes to make the satire fly. Succession turned into a compelling example of a kind of uncertainty principle: that it was, in theory, satirical, and certainly made its audience laugh at times, but that it was equally dark and dramatic, at times devastatingly so. Mountainhead dances that dance, too, though it delivers its funny moments with a more conventionally humorous punch. 'I don't think too much about in some ways how the audience will receive it,' he explains. 'Although obviously, in general, that's constantly what you're thinking about when you're writing and directing. [In terms of] how they'll navigate the space between the real and the fictional, once I've done my work setting up the world, that's [for] them to think about.' Armstrong did consider setting Mountainhead in the Succession universe by including a scene in which ATN, the fictional news network owed by the Roy family, would be seen in the background on a screen. 'And then, as it developed, I thought that it was really subtly tonally different,' Armstrong says. 'And maybe that is the answer to the question in terms of the relationship ... one's relationship to the real world is interesting. And this obviously relates to the real world and so did Succession. It's just finding a comfortable distance.' What is critical, perhaps, is to remember that Armstrong's creative DNA is naturally comedic. He was a writer on some of Britain's most significant political comedies, such as the television series, The Thick of It, and its spin-off film, In the Loop. 'It's often my way into something to find the bit which feels mad and ridiculous,' Armstrong says. 'In a certain way, I think the subject matter chooses the form, and then you write the form. And the form of this is very similar to Succession, but also completely different. 'You can try and formulate the rules for that, but essentially, they just come out as you write that these people speak like this and their logic can take them to this place. So, [certain] things are allowed, and they're not allowed in another piece. And it's both very technical but also beyond your control once you've set up the maths of the situation.' Important too, perhaps, is that despite the gravity of the piece overall – or, at least, the gravity of its implications – Armstrong is, essentially, still an optimist. In one scene, Jeff offers this depressing prediction for us: 'Earth is like an all-you-can-eat buffet; no one's going to stop until we clear all the hot plates.' It does not have to be so, says Armstrong. Loading 'I do feel I am personally optimistic,' he says. 'And that line that Ramy has, I do feel a bit like that. I feel certain pity for us in that we can't really help ourselves, that the stuff that's there, we take and we use, and our ability to take and use stuff, maybe our only hope is that we can keep mitigating that at a fast enough rate that our destructive tendencies can be tempered. And I also worry that we won't be able to do that, but I can only hope we do. I'm a bit like the guys in the film, I'm a techno-optimist.'
