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Irish Examiner
16 hours ago
- 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.
Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘Mountainhead' is a lock for an Emmy nod. Its actors, not so much
'Mountainhead,' a satirical skewering of tech oligarchs from 'Succession' showrunner Jesse Armstrong, arrived this weekend, dropping on the final day of this year's Emmy eligibility window. I'm Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter. While we're pondering the timeline to upload a human consciousness, let's consider 'Mountainhead' and its Emmy chances. Early on in 'Mountainhead,' tech bro and Elon Musk stand-in Venis Parish (Cory Michael Smith) uses film history to put the glitches of his company's latest AI rollout into perspective. 'The first time people saw a movie, everybody ran screaming because they thought they were gonna get hit by a train,' Venis relates, shouting out the Lumiere brothers' 1895 film, 'Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station.' 'The answer to that was not stop the movies. The answer was: Show more movies. We're gonna show users as much s— as possible, until everyone realizes nothing's that f— serious. Nothing means anything, and everything's funny and cool.' In the meantime, though, Venis' social media platform has given users the tools to create deepfakes so realistic they can't be identified as bogus. Immediately, people all over the world are uploading videos of their enemies committing atrocities, inflaming centuries-old animosities. Reality has collapsed and, with it, global stability. But for 'Mountainhead's' quartet of tech magnates, played by Smith, Steve Carell, Ramy Youssef and Jason Schwartzman, everything is just fine. As venture capitalist Randall Garrett (Carell) notes, 'We have plenty of calories stockpiled. Western countries have strategic commodity reserves, canola oil, lard, frozen orange juice.' Later, Randall asks: 'Are we the Bolsheviks of a new techno world order that starts tonight?' 'Mountainhead' is in many ways scarier than the zombie apocalypse of 'The Last of Us' because it feels like its premise is lurking right around the corner. Armstrong came up with the idea for the two-hour movie in November, after immersing himself in podcasts and books about Silicon Valley. He shot it in March, edited it in April and delivered it in May. It captures the DOGE era, specifically in the casual cruelty expressed by its entitled characters. 'Do you believe in other people?' Venis asks Randall. 'Eight billion people as real as us?' Randall's reply: 'Well, obviously not.' 'Mountainhead' aspires more directly to comedy, but because we don't have a history with these four deplorable men, it's often difficult to find the humor. 'Like 'Fountainhead' Mountainhead?' Youssef jokes to Schwartzman about the estate's title. 'Was your interior decorator Ayn Bland?' There's a procession of put-downs like that. When they're not roasting each other, they're trying to boost their own agendas — in the case of the cancer-stricken Randall, it's the quest to live forever as a disembodied consciousness. For all its Shakespearean drama, 'Succession' was wildly entertaining, more of a comedy than, yes, 'The Bear.' Kendall Roy performing the rap 'L to the OG' at a party honoring his father's half-century running Waystar Royco will be the funniest two minutes of television probably forever. But half the fun came from the characters' reactions to this transcendent moment of cringe. We were deeply invested in this world. For all their money and power, the 'Mountainhead' moguls are, like the Roy children in 'Succession,' not serious people. But beyond that, 'Mountainhead' doesn't have much of anything novel to say about its subjects. As good as Smith is at channeling Musk's alien, empathy-deficient otherness, you can come away with the same level of insight — and entertainment — by spending a few minutes watching Mike Myers on 'Saturday Night Live.' I don't need to watch a movie to know that a guy sitting on a gold toilet isn't prioritizing anyone's interests but his own. 'Mountainhead,' as mentioned, arrives on the last day of 2024-25 Emmy eligibility, less by design than from necessity. The paint's still wet on this film. But this does mark the third straight season that HBO has dropped a TV movie right before the deadline. Last year, it was 'The Great Lillian Hall,' starring Jessica Lange as fading Broadway legend. Two years ago, it was the excellent whistleblower thriller 'Reality,' featuring a star turn from Sydney Sweeney. Both movies were blanked at the Emmys, though Kathy Bates did manage a Screen Actors Guild Awards nod for 'Lillian Hall.' Did the movies land too late for enough people see them? Perhaps. The late arrival time should mean they'd be fresh in voters' minds when they fill out their ballots. But you have to be aware of them for that to happen. Awareness shouldn't be an issue with 'Mountainhead.' Enough people will want to watch the new offering from the creator of 'Succession,' and there's not much else on television vying for attention right now. 