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Tag: Jeremy Strong

  • Jesse Eisenberg Says He Didn’t Return for ‘Social Network’ Sequel “for Reasons That Have Nothing to Do With” the Movie

    Jesse Eisenberg is leaving his turn as Mark Zuckerberg in the past.

    Eisenberg, who played the Facebook CEO in the David Fincher-directed film The Social Network, surprised fans when it was reported in June that a sequel was in the works, but Eisenberg wasn’t coming back to play its lead.

    During a Thursday appearance on the Today show, the Now You See Me: Now You Don’t star was asked why he wouldn’t return for the second film, The Social Reckoning. “Listen, for reasons that have nothing to do with how amazing that movie will be, really, truthfully,” Eisenberg said. “But when you play a character, you feel, at some point, you’ve grown into something else.”

    When asked if he’s outgrown the character, the actor responded, “Yeah, something. But it’s a really wonderful movie. I’m friends with Aaron Sorkin who wrote and is directing this movie, and all of the reasons that I am not in it are completely unrelated to how brilliant it will be.”

    The 2010 film scored eight Oscar nominations and won three, including adapted screenplay for Sorkin. The film grossed $226 million globally. Its cast included Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg, Andrew Garfield’s Eduardo Saverin, Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker and Armie Hammer as the Winklevoss twins.

    In the upcoming sequel — which has Aaron Sorkin, writer of the first film, directing and writing for Sony — Jeremy Strong will play Zuckerberg. “It’s one of the great scripts I’ve ever read. It speaks to our time, it touches the third rail of everything happening in our world,” Strong told The Hollywood Reporter earlier this month. “It’s a great character — fascinating, complex — and I’m approaching it with great care and empathy and objectivity.”

    The Succession actor also noted that he hasn’t spoken to Eisenberg about taking over his role. “I think that has nothing to do with what I’m going to do,” Strong told THR.

    In addition to Strong, Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White and Bill Burr are among its cast. The film takes place 17 years after the original ended. It follows a young Facebook engineer, Frances Haugen (Madison), and Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (White), who work together to spotlight the secrets of the social network.

    The Social Reckoning will release in theaters over Columbus Day weekend next year.

    Lexi Carson

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  • Reviews For The Easily Distracted: Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere – Houston Press

    Title: Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

    Describe This Movie Using One St. Elmo’s Fire Quote:
    ALEC: “No Springsteen is leaving this house! You can have all the … Carly Simons.”

    Brief Plot Synopsis: Singer-songwriter is born to run, but can’t escape the darkness on the edge of town his subconscious.

    Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: 2.5 Denise Huxtables out of 5.

    NBC

    Tagline: N/A

    Better Tagline: “Wrapped up like a douche, another runner in the night.”

    Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: Freehold, NJ’s own Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) has just come off a successful tour in support of The River, and both the record company and manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) are ready to strike while the iron is hot. Springsteen, however, isn’t content to chase the next hit single, and draws inspiration from Terence Malick’s Badlands and his own troubled history with his father for more somber inspiration. You could almost say he has a … hungry heart. Ok, I’ll stop now.

    YouTube video

    “Critical” Analysis: The relative trickle of musical biopics that came down the cinematic pike at the beginning of the century (Ray, Walk the Line) has turned into a deluge. This is thanks to a combination of Boomer nostalgia and such movies serving as reliable awards bait for its stars. The recent efforts have ranged from quite good (Rocketman, Elvis) to rather bad (Bohemian Rhapsody, Back to Black), with most efforts falling somewhere in the middle (One Love, Respect).

    Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is the latter. Writer/director Scott Cooper is clearly a fan of the Boss (the screening I attended began with a clip of Cooper explaining his “vision” for the movie). And, with credits under his belt like Crazy Heart, has shown a knack for thoughtful examinations of artistic characters. Deliver Me From Nowhere attempts to replicate this, only with less success.

    Cooper takes a page from A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s widely lauded 2024 Bob Dylan bio, by narrowing the film’s focus. Specifically, the two years following the River tour when Springsteen wrote and recorded songs in a rented house in Colts Neck, NJ. These songs would become Nebraska and, later, Born in the U.S.A. Springsteen is already “The Boss” at this point, having released a trio of superlative albums (Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River) and establishing a reputation for Herculean live performances.

    But Springsteen is a troubled guy; nonplussed by label demands, struggling with the direction of his new music, and coming to grips with his abusive childhood. The result is a lot of brooding Bruce: on the seashore, in his hometown of Freehold, and in his rental living room while Badlands plays seemingly on repeat.

    And nobody broods quite like Jeremy Allen White. Of course, he doesn’t really look like Bruce Springsteen. Even with his blond locks dyed Boss brown, there’s not the squint-and-you-can-kinda-see-it resemblance that Timothée Chalamet and Joaquin Phoenix had to Dylan and Johnny Cash. He has the Jersey patois down, and wears the jeans and leather jacket well, but it’s still a stretch.

    Credit: 20th Century Studios

    So it’s fortunate that Cooper isn’t focused on those aforementioned live performances. Aside from the opening scene and some of Bruce jamming with the Stone Pony’s house band (Cats on a Smooth Surface), Deliver Me From Nowhere is more concerned with his inner journey. It’d just be nice if the director concentrated on those more powerhouse scenes with White in the third act than having him staring into the middle distance the rest of the time.

    White’s pretty good, which is no surprise. Even better is Strong, who holds all the strands together. His Landau is both a friend to Springsteen and a champion of his vision to the suits at Columbia (personified by David Krumholz as label president Al Teller). He’s also who the one who finally got Springsteen help for his depression.

    Depression and other mental illnesses also afflicted Springsteen’s father Doug (Adolescence’s Stephen Graham, having quite the run of playing troubled dads), whose negative impact on his son is twofold: abuse — of both the physical and psychological variety — and Bruce’s growing fear that he may turn out like him.

    But that’s not exactly an unexamined aspect of biopics, and Deliver Me From Nowhere — though authentic to its surroundings and featuring solid performances all around — doesn’t have a lot new to say. It doesn’t stray significantly from formula, and is also strangely inert And that may be the biggest slight of all against its subject.

    Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is in theaters today.

    This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.

    Pete Vonder Haar

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  • Screening at NYFF: Scott Cooper’s ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’

    Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2025 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

    The first and final scenes of any film are vital, and contained within these bookends you can find the entire story of Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. Unfortunately, nearly everything in between is standard biopic filler and reinforces filmmaker Scott Cooper’s unique position in the Hollywood landscape: he’s a tremendous director of actors and quite unremarkable at most other parts of the job.

    Based on Warren Zanes’ Bruce Springsteen biography of the same name, the film (which Cooper both directed and wrote) tells the story of how the famed heartland rocker created Nebraska—perhaps his most time-tested album—but it seldom has anything to say beyond observing his emotional troubles during this period, often at great dramatic distance. Despite this contained focus on a one-year period, Deliver Me From Nowhere is very much a decades-spanning saga in the tale of most by-the-numbers “true stories” about revered figures and begins with a monochrome depiction of a young Springsteen (Matthew Pellicano Jr.) listening to his father (Stephen Graham) abuse his mother (Gaby Hoffmann) in the next room. A hard cut from his haunted expression to the adult Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) delivering a full-throated, thoroughly embodied performance of “Born to Run” in 1981 creates a strange but appropriate thematic link between these childhood events and Springsteen’s ’70s mega-hit. Regardless of what the song was actually about (in short: a girl), its lyrics become an obvious cipher here for a man escaping his past at lightspeed. If only the rest of the film had maintained this momentum.

    As mentioned, Deliver Me From Nowhere does in fact conclude with a touching gesture toward catharsis, so in theory one could string these brief opening and closing acts together to create a much more impactful short film without losing very much by way of story. However, viewers then wouldn’t be treated to the real delights of a Scott Cooper joint: broad caricatures who become imbued with beating humanity in a way so few American filmmakers tend to manage. As Springsteen begins work on his next album, he sees the process as a long-overdue exorcism of personal demons, while his record executives et al. want more hits for the radio. The Boss, however, is largely shielded from these demands, leaving his manager and producer Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) to advocate on his behalf.

    This side of things—the logistics of creating the next big hit or cultural phenomenon—features little by way of discernible drama despite the many arguments that play out in the confines of various offices. And yet it can be intriguing to watch in its own way, as Landau becomes the de facto point-of-view character for lengthy stretches, talking up Springsteen’s genius to anyone who’ll listen (including and especially David Krumholtz’s Columbia record exec) while barely giving any pushback to the artist himself. There’s a sense of inevitability to Nebraska coming into being (and the iconic Born in the U.S.A. after it, which used many of his original concepts for the former). On one hand, this rarely affords the movie any meaningful stakes. On the other, it allows Strong to create a cautiously eager version of Landau who practically bleeds adoration for Springsteen. Similarly, Paul Walter Hauser plays an eager recording engineer who goes along with Springsteen’s intentionally lo-fi plans for Nebraska, while Marc Maron plays a mostly silent studio mixer who, despite a few incredulous reactions, largely goes along with things. After all, who is he, and who are any of them, to question the Boss?

    A man with curly hair and a sweat-soaked shirt sings passionately into a microphone on stage, one arm raised in the air under bright concert lights.A man with curly hair and a sweat-soaked shirt sings passionately into a microphone on stage, one arm raised in the air under bright concert lights.
    White’s conception of Springsteen is joyful to witness. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2025 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

    This kind of idolatry is usually the raison d’être for jukebox “IP” biopics like Deliver Me From Nowhere, and there’s a refreshing honesty to the hagiography refracted in Strong’s doting gaze. Granted, the film is prevented from veering into full-on Boss propaganda by the personal half of the story, in which he enters a romance with radiant single mother Faye Romano (Odessa Young), a relationship that feels doomed by the very same inevitability that colors the movie’s making-of-Nebraska half. He offers her, up front, a premonition of what will inevitably happen—that he won’t be able to commit himself to loving her so long as this album and its ghosts hang around his neck—but with the movie’s parameters all clearly established, in the studio and behind closed doors, there remains little reason to watch it beyond its performances. Springsteen will prioritize his work, people will laud his musical talent and he will eventually confront the wounds of his past, but none of these are framed as part of a story where Springsteen’s or anyone’s human impulses threaten to derail the inevitable for even a moment.

    White’s conception of Springsteen is joyful to witness, not just for the way he impersonates the Boss’s gravelly voice and vein-popping performances but for the way he conjures Springsteen’s spirit through exaggeration. He crafts a sense of mood (and moodiness) where the film might not otherwise contain it, brooding to the extreme and sitting in Jersey and New York diner booths hunched over to the side, leaning so far that he threatens to keel over. He doesn’t so much play Springsteen as he does an imaginary, effortlessly cool, deeply tormented version that James Dean might have portrayed, and Deliver Me From Nowhere is slightly better for it. In tandem with Masanobu Takayanagi’s cinematography, which subtly silhouettes the superstar and turns him into an icon even in mundane settings, the film has tremendous physical architecture even if its emotional architecture is practically null.

    SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE ★★ (2/4 stars)
    Directed by: Scott Cooper
    Written by: Scott Cooper
    Starring: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham, Odessa Young, David Krumholtz, Gaby Hoffmann, Harrison Sloan Gilbertson, Grace Gummer, Marc Maron, Matthew Pellicano Jr.
    Running time: 114 mins.

    Clichés abound in the form of flowery dialogue, but the kind that, when imbued with enough cinematic gusto—Springsteen speaks of “finding silence amongst the noise”—can transcend their trappings and become jubilant. Unfortunately, here they end up as overwritten pablum that struggles to convey meaning.

    There are movie references aplenty, from Springsteen discovering dark subject matter through a Terrence Malick film and flashbacks of him enjoying Charles Laughton’s sumptuous The Night of the Hunter with his father. But these only serve as mood boards, presented as-is when Springsteen watches them, rather than becoming stylistic or thematic influences for the artist or for the film at large. They become reminders of how comparatively little by way of style or philosophy Cooper puts into his work, even if his protagonist can be seen watching them, enjoying them and being influenced by them in a way that makes his wheels silently turn. But what that influence leads to, and the synapses it fires, remain something of a mystery.

    At the end of the day, Deliver Me From Nowhere is a film worth looking at and observing from the same distance that Cooper frames his impenetrable version of Springsteen, whose troubles hover over his creative process like a gloomy cloud. But the camera seldom looks past the pristine surfaces it creates in order to explore those problems or Springsteen’s connection to the many lyrics we see him jotting down throughout the runtime. “Double album??” he scrawls at one point, underlining it twice in a gesture that hilariously ends up with about as much weight and meaning as any of Springsteen’s actual lyrics—in a film nominally about the lifelong pain that fuels them. Sure. Double album. Why the hell not?

    Screening at NYFF: Scott Cooper’s ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’

    Siddhant Adlakha

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  • The Social Network Follow Up Is App-ening

    Yeah, brother.
    Photo: Merrick Morton/Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection

    It’s hard to quantify the success of The Social Network. It made $224 million at the box office against a $40 million budget; it was nominated for eight Oscars, winning three; it recently placed at No. 10 on both the New York Times’ industry poll and readers poll for the best movies of the 21st century. So … let’s make another one, right? That always goes well. The Social Network’s “follow-up” is in development at Sony with Aaron Sorkin returning to direct in addition to writing the script. Below, everything we know about the sequel that’s not exactly a sequel, including the latest cast members.

    The movie, which is not a direct sequel to the original film, is titled The Social Reckoning, per Variety.

    The film will be based on 2021 Wall Street Journal reports “The Facebook Files,” by Horwitz. Based on leaked internal documents from Facebook, the reports claim Facebook allowed celebrities and public figures (like Donald Trump) to post content that regular users (like activists) would not be allowed to post, then did not tell its Oversight Committee. They also allege that Facebook’s response to human and drug trafficking on the site was “weak” and that Facebook knew that Instagram is “toxic” for teen girls but downplayed the negative effects publicly. The documents that the reporting was based on were gathered and disclosed by Haugen, a product manager on Facebook’s civic integrity team.

    Jesse Eisenberg is not attached to return as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Instead, Succession star Jeremy Strong is taking over the part, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Hard to imagine J. Strong in a curly wig, but based on the similar cringe-o-meter ratings between “L to the OG,” from Succession, and Zuckerberg serenading his wife with “Get Low,” the casting isn’t out of nowhere. Despite his role as Zuck, Strong will not be the lead of the film. That honor will be shared between Anora’s Oscar winner Mikey Madison, who will play Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen and The Bear star Jeremy Allen White, who will play the journalist who wrote Haugen’s secrets up, Jeff Horwitz. They’ll all be joined by comedian Bill Burr in an unknown role. Maybe himself?

    Additional cast members include Sinners star Wunmi Mosaku as well as the recently announced Billy Magnussen, former Mary Lincoln Betty Gilpin, Gbenga Akinnagbe, and Anna Lambe of True Detective: North Country.

    The Social Reckoning will be released in a little over a year, on October 9, 2026. Get zucking ready.

    Jason P. Frank

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  • The Social Network 2 is coming next fall and stars Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg

    The long-awaited sequel to The Social Network will hit theaters next fall, according to a report by Deadline. The official release date is set for October 9, 2026, which is just about 16 years after the first film dropped.

    We also have plenty of other information, including the full cast and the actual name of the movie. The official name is The Social Reckoning, which makes sense as the movie follows recent events in which Facebook got into legal and political trouble when a whistleblower alleged that the company knew the platform was harming society but did nothing about it.

    The cast is being led by Jeremy Strong from Succession, who takes over Zuckerberg duties from actor Jesse Eisenberg. Mikey Madison is playing the aforementioned whistle blower Frances Haugen and The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White portrays Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horowitz.