'Mountainhead' should score a nomination for television movie, even with the category being stronger than usual this year with audience favorites 'Rebel Ridge,' the latest 'Bridget Jones' movie and Scott Derrickson's enjoyable, genre-bending 'The Gorge' competing. But actors in these TV movies are at competitive disadvantage as the Emmys lump them together with their counterparts in limited series, performers who are onscreen for a much longer time. This decade, only two TV movie actors have been nominated — Hugh Jackman ('Bad Education') and Daniel Radcliffe ('Weird: The Al Yankovic Story'). The lead actress category, meanwhile, has been completely dominated by limited series. Not that there are any women starring in 'Mountainhead' because ... tech bros. As for the men, Carell, Schwartzman, Smith and Youssef are very good at conveying delusional arrogance. I despised each and every one of their characters. If hate-voting were a thing, they'd all be nominated.
Gulf Today
2 days 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
Arab Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Arab Times
A tech bro-pocalypse in ‘Mountainhead'
LOS ANGELES, June 1, (AP): 'Succession' fans rejoice. Jesse Armstrong has again gathered together a conclave of uber-wealthy megalomaniacs in a delicious satire. 'Mountainhead,' which the 'Succession' creator wrote and directed, is a new made-for-HBO movie that leaves behind the backstabbing machinations of media moguls for the not-any-better power plays of tech billionaires. Or, at least, three billionaires. Their host for a poker weekend in the mountains at a sprawling estate named after Ayn Rand's 'The Fountainhead' is Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), the solo member of the group not to reach, as they say, 'B-nut' status. His net worth is a paltry $521 million. The others are three of the wealthiest men in the world. Randall (Steve Carell) is their senior, a kind of Steve Jobs-like mentor they all call 'Papa Bear.' Jeff (Ramy Youssef), who runs the world's leading AI company, calls Randall the 'Dark Money Gandalf.' Lastly, but maybe most notably, is Venis (Cory Michael Smith), whose social media platform boasts 4 billion users globally. But the latest update to Venis' platform, named Traam, is causing havoc. As the four gather at Hugo's isolated perch in the Utah mountains, news reports describe violence sweeping across Asia due to an outbreak of deepfakes on Traam that have wrecked any sense of reality. Yet what's real for this quartet of digital oligarchs - none of whom has a seemingly direct reallife corollary, all of whom are immediately recognizable - is more to the point of 'Mountainhead,' a frightfully credible comedy about the delusions of tech utopianism. Each of the four, with the exception of some hesitancy on the part of Jeff, are zealous futurist. On the way to Mountainhead, a doctor gives Randall a fatal diagnosis that he outright refuses. 'All the things we can do and we can't fix one tiny little piece of gristle in me?' Dialogue But together, in Armstrong's dense, highly quotable dialogue, their arrogance reaches hysterical proportions. While the cast is altogether excellent, this is most true with Smith's Venis, a tech bro to end all tech bros. As the news around the world gets worse and worse, his certainty doesn't waver. Earth, itself, no longer hold much interest for him. 'I just want to get us transhuman!' he shouts. Progress (along with net worth) is their cause, and much of the farce of 'Mountainhead' derives from just how much any semblance of compassion for humanity has left the building. It's in the way Venis blanches at the mention of his baby son. It's in the way, as death counts escalate in the news on their phones, they toy with world politics like kids at a Risk board. In one perfectly concise moment, Venis asks, sincerely, 'Do you believe in other people?' If 'Succession' filtered its media satire through family relationships, 'Mountainhead' runs on the dynamics of bro-styled male friendship. There are beefs, hug-it-out moments, passive-aggressive put downs and eruptions of anger. Part of the fun of Armstrong's film isn't just how their behavior spills into a geopolitical events but how it manifests, for example, in which room everyone gets. All of 'Mountainhead' unfolds in the one location, with white mountaintops stretching in the distance outside the fl oor-to-ceiling windows. It could be a play. Instead, though, it's something that either hardly exists anymore or, maybe, exists everywhere: the made-for-TV movie. There's no lack of films made for streaming services, but many of them fall into some in-between aesthetic that couldn't fill a big screen and feel a touch disposable on the small screen. But 'Mountainhead' adheres to the tradition of the HBO movie; it's lean, topical and a fine platform for its actors. And for Armstrong, it's a way to keep pursuing some of the timely themes of 'Succession' while dispensing lines like: 'Coup-out the US? That's a pretty big enchilada.' 'Mountainhead,' an HBO Films release, is unrated by the Motion Picture Association. Running time: 109 minutes. Three stars out of four.