    Bill Burr is also appearing in this flick, though we don’t know in what capacity. The Hollywood Reporter has suggested he will play a fictional character invented for the film that will be an amalgamation of several people. Aaron Sorkin is both writing and directing this one. He wrote the first movie, but David Fincher directed it.

    Lawrence Bonk

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  • Canada to End Foreign Actor Eligibility for 2026 Screen Awards

    The organizers of the Canadian Screen Awards, the country’s Oscars and Emmys, are to end nomination eligibility for foreign talent, including American actors, starting with the 2026 edition.

    “In order to best celebrate and honor Canadians working on Canadian productions, individuals must be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident of Canada to be eligible for a Canadian Screen Award,” the Academy said as tightened eligibility and voting rule changes unveiled Wednesday come amid rising U.S.-Canada diplomatic and trade tensions.

    Making CSAs eligibility exclusively available to homegrown talent or those with residency follows a rise in Canadian nationalism countrywide after U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff and annexation threats. Honoring the best in Canadian film and TV in past years occasionally had CSA trophies going to Americans and other foreign talent as productions with Hollywood actors, or U.S. streamers investing in Canadian projects, aim to drive increased international sales.

    During the 2025 CSAs, Cate Blanchett won for best lead performance in a comedy for her role in Guy Maddin’s Rumours, and The Apprentice, a Canada-Ireland-Denmark co-production and a Donald Trump origin drama, earned the best film prize. Also, the best performance in a lead role trophy went to Sebastian Stan for his portrayal of Trump while the best supporting actor win was awarded to Jeremy Strong for his performance as Roy Cohn. 

    As Canadian talent and content increasingly figures on the world stage, other Canadian Academy rule changes include introducing four new “Spotlight” categories to honor Canadian directors, writers, performers and producers who work on international TV series made and broadcast in Canada. 

    And while Trump’s threat ahead of Cannes to impose a 100 percent tariff on films made outside of the U.S., including Canada, has faded with no concrete policy action, the turbulence of the U.S. president’s global trade war is still felt by a Canadian entertainment industry dependent for jobs and investment on Hollywood production hubs in Toronto and Vancouver.

    The CSAs will also launch a Creator of the Year prize to honor a Canadian digital creator whose original work has found significant online reach on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch and other digital and social media platforms. ACTRA, the country’s actors union, welcomed the rule changes to make eligibility exclusively available to Canadian citizens or permanent residents north of the border.

    “At a time when Canada’s cultural sovereignty is under pressure, the Canadian Screen Awards are uniquely positioned to celebrate Canadian excellence, with Canadian performers rightfully at the center. This decision is a vital investment in Canada’s cultural future,” the actors union said in a statement.

    But Allan Ungar, the Canadian director of London Calling, an action comedy starring Josh Duhamel and Jeremy Ray Taylor and premiering this weekend in theaters, argued the rule changes, while supporting the Academy’s mandate to promote local talent, threatens to limit the sale and promotional reach of homegrown movies in international markets.

    “It’s a little disappointing, especially as we’re making Canadian films by Canadians, and often we have to feature American actors to get them financed and sold worldwide,” Ungar told The Hollywood Reporter.

    Etan Vlessing

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  • Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong on How Bruce Springsteen and Jon Landau Let Them In

    Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong have both experienced a meteoric rise in stardom thanks to their time on two critically acclaimed TV series. But being the star of The Bear or Succession is nothing compared to walking around a film festival with a music icon like Bruce Springsteen.

    At the Telluride Film Festival on Saturday, White, who plays Springsteen in the new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, and Strong, who plays Springsteen’s longtime manager Jon Landau, were joined by their real-life counterparts for a sold-out screening of the film. The screams were deafening when Springsteen came to the stage for the post-screening Q&A. Springsteen told the crowd he had finally signed off on a movie about his life because he considers it an “antibiopic” since it focuses closely on just two years of his life. “And I’m old and I don’t give a fuck what I do,” he added to laughs.

    Deliver Me From Nowhere, directed by Scott Cooper, centers on the time when Springsteen was making his 1982 album Nebraska, while struggling with depression and challenging memories from his past. Springsteen and Landau worked closely with White and Strong as they prepared to play the characters, and were also present on set.

    For White and Strong, recreating the steadfast friendship between these two was easy, but performing these characters in front of their real-life counterparts wasn’t. On the ground at Telluride, they spoke to Vanity Fair about Springsteen’s openness, relating to struggles with fame, and why Strong left Landau a voicemail as Landau.

    Vanity Fair: What was it like the first time you met Bruce Springsteen and Jon Landau?

    Jeremy Allen White: We’d been in touch a little bit through text, and I had been preparing for a couple months before meeting him. But my first time meeting Bruce was at an empty Wembley [Stadium] in London. I went to soundcheck and got to watch him. After soundcheck, he saw me and called me over, and our first 20 minutes of talking were center stage at Wembley.

    Were you nervous?

    White: I was nervous, but I was with Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson.

    Wait, are they friends of yours?

    White: No, I had had lunch at Emma’s house with another friend. Because of the generation that Emma and Pierce are from, I saw them react [to Bruce]. They’re such confident and charismatic people, and I saw them kind of get shy in his presence, which gave me, somehow, a little bit more confidence. So yes, I was nervous, but also, when you spend a little bit of time around Bruce, he’s so available and sort of generous and accommodating. It didn’t take long until there was a real ease in the conversation that happened pretty quickly.

    Jeremy Strong: I was in Denmark last summer and drove a couple hours to where they were playing a show, and was sort of whisked into the complex of trailers and into a room with Bruce and Jon. And it’s interesting as an actor for me, before you’ve done the work and before you’ve entered into something, you’re totally outside of it. So I remember feeling like, I know somehow between now and X amount of months from now I’m going to be inside of this. But I met them before that was the case, so it was just kind of putting my toes in the water.

    But it was a really profound experience. I’d never seen Bruce play before. Watching this ritual that he had with Jon before the show, which I subsequently learned is a ritual they have before every show—hundreds, maybe thousands of shows—where they sort of hold each other by his shoulders, kind of touch heads a bit of a benediction before Bruce goes out and plays the show. It gave me so much emotional information.

    How did you come to understand the bond they have?

    Rebecca Ford

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  • Jeremy Strong’s Meme-Bait Monologue Cut From Springsteen Biopic ‘Deliver Me from Nowhere’: No More ‘Hole in the Floor’

    Becoming a meme doesn’t guarantee you make it into the final cut.

    Jeremy Strong fans will learn this the hard way come October 24, when “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” hits theaters. Variety can report that a divisive monologue performed by Strong in the film’s official trailer has been snipped from the final product, the result of a creative decision by director Scott Cooper, per one source.

    Strong plays longtime Bruce Springsteen manager Jon Landau in the unconventional and emotionally charged biopic, which shows the rocker (played by Jeremy Allen White) coming to grips with his depression during the production of the 1982 album “Nebraska.”

    “When Bruce was little, he had a hole in the floor of his bedroom. A floor that’s supposed to be solid, he’s supposed to be able to stand on. Bruce didn’t have that,” Strong narrates in the still-circulating trailer. “Bruce is a repairman. What he’s doing with this album is, he’s repairing that hole in his floor. Repairing that hole in himself. Once he’s done that, he’s going to repair the entire world.”

    While the speech captures Landau’s hand in Springsteen’s personal and artistic development (stand-in father, consigliere, best friend), many took to social media to mock the prose and how it sets the film’s dramatic stakes. One user appropriated the monologue as an origin story for Fozzie Bear. It then became the latest and greatest use of the Mary Jane Defending Peter Parker template. The examples go on.

    An insider familiar with the film said that “in examining the film, it felt unnecessary.” A rep for the project had no comment on the matter.

    While it may be easy to take shots at Strong’s “Capital-A Acting” or even Cooper’s script adaptation, we should note that at Friday’s Telluride world premiere of “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” Strong elicited a positive response. His soft-touch portrait of Landau, sneaker-clad and with receding hair and concerned glances, tugged heartstrings. Others on the ground noted that the film is revelatory in how it shows, perhaps for the first time, Landau’s true influence on Springsteen (now a billionaire) and his place in history.

    Consider the hole in the floor repaired, but remember the friends we made along the way.

    Varietymattdonnelly

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  • “…And Good Business Is The Best Art”: The Apprentice

    “…And Good Business Is The Best Art”: The Apprentice

    Although director Ali Abbasi and writer Gabriel Sherman are certain to put a disclaimer title card at the beginning of The Apprentice that notes creative license was taken in retelling the story of Donald Trump’s (played by Sebastian Stan) rise to power in New York during the 70s and 80s, it’s no “embellishment” that Andy Warhol and Trump orbited orbited the same circles. In fact, the two first met at Roy Cohn’s birthday party on February 20, 1981 (Cohn was turning fifty-four, and would only have five years left to live), which Warhol would mention in one of his diary entries two days later, commenting of the event, “Black tie. The Mafioso types weren’t in black tie, though… There were about 200 people. Lots of heavies. Donald Trump, Carmine DeSapio, the D’Amatos, David Mahoney, Mark Goodson, Mr. LeFrak, Gloria Swanson, Jerry Zipkin, C.Z. Guest and Alexander, Warren Avis, Rupert Murdoch and John Kluge.”

    The significance of these two theoretically “divergent” types encountering one another in a Cohn-curated environment is taken the utmost advantage of by Sherman, who uses this kernel of hobnobbing history to create a scene of dialogue between Warhol and Trump in The Apprentice that allows the former to wield a riff on one of his famous aphorisms, “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During the hippie era people put down the idea of business. They’d say ‘money is bad’ and ‘working is bad.’ But making money is art, and working is art—and good business is the best art.” (Trump conveniently seemed to gloss over the word “good” in good business though, even if he chose to cite the quote in 2009’s Think Like A Champion.)

    On this matter, Trump can agree with someone as “liberal” as Warhol. Even if, like Cohn, Warhol’s politics (just as his sexuality) leaned more toward “a.” As in amoral and apolitical. That two so ostensibly “different” personalities could converge in a milieu with Cohn as the common denominator spoke to something about both Cohn and Warhol. In Warhol’s case, that his bottom line wasn’t just ahout making more money, but also attending any event with name-dropping potential for his diary. As for Cohn, an association with Warhol was yet another “Easter egg” about his so-called hidden sexuality. A sexuality that Trump, like so many things, chose to ignore. Or at least turn a blind eye to. After all, his friendship with Cohn was much too beneficial to let homophobia get in the way (until it finally did because of Cohn’s overt AIDS symptoms). Besides, Cohn literally made his career out of persecuting the LGBTQIA+ community during what was known as the Lavender Scare of the 1950s, a “companion piece” to the Red Scare, if you will. Of course, the irony was obvious considering Cohn’s own homosexuality. And the irony quotient was further upped because of how enthusiastic fellow homo J. Edgar Hoover was about Joseph McCarthy and Cohn’s concerted effort to expel anyone suspected of homosexuality from government.

    Even after McCarthy was disgraced and the tide turned against him and his tactics, Cohn was able to rise from the ashes and become the fixer to turn to in New York when someone had legal issues. And Trump had plenty of those starting in 1973, when the Department of Justice brought a civil rights lawsuit against the Trump Organization for its discriminatory practices against Black applicants attempting to rent an apartment at various Trump properties. It is at this point in time that Sherman sets the stage for the story to commence, for it is where Donald Trump truly starts to get on the path toward becoming Donald Trump. A “persona” that fully congeals and peaks in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan had taken control of the government and turned America into a “neoliberal paradise” (in other words, hell for most people), much to the delight of men like Trump. And even men like Warhol (who was a capitalist before he was a gay man).

    Warhol and Trump’s paths would cross again amid this “new world order,” soon after meeting at Cohn’s birthday party. In fact, Trump actually stopped into The Factory to discuss more of their favorite thing: “business.” Or the art of business (clearly, Trump would later take from that Warholian sentiment in titling his first book The Art of the Deal). At the time, there was talk of Warhol furnishing paintings for the then “still in production” Trump Tower. He did, indeed, create a series of “portraits” of the building (that meta flair) to be displayed in the lobby, but, per his August 5 (the day before his birthday), 1981 diary entry, “I showed them the paintings of the Trump Tower that I’d done. I don’t know why I did so many, I did eight. In black and gray and silver which I thought would be so chic for the lobby. But it was a mistake to do so many, I think it confused them. Mr. Trump was very upset that it wasn’t color-coordinated.”

    Eventually, “The Donald” side-stepping use of Warhol’s paintings in the building would yield even stronger reactions to him and his then wife, Ivana, with Warhol writing flat-out (on January 15, 1984), “I still hate the Trumps because they never bought the paintings I did of the Trump Tower.” Interestingly, his hatred of them doesn’t seem to stem from what they represent, but from what he failed to be a part of/get paid for. Though surely that wouldn’t have stopped him from attending the black-tie opening gala for Trump Tower in the fall of 1983, as The Apprentice shows him to. While Cohn is, obviously, the true Trump foil/mentor of the film, there’s no denying the pointed inclusion of Warhol, however briefly. For, lest anyone forget, Warhol single-handedly altered the perception of art into something viewed as an assembly line business—from both the artist and the consumer’s standpoint. And that odious word, “consumer,” in relation to art really didn’t start to be in vogue until Warhol made art into something designed for mass consumption.

    And, unlike, say, Keith Haring, Warhol’s intent was not for the “noble purpose” of disseminating art to people from all walks of life, but to make as much profit from it as possible. The same went for Trump in terms of buying up as much real estate as possible at a time when buildings in New York were selling for peanuts. It certainly wasn’t done as a “beneficent” way to “bring prestige back” to NYC, as Trump and his cohorts wanted to position it for their own “good PR” ends. One such key early cohort being Cohn (played to perfection by Jeremy “Kendall Roy” Strong). To be sure, the crux of The Apprentice—and where it gets its name apart from Trump’s shitty 00s reality show—is the Orange One’s formative relationship with Cohn. As such, The Apprentice reiterates that every dirty trick for “success” that Trump learned, he learned from Cohn, who took him under his wing as a client when few others would have bothered. Granted, it was Cohn who requested “an audience” with Trump first at what is supposed to be Le Club, a members-only place for somebodies and social climbers—Trump was clearly in the second camp.

    As for why Cohn summoned a then “Robert Redford-looking” Trump over under the pretense of congratulating him for becoming the youngest member to join the club, Sherman explains it best when he says, “There clearly was a father-son dynamic to their relationship. On another level, there was a homoerotic subtext. One of the things I found in my research is that a lot of Roy’s lovers were young, blonde, blue-eyed men who bore a striking resemblance to young Donald. I think Roy was attracted to Trump, in a way, and this movie is sort of a love story.” Needless to say, a very fucked-up love story involving a gross betrayal from the “student who has surpassed the teacher” in terms of merciless cold-bloodedness. It’s a slowly mounting callousness he’s proud of, too, telling Ivana (Maria Bakalova) during their “courtship phase” (a.k.a. he relentlessly pursues her to the point of stalking) that there are only two kinds of people in this life: killers or losers.

    Britney phrased it better when she divided the two kinds of people into “the ones that entertain and the ones that observe” on “Circus.” And yes, that’s what Trump turned his life into after securing the renovation of The Commodore hotel next to Grand Central, partnering (always a loose word with Trump involved) with Hyatt’s Pritzker family to reinvent it as the Grand Hyatt. It is Cohn, of course, who is speculated to have “silently” helped Trump push this deal through, complete with his standard brand of blackmailing select politicos. And while there might be no direct evidence to support that narrative claim in The Apprentice, sometimes, a bit of deductive reasoning is all it takes for something to be believable.