Time Magazine
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
The Real Life Tech Execs That Inspired Jesse Armstrong's Mountainhead
Jesse Armstrong loves to pull fictional stories out of reality. His universally acclaimed TV show Succession, for instance, was inspired by real-life media dynasties like the Murdochs and the Hearsts. Similarly, his newest film Mountainhead centers upon characters that share key traits with the tech world's most powerful leaders: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and others. Mountainhead, which releases on HBO on May 31 at 8 p.m. ET, portrays four top tech executives who retreat to a Utah hideaway as the AI deepfake tools newly released by one of their companies wreak havoc across the world. As the believable deepfakes inflame hatred on social media and real-world violence, the comfortably-appointed quartet mulls a global governmental takeover, intergalactic conquest and immortality, before interpersonal conflict derails their plans. Armstrong tells TIME in a Zoom interview that he first became interested in writing a story about tech titans after reading books like Michael Lewis' Going Infinite (about Sam Bankman-Fried) and Ashlee Vance's Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, as well as journalistic profiles of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and others. He then built the story around the interplay between four character archetypes—the father, the dynamo, the usurper, and the hanger-on—and conducted extensive research so that his fictional executives reflected real ones. His characters, he says, aren't one-to-one matches, but 'Frankenstein monsters with limbs sewn together.' These characters are deeply flawed and destructive, to say the least. Armstrong says he did not intend for the film to be a wholly negative depiction of tech leaders and AI development. 'I do try to take myself out of it, but obviously my sense of what this tech does and could do infuses the piece. Maybe I do have some anxieties,' he says. Armstrong contends that the film is more so channeling fears that AI leaders themselves have warned about. 'If somebody who knows the technology better than anyone in the world thinks there's a 1/5th chance that it's going to wipe out humanity—and they're some of the optimists—I think that's legitimately quite unnerving,' he says. Here's how each of the characters in Mountainhead resembles real-world tech leaders. This article contains spoilers. Venis (Cory Michael Smith) is the dynamo. Venis is Armstrong's 'dynamo': the richest man in the world, who has gained his wealth from his social media platform Traam and its 4 billion users. Venis is ambitious, juvenile, and self-centered, even questioning whether other people are as real as him and his friends. Venis' first obvious comp is Elon Musk, the richest man in the real world. Like Musk, Venis is obsessed with going to outer space and with using his enormous war chest to build hyperscale data centers to create powerful anti-woke AI systems. Venis also has a strange relationship with his child, essentially using it as a prop to help him through his own emotional turmoil. Throughout the movie, others caution Venis to shut down his deepfake AI tools which have led to military conflict and the desecration of holy sites across the world. Venis rebuffs them and says that people just need to adapt to technological changes and focus on the cool art being made. This argument is similar to those made by Sam Altman, who has argued that OpenAI needs to unveil ChatGPT and other cutting-edge tools as fast as possible in order to show the public the power of the technology. Like Mark Zuckerberg, Venis presides over a massively popular social media platform that some have accused of ignoring harms in favor of growth. Just as Amnesty International accused Meta of having 'substantially contributed' to human rights violations perpetrated against Myanmar's Rohingya ethnic group, Venis complains of the UN being 'up his ass for starting a race war.' Randall (Steve Carell) is the father. The group's eldest member is Randall, an investor and technologist who resembles Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel in his lofty philosophizing and