    The same goes for the allusion to Trump being an avid user of amphetamines throughout the 1980s, another key component in The Apprentice to comprehending his gradual mutation into a Frankenstein monster—with Cohn as his Dr. Frankenstein. Sherman’s script is essential to unfolding that arc, along with his previous experience writing about another conservative monster, Roger Ailes, which eventually became a bestselling book called The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News – and Divided a Country. Sherman came to see Ailes as “a real-life modern-day Citizen Kane figure and someone who had been so kind of corrupted and corroded by his own lust for power.” This, too, is how he sees both Cohn and Trump, but especially the latter. And, as though to “subtly” underscore that point, the set design for one of Trump’s pre-80s yuppie apartments features a poster of Citizen Kane in the living room area. Undeniably, Trump has that same ego and empire (even if said empire is built on smoke and mirrors) as Charles Foster Kane. The New York Times thought so long ago, titling a 1983 article about the “mogul,” “The Empire and Ego of Donald Trump.” In it, the eponymous subject gives the telling quote, “‘Not many sons have been able to escape their fathers,’ said Donald Trump, the president of the Trump Organization, by way of interpreting his accomplishments.”

    And yet, if Cohn is to be viewed as his “surrogate father,” Trump most certainly hasn’t escaped his “daddy” at all, having adopted every tenet Cohn imparted and then some. Among those tenets (apart from “always attack, never apologize”) penned by Sherman being, “This is a nation of men, not laws,” “You create your own reality. The truth is malleable” and, not one to exempt physical appearance from his advice, “You’ve got a big ass, you need to work on that.” To that, er, end, Sherman delivers the ultimate Frankenstein scene during the film’s coda, as Trump proceeds to go under the knife for some liposuction and alopecia reduction surgery (all as “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” is eerily sung by a children’s choir at Cohn’s funeral). The “source” for confirming that Trump underwent these procedures (apart from having eyes)? Ivana’s divorce deposition. Along with her stating that Trump raped her—a scene that is harrowingly recreated in The Apprentice.

    Although, in 2015, Ivana amended the statement she made (saying, “As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited towards me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense”), Sherman was determined to include this scene, insisting, “I couldn’t stand behind a movie that didn’t explore Trump’s misogyny. I needed the film to engage with that, and this scene is the most powerful and visceral way. Sexually assaulting somebody you love is such a transgression. Dramatically, it showed the depth to which Donald Trump had sunk at that point in the story.” Sort of like Elvis with Priscilla (who also refers to a rape in Elvis & Me). Except that Elvis actually had a talent and Trump was, more than anything, threatened by Ivana’s star eclipsing his in a way that Elvis’ never was by Priscilla.

    As for Cohn, he felt threatened by Ivana long before Trump. Not just because of his romantic jealousy, but because of his fear of Trump losing half of his “hard-won” assets, thus drafting an ironclad prenup that ends up offending Ivana in The Apprentice. But not as much as Cohn himself will end up being offended by Trump’s cold shoulder as he grows wary of associating with a “known fag.” AIDS being the ultimate outing device in the 80s (just ask Rock Hudson, summarily abandoned by his “good friends,” the Reagans when his condition became too much of a “political hot potato”). Even so, Trump offers one more “act of goodwill” by inviting him for a “goodbye forever” sendoff (thinly disguised as a “birthday celebration”) at Mar-a-Lago in early 1986, which Trump had freshly purchased in 1985. It is here that Trump gifts Cohn a pair of diamond platinum cufflinks. Ivana is the one to tell him that they’re fake and that “Donald has no shame.” This little detail layers the scene with heightened tension and emotion, as Cohn suddenly grasps the gravity of what he’s created through the revelation of how effortlessly Trump not only lies, but delivers those lies with such conviction. Sherman noted of these types of absurd moments in The Apprentice, “A lot of scenes in this movie seem so crazy that you think maybe a screenwriter invented them, but there’s actually a record of them happening.”

    Sherman chooses to end the film just after Cohn’s death, with Trump in his office going over “talking points” for what would become The Art of the Deal. Written by Tony Schwartz (though Trump was sure to put his name on the book), who was hired by Trump precisely because of the unfavorable article he published in New York Magazine about the “real estate titan,” Trump is depicted as someone scrambling for anything of substance to say to his “ghostwriter” as material for the manuscript. Right out the gate, his past and childhood is something he doesn’t want to delve deeply into, saying there’s nothing “to” people other than wanting to make a lot of money and be winners—no psychoanalysis required to see that. With little else to probe, Schwartz tries to draw out some of the simple steps for making a “good deal.” Trump then regurgitates the three rules for success that Cohn had taught him long ago, listing the “rules” as though he thought of them himself.

    And it’s a scene that’s entirely believable as fact, what with Sherman remarking, “People who have known Trump since the 1980s told me that Donald was using both the techniques and words that Cohn taught him. That’s really when the inspiration for the movie came about, thinking about the ghost of Roy Cohn inhabiting the body of Donald Trump.” Again, Trump hasn’t escaped his “father.”

    Matt Tyrnauer, director of the 2019 documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn?, already established what Sherman reemphasized by stating to NPR, “Donald Trump is Roy Cohn. He completely absorbed all of the lessons of Cohn, which were attack, always double down, accuse your accusers of what you are guilty of, and winning is everything. And Trump absorbed these lessons and has applied them in every aspect of his life and career.” The one lesson Trump didn’t seem to absorb from Cohn, however, is that the truth always—but always—catches up to you. Granted, Cohn avoided paying fully for his sins by dying before he had to. Perhaps the same will be true of his protégé.

    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Jeremy Strong Calls ‘The Apprentice’ “Frankenstein Movie”; Calls Hollywood Response “Disappointing”

    Jeremy Strong Calls ‘The Apprentice’ “Frankenstein Movie”; Calls Hollywood Response “Disappointing”

    Jeremy Strong has ignited Oscar chat with his performance in The Apprentice as Roy Cohn, Donald Trump’s mentor and lawyer during his hinterland as a property developer in Manhattan, but he’s revealed that every studio initially passed on the project. 

    Strong told The Times of London that the film, co-starring Sebastian Stan as Trump, did not find US distribution for months. As we’ve previously reported, after The Apprentice premiered at Cannes, and the Trump campaign widely publicized a cease-and-desist letter that threatened legal action. It labeled the film a “libelous farce,” and “direct foreign interference in America’s elections,” because some financing came from Canada and Ireland. The whole thing was a bluff, but an effective one. Potential distributors ran for cover.

    Strong told The Times: “I found it profoundly disturbing and a dark harbinger of things to come. Frankly, everyone in Hollywood passed on it because they were afraid of litigation or repercussions. I don’t think Hollywood has ever been a bastion of bravery, but that was disappointing.”

    The film lays out Trump’s life in the 1970s, when he took over the family property business and began his empire-building under the tutelage of Cohn. 

    Strong calls it a “Frankeinstein movie” saying: “They told us not to frame it like that, but let’s be honest. Cohn’s malign legacy is one of denial and that is what he passed on to Trump: this detestation of the world and a need to punish and act out with hatred.”

    Caroline Frost

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  • ‘The Apprentice’ Actor Jeremy Strong Defends Mainstream Media As He Compares Donald Trump To Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, And Nazi Propagandist Joseph Goebbels

    ‘The Apprentice’ Actor Jeremy Strong Defends Mainstream Media As He Compares Donald Trump To Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, And Nazi Propagandist Joseph Goebbels

    Kendall (Jeremy Strong) wakes up after a rough night in Succession Season 1 Episode 10 “Nobody Is Ever Missing” (2018), HBO

    The Apprentice actor Jeremy Strong, perhaps best known for his role as Kendall Roy in HBO’s Succession series, has recently compared Donald Trump to dictators Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong as well as Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

    Furthermore, the Succession star also stood behind mainstream media outlets such as CNN, NBC, and The New York Times, amongst others.