quest for immortality. Like Andreessen, Randall is a staunch accelerationist who believes that U.S. companies need to develop AI as fast as possible in order to both prevent the Chinese from controlling the technology, and to ostensibly ignite a new American utopia in which productivity, happiness, and health flourish. Randall's power comes from the fact that he was Venis' first investor, just as Thiel was an early investor in Facebook. While Andreessen pens manifestos about technological advancement, Randall paints his mission in grandiose, historical terms, using anti-democratic, sci-fi-inflected language that resembles that of the philosopher Curtis Yarvin, who has been funded and promoted by Thiel over his career. Randall's justification of murder through utilitarian and Kantian lenses calls to mind Sam Bankman-Fried's extensive philosophizing, which included a declaration that he would roll the dice on killing everyone on earth if there was a 51% chance he would create a second earth. Bankman-Fried's approach—in embracing risk and harm in order to reap massive rewards—led him to be convicted of massive financial fraud. Randall is also obsessed with longevity just like Thiel, who has railed for years against the 'inevitability of death' and yearns for 'super-duper medical treatments' that would render him immortal. Jeff (Ramy Youssef) is the usurper. Jeff is a technologist who often serves as the movie's conscience, slinging criticisms about the other characters. But he's also deeply embedded within their world, and he needs their resources, particularly Venis' access to computing power, to thrive. In the end, Jeff sells out his values for his own survival and well-being. AI skeptics have lobbed similar criticisms at the leaders of the main AI labs, including Altman—who started OpenAI as a nonprofit before attempting to restructure the company—as well as Demis Hassabis and Dario Amodei. Hassabis is the CEO of Google Deepmind and a winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; a rare scientist surrounded by businessmen and technologists. In order to try to achieve his AI dreams of curing disease and halting global warning, Hassabis enlisted with Google, inking a contract in 2014 in which he prohibited Google from using his technology for military applications. But that clause has since disappeared, and the AI systems developed under Hassabis are being sold, via Google, to militaries like Israel's. Another parallel can be drawn between Jeff and Amodei, an AI researcher who defected from OpenAI after becoming worried that the company was cutting back its safety measures, and then formed his own company, Anthropic. Amodei has urged governments to create AI guardrails and has warned about the potentially catastrophic effects of the AI industry's race dynamics. But some have criticized Anthropic for operating similarly to OpenAI, prioritizing scale in a way that exacerbates competitive pressures. Souper (Jason Schwartzman) is the hanger-on. Every quartet needs its Turtle or its Ringo; a clear fourth wheel to serve as a punching bag for the rest of the group's alpha males. Mountainhead 's hanger-on is Souper, thus named because he has soup kitchen money compared to the rest (hundreds of millions as opposed to billions of dollars). In order to prove his worth, he's fixated on getting funding for a meditation startup that he hopes will eventually become an 'everything app.' No tech exec would want to be compared to Souper, who has a clear inferiority complex. But plenty of tech leaders have emphasized the importance of meditation and mindfulness—including Twitter co-founder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey, who often goes on meditation retreats. Armstrong, in his interview, declined to answer specific questions about his characters' inspirations, but conceded that some of the speculations were in the right ballpark. 'For people who know the area well, it's a little bit of a fun house mirror in that you see something and are convinced that it's them,' he says. 'I think all of those people featured in my research. There's bits of Andreessen and David Sacks and some of those philosopher types. It's a good parlor game to choose your Frankenstein limbs.'