    Kendall (Jeremy Strong) finds out Logan (Brian Cox) will not be stepping down as CEO of Waystar RoyCo in Succession Season 1 Episode 1 "Celebration" (2018), HBO
    Kendall (Jeremy Strong) finds out Logan (Brian Cox) will not be stepping down as CEO of Waystar RoyCo in Succession Season 1 Episode 1 “Celebration” (2018), HBO

    RELATED: ‘Reacher’ Star Alan Ritchson Baffled At Religious Support For Donald Trump: “He’s A Rapist And A Con Man, And Yet The Entire Christian Church Seems To Treat Him Like He’s Their Poster Child”

    Strong’s inflammatory comments were made at the Cannes Film Festival ahead of the premiere of the Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice, where the Succession star plays the former president’s lawyer and mentor Roy Marcus Cohn.

    “I deeply wish I could be there with you right now, but I am on stage in New York doing Henrik Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People,” read The Apprentice Director Ali Abbasi on behalf of Strong.

    He continued, “‘Enemy of the people’ is a phrase that has been used by Stalin, by Mao, by Goebbels, and most recently by Donald Trump, when he denounces the free press and calls CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, [and] New York Times, fake news media.”

    “We’re living in a world where truth is under assault, and in America that assault on truth in many ways began in the malevolent chrysalis of Donald Trump’s apprenticeship under Roy Cohn,” he added. “Cohn was called ‘an assault specialist’ by The National Law Journal, and at this perilous moment in history we are experiencing Roy Cohn’s long, dark shadow.”

    Kendall (Jeremy Strong) coerces Greg (Nicholas Braun) into snorting cocaine in Succession Season 1 Episode 8 "Prague" (2018), HBO
    Kendall (Jeremy Strong) coerces Greg (Nicholas Braun) into snorting cocaine in Succession Season 1 Episode 8 “Prague” (2018), HBO

    RELATED: Jimmy Kimmel Sits Down With Group Of Reformed Inmates To Fantasize About Donald Trump Going To Prison

    Continuing to quote Strong, Abbasi went on, “His legacy of lies, of outright denialism, of manipulation, [and] of flagrant disregard for truth has reached a terrible fruition. Ali Abbasi has made a monster movie, where one begets the other.”

    “It’s an attempt to understand, in the words of the 11th century Persian poet Omar Khayyam, how ‘yesterday this day’s madness did prepare,’” Strong’s statement concluded.

    Kendall (Jeremy Strong) breaks down in tears as he is blackmailed by Logan (Brian Cox) in Succession Season 1 Episode 10 "Nobody Is Ever Missing" (2018), HBO
    Kendall (Jeremy Strong) breaks down in tears as he is blackmailed by Logan (Brian Cox) in Succession Season 1 Episode 10 “Nobody Is Ever Missing” (2018), HBO

    Abbasi himself took a moment to smear Trump at the premiere of The Apprentice, declaring, “When we did this movie everyone said, why do you want to make a movie about Trump? If you want to tell something about the world, do it in a nice way, in a metaphorical way.”

    “How about the Second World War movie? How about a First World War movie? How about an American independence movie? How about the Russian invasion movie? ” the director recalled being suggested to make into a film, adding, “The point is there is no nice metaphorical way to deal with the rising wave of fascism.”

    Starring Marvel actor Sebastian Stan in the role of a young Donald Trump, the synopsis for The Apprentice reads, “1970s New York: determined to emerge from his powerful father’s shadow and make a name for himself in Manhattan real estate, aspiring mogul Donald J. Trump is in the earliest days of his career when he encounters the man who will become one of the most important figures in his life, political fixer Roy Cohn.”

    Winter Soldier/Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) in Marvel Studios' THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER exclusively on Disney+. Photo by Eli Adé. ©Marvel Studios 2021. All Rights Reserved.
    Winter Soldier/Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) in Marvel Studios’ THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER exclusively on Disney+. Photo by Eli Adé. ©Marvel Studios 2021. All Rights Reserved.

    RELATED: Robert De Niro Compares Donald Trump To Nazi Party Leader Adolf Hitler: “It’s Almost Like He Wants To Do The Most Horrible Things That He Can Think Of”

    “Seeing promise in young Donald, the influential attorney – who secured espionage convictions against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and investigated suspected Communists alongside Senator Joseph McCarthy – teaches his new acolyte how to amass wealth and power through deception, intimidation and media manipulation. The rest is history,” the synopsis concludes.

    Abbasi calling Trump a fascist pales in comparison to what the director put in the movie. According to Variety, The Apprentice features a rape scene in which Trump is seeing throwing his ex-wife Ivanka to the floor and then proceeds to have non-consensual intercourse with her.

    FULL RALLY: President Donald Trump | Las Vegas, Nevada via LiveNOW From FOX, YouTube
    FULL RALLY: President Donald Trump | Las Vegas, Nevada via LiveNOW From FOX, YouTube

    “In the controversial scene, Ivana playfully presents a book to her husband about the merits of a female orgasm,” the outlet described. “But the interaction between the two turns dark quickly, as an uninterested Trump tells his wife that he is no longer attracted to her.”

    “They argue, and then Trump throws her to the ground. An icy Trump sneers: ‘Is that your G spot? Did I find it?’” Variety concludes the description of the controversial scene.

    Former President Donald Trump makes a 'special announcement' via Fox News, YouTube
    Former President Donald Trump makes a ‘special announcement’ via Fox News, YouTube

    On Monday, political advisor and Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung addressed the controversial scene in The Apprentice, threatening legal action against the filmmakers, declaring, “We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers.”

    “This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked,” Cheung accused. “As with the illegal Biden Trials, this is election interference by Hollywood elites, who know that President Trump will retake the White House and beat their candidate of choice because nothing they have done has worked.”

    NEXT: Robert De Niro Believes That If Elected, Donald Trump Would Install Himself As Dictator: “His Slogan Should Be ‘F—k America, I Want To F—k America’”

    Josh Berger

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  • Sebastian Stan to Portray Young Donald Trump in Ensemble Film ‘The Apprentice’

    Sebastian Stan to Portray Young Donald Trump in Ensemble Film ‘The Apprentice’

    Sebastian Stan is set to portray a young Donald Trump in a movie from filmmaker Ali Abbasi.

    The Apprentice began principal photography this week and features an ensemble cast that includes Jeremy Strong and Maria Bakalova. The film focuses on Trump as he builds his real estate business in New York City in the 1970s and ’80s, according to media reports.

    Abbasi (Holy Spider) is directing from a script by Gabriel Sherman. Sherman’s biography of Fox News founder Roger Ailes, The Loudest Voice in the Room, was the basis for Showtime’s 2019 miniseries The Loudest Voice that starred Russell Crowe.

    The Apprentice is described as a mentor-protégé narrative that documents the start of an American dynasty and tackles themes including power, corruption and deception.

    Producers of The Apprentice are Daniel Bekerman of Scythia Films, Jacob Jarek of Profile Pictures, and Ruth Treacy of Taylored Films. Sherman, Grant Johnson and Amy Baer, in association with Mark Rappaport’s Kinematics, serve as executive producers.

    Stan earned an Emmy nomination for his role as drummer Tommy Lee in Hulu’s biographical miniseries Pam & Tommy opposite Lily James as Pamela Anderson. His other work includes this year’s Sony film Dumb Money, the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and the 2017 fact-based movie I, Tonya.

    Strong recently concluded his Emmy-winning role as Kendall Roy on HBO’s Succession and starred in the 2022 feature Armageddon Time.

    Bakalova is known for such films as Borat Subsequent Moviefilm — for which she received an Oscar nomination — Bodies Bodies Bodies and The Bubble.

    Ryan Gajewski

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  • The Eyes Don’t Have It: Succession’s Series Finale, “With Open Eyes,” Emphasizes That Hubris Makes You Blind

    The Eyes Don’t Have It: Succession’s Series Finale, “With Open Eyes,” Emphasizes That Hubris Makes You Blind

    If Kendall (Jeremy Strong) hugging Roman (Kieran Culkin) toward the end of the series finale of Succession reminded viewers of anything, it’s that, when it comes to the Roys, love fucking hurts—and seems to cause far more pain than it’s worth. The last episode, “With Open Eyes,” offers an ominous title in and of itself without any backstory, but taking into account that it continues the Succession season finale tradition of using lines from John Berryman’s “Dream Song 29,” it adds yet another sinister layer. Berryman himself was haunted his whole life by his father’s suicide when the poet was just eleven. With Succession being, at its core, a show about daddy issues and what they can wreak, it seems appropriate to interweave this writer into final episode titles. And oh, what a final episode “With Open Eyes” is. And yes, it’s all about eyes in this narrative. Particularly how those with sight can be so blind (see also: King Lear).

    The emphasis on eyes begins the moment Shiv (Sarah Snook) arrives in Barbados at the urging of her mother, Caroline (Harriet Walter), to come and comfort Roman after the beating he took at the end of episode nine, “Church and State.” Naturally, Shiv is only really interested in taking the trip so she can lock down another vote and really secure the GoJo deal for Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård), who has promised to make her the CEO once the merger and acquisition goes through.

    Alas, in the business realm, where misogyny reigns more supremely than anywhere else besides politics, it’s clear that Matsson actually doesn’t feel that comfortable with Shiv taking the front seat while he rides shotgun at best, and in the trunk at worst. A profile in some New Yorker-esque rag featuring a cartoon of Shiv as the puppet master pulling Matsson’s strings (even though the article is called “Is Lukas Matsson Taking Over the World?”) does little to assuage his wounded ego. After all, he’s already being forced to stand in the shadows for the sake of the deal going through with an anti-foreign business president taking the reins (or not…the finale leaves that open-ended as well). And it seems to dawn on him that it would be so much better to have someone (a man, of course) in charge that he could boss around with far more ease than he can Shiv, who easily lives up to her nickname by shiving Kendall in the back at the end of the episode. And just when it seemed like the trio was getting along so well, too. That is, back in the kitchen of Caroline’s “hellhole in paradise.” After Caroline remarked to Shiv about being unable to “tend to” Roman, “There’s something about eyes. They just kind of, ugh, revolt me.” Shiv clarifies, “Eyes? Like human eyes we all have?” “Yeah, I don’t like to think of all these blobs of jelly rolling around in your head. Just…face eggs.” To be sure, that is what they amount to when you can’t really see past the blinding nature of your own hubris.

    Something all four of the Roy children suffer from…because let’s not forget about Connor (Alan Ruck). Even if his appearance is minimal as usual, but nonetheless effective. Especially when, via a fresh home movie, he stands next to Logan (Brian Cox) and delivers a performance of “I’m a Little Teapot” “in the manner of Logan Roy.” The lyrics then, naturally, go, “I am a little teapot—fuck off! Short and stout—what did you fucking call me? Here’s my handle, here’s my fuckin’ spout. When I get steamed up, you can hear me shout—Frank Vernon is a moron, Karl Muller is a kraut!” But Karl (David Rasche) can still sing a good Scottish folk song as he regales the dinner table with his rendition of “Green Grow the Rashes, O.” The lyrical content of which hits too close to home for the Roy children as they listen to the words, “Green grow the rashes, O/The sweetest hours that e’er I spend/Are spent among the lasses, O/The war’ly race may riches chase/And riches still may fly them, O/And even though they catch ‘em fast/Their hearts can ne’er enjoy them, O.”

    What modicum of something resembling “hearts” the Roy children might have certainly don’t allow them to enjoy much, that’s for sure. Indeed, they all seem like masochists who actually relish torturing themselves, and reminding the other siblings of who they really are. For a brief moment in the episode, Shiv and Roman are compelled to make Kendall forget who he is at his core by obliging him in his long-standing, ceaseless desire to become Waystar Royco’s CEO. Upon Kendall informing Shiv that Matsson ousting her (per craftily-secured intel from Greg [Nicholas Braun]), the trio at last aligns to form a bloc that will stop the vote from going through. The only problem, as usual, is that none of them can agree on who should be CEO.

    With Kendall swimming out to a dock to let his siblings confer in the darkness of a Barbados beach, Shiv and Roman discuss whether or not they ought to finally just let Kendall have what he’s been dreaming of ever since this whole saga began. Roman asks, “Should we give it to him?” An annoyed Shiv says, “Yeah, we probably should.” Shiv pauses and then adds deviously. “Unless we kill him.” Although meant “in jest,” it’s ultimately exactly what Shiv decides to do by ousting her big bro at the last minute. And when she cuts him with that knife, he definitely bleeds, saying, “I feel like…if I don’t get to do this—I, I feel like, that’s it. I might, I might, uh, like I might die.” And there is that exact feeling as we watch him sink via the elevator back into the bowels of the cruel real world. Whether or not he tries to kill himself now, Kendall is already dead.

    Perhaps it’s all part of his karma for Andrew Dodds (Tom Morley), the waiter who ended up drowning at the end of season one as a result of Kendall’s insatiable search for drugs. When Kendall spots the waiter, just fired from Shiv’s wedding by Logan, he asks him for a “powder” connect. When Andrew tries to offer him some ketamine, which he does himself, Kendall insists he needs a “different vibe tonight”: coke. Thus, Kendall drives them through the darkened English countryside in search of Andrew’s connection. When he sees a deer in the road and swerves, Kendall crashes the car in the water, leaving a ket’d-out Andrew to die. In the present, when Shiv and Roman bring the murder up (which Kendall confessed to them in the season three finale, “All the Bells Say”), Kendall has lost all sense of guilt for the “incident,” immediately responding, “It did not happen. I wasn’t even there.” He then reiterates, “It did not happen!” Because when rich people say something didn’t happen, then it definitely didn’t. But this denial makes Shiv all the more disgusted by her brother, and therefore convinced they’re better off selling the company than letting him be the CEO. Blinded by her own jealousy, of course, she would rather watch the company burn in someone else’s hands than let Ken take his shot. And, talking once more of eyes and sight, when Roman reminds that, in terms of “bloodline,” Ken’s children aren’t “‘real’ real,” he escalates the eye jelly comment Caroline foreshadowed to the next level by pressing Roman’s eyeballs in (already having mushed Roman’s face into his shoulder in that previous scene of “aggressive love”).

    This gives Shiv her opportunity to go back into the meeting and cast her vote in favor of the GoJo deal despite being betrayed by Matsson. And despite the fact that the CEO position will go to, of all people, Tom fucking Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen). The one person who should have been axed ages ago both personally and professionally, but managed to shapeshift his way to the top. Indeed, it’s his “mutability” that makes him so appealing to Matsson, whose opinion of this non-person is obviously cinched when Shiv describes him as “very plausible corporate matter” and “a highly interchangeable modular part.” In other words, exactly what Matsson is looking for in his own puppet. And, being that Tom sells himself by noting of his current position, “I’m cutting heads and harvesting eyeballs,” Matsson can tell he’s got the chops to give the chop to whoever he says, whenever he says. Of course, Tom’s mention of harvesting eyeballs is yet another nod to the notion of sight and vision—or rather, lack thereof—in this episode, and in Logan’s progeny.

    Kendall obviously had no foresight about Shiv’s sudden treachery, prompting him to continue to stand in disbelief in the office where the emotional and physical altercation transpired. Roman finally lays the truth out for him: “It’s fuck-all, man. It’s bits of glue and broken shows, fuckin’ phony news, fucking come on.” Unable to see that reality, Kendall keeps urging, “We have this, we can still do this.” Himself seeing clearly for the first time, Roman balks, “Oh my god, man, it’s nothing. Okay? It’s just nothing. It’s fucking nothing. Stop it!” Kendall, who has placed his entire identity into this role of “successor” cannot believe what Roman is saying, repeating “no” over and over again until Roman interjects, “Yeah. Hey, we are bullshit… You are bullshit. You’re fucking bullshit, man. I’m fucking bullshit. She’s bullshit. It’s all fucking nothing, man. I’m telling you this because I know it, okay? We’re nothing. Okay.”

    And so it is that Roman is the one to finally admit that what Logan said at the beginning of season four was accurate, even if harsh: “You’re such fucking dopes. You’re not serious figures. I love you, but…you are not…serious people.” Only ornaments and pawns in the life of Logan, the quintessential King Lear figure of this narrative. And yet, a Cordelia never seems to manifest in any of his children. It’s nothing but Regans and Gonerils where the obsession with “winning at inheritance” is concerned.

    Genna Rivieccio

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  • 5 Questions To Consider As You Get Ready For The ‘Succession’ Finale

    5 Questions To Consider As You Get Ready For The ‘Succession’ Finale

    By ANDREW DeMILLO, The Associated Press.
    Published:
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    There’s no Iron Throne, but the stakes feel just as high.

    “Succession”, the critically acclaimed drama chronicling a Murdoch-esque feuding billionaire family, wraps its four-season run on Sunday May 28 with a highly anticipated 88-minute finale.

    And just like another tentpole HBO show, “Game of Thrones”, there’s no shortage of theories over how the series will end and who will prevail. But instead of a throne, the Roy siblings are battling over the sprawling Waystar Royco media empire.

    The Shakespearean-level intrigue has prompted speculation among fans looking for clues in past episodes, characters’ names and elsewhere. Even the final episode’s title, “With Open Eyes”, has critics poring through the John Berryman poem that has been used for each season finale’s title.

    Here are some of the questions that remain as the finale nears.

    WHERE DO THINGS STAND WITH THE ROY FAMILY?

    “Succession” has been about who will ultimately run the media conglomerate founded by Logan Roy, the belligerent and profane Roy family patriarch played by Brian Cox.

    For most of the series, three siblings have been vying for the crown: Kendall, played by Jeremy Strong; Roman, played by Kieran Culkin; and Shiv, played by Sarah Snook. A fourth sibling — Connor, played by Alan Ruck — instead mounted an ill-fated run for president.

    By the end of season three, the siblings had buried their differences enough to attempt a corporate coup of their father — only to be betrayed by Shiv’s husband Tom Wambsgans, played by Matthew Macfadyen.

    Brian Cox in ‘Succession’
    — Photograph by Macall B. Polay/HBO

    The series’ most shocking twist came early this season, when Logan died on his way to close a deal with GoJo, a tech company.

    Logan’s death and the power vacuum it created have led to renewed struggle among the siblings, with Kendall and Roman hoping to block the GoJo deal.


    READ MORE:
    ‘Succession’ Directors Filmed Tense Fight Scene Without Knowing Shiv Was Pregnant

    WHO WILL PREVAIL?

    Show creator Jesse Armstrong told The New Yorker earlier this year “there’s a promise in the title of ‘Succession,’” a sign that there’ll be some certainty at least on this question.

    The finale could live up to Logan’s statement in season 3 that life is “a fight for a knife in the mud.”

    Kendall appeared in the penultimate episode to be on track to follow in his father’s footsteps, delivering an impromptu eulogy at Logan’s funeral after Roman was too grief-stricken to do so.

    Jeremy Strong as Kendall in “Succession”.
    Jeremy Strong as Kendall in “Succession”.
    — Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Media

    After aligning himself with the far-right presidential candidate Jeryd Mencken — who the Roys’ network questionably declared the winner — Roman’s fortunes appeared to be falling and was seen fighting with protesters in the streets in the final scenes.

    Shiv, meanwhile is still trying to shepherd the GoJo deal with a plan she’s concocted that would install her as the company’s chief executive in the United States.

    Connor, after losing every state and endorsing Mencken, is instead planning for his hoped-for ambassadorship.

    There are a few wild cards that remain, within and outside the Roy family. The biggest one of all is Greg, the cousin and fan favourite played by Nicholas Braun, known for his awkward quotes and verbal abuse he endures from Tom.


    READ MORE:
    ‘Succession’: Kendall Roy’s Manhattan Penthouse Hits The Market At $29 Million

    WHO WON THE ELECTION?

    All of this is happening with the backdrop of an unsettled U.S. election that may have been swung to Mencken (Justin Kirk) with the help of the Roys’ cable network and a seemingly not-coincidental fire at a vote centre in a swing state.

    Justin Kirk as Jeryd Mencken in “Succession”.
    Justin Kirk as Jeryd Mencken in “Succession”.
    — Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Media

    The scenario and the series’ Election Night episode has echoed the conversations revealed among Fox News executives and talent during the defamation suit by Dominion Voting Systems that led to a nearly $800 million settlement with the network.

    “Succession’s” fictional election results have both professional and personal implications for the Roy family, with protests over Mencken erupting throughout the city. But even Shiv seems willing to put her moral qualms aside at the prospect of making a deal with Mencken.

    WHAT ABOUT TOM AND SHIV?

    Tom and Shiv’s marriage had been on shaky ground before he betrayed her to Logan at the end of last season.

    This season it’s even more so, with the two holding a no-holds-barred argument at a pre-election party where the two traded grievances and insults.

    Shiv’s revelation to Tom on Election Night that she’s pregnant prompted one of the most gut-wrenching responses, with Tom asking her whether she was telling the truth or just using a new tactic against him.

    The show continues to offer some signs of affection between the two, with Shiv telling an exhausted Tom to sleep at her apartment after the funeral, but it remains to be seen whether their marriage is salvageable.


    READ MORE:
    Kieran Culkin Clears Up Confusion About Roman’s Wife And Child In ‘Succession’

    IS THIS REALLY THE END?

    There are plenty of examples of shows that lived on after their finales. “Game of Thrones” spawned a popular prequel series, “House of the Dragon”, while “Seinfeld” got a second try on its much-maligned finale on “Curb Your Enthusiasm”.

    Even “The Sopranos”, known for one of the buzziest finales of all time, came back with a movie looking at Tony Soprano’s beginning.

    Armstrong has left open revisiting his characters in another fashion, and the possibilities for doing so are endless. A Tom and Greg buddy comedy? Or maybe a Logan Roy origin story, just to reveal the first time he said his signature vulgar phrase.

    Melissa Romualdi

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  • ‘Succession’ star Jeremy Strong lands a role on Broadway in 2024 in ‘An Enemy of the People’

    ‘Succession’ star Jeremy Strong lands a role on Broadway in 2024 in ‘An Enemy of the People’

    NEW YORK (AP) — Jeremy Strong is going from a corporate boardroom on TV to a whistleblower on Broadway.

    The actor who plays Kendall Roy in the HBO television series “Succession” has signed on to play a man who tries to expose water contamination in a Norwegian spa town in Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play “An Enemy of the People.”

    The play — with a rewrite from Amy Herzog, whose adaptation of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” just won a Tony nomination — will premiere on Broadway in early 2024 at a theater to be revealed later, producers said. The rest of the cast will be announced later. Sam Gold, who won a Tony directing “Fun Home,” will helm the revival.

    It will be Strong’s second time on Broadway. He was in “A Man for All Seasons” in 2008 with Frank Langella and Patrick Page. Since then, his work on “Succession” has earned him an Emmy and a Golden Globe.

    Strong will play a public-minded doctor in a small town who discovers the water supply for the public spa is contaminated and may have made tourists — the community’s economic lifeblood — ill. But his efforts to clean up the mess pit his ethics against political cowards and the media, leaving his family suffering.

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  • Lukas Matsson Has His Lexi Featherston Moment

    Lukas Matsson Has His Lexi Featherston Moment

    There must be something about being inside a rich person’s apartment overlooking the New York skyline that makes a party guest have a rather overt epiphany: New York kinda sucks. More to the point, it’s not actually that special. Naturally, those loyalists who are obsessed with NYC and defending its “honor” no matter how much it devolves into a moated island for the uber-affluent or the uber-deranged (usually those two qualities go hand in hand) will say that the likes of Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) and Lexi Featherston (Kristen Johnston) are merely “haters” because they’re not being treated like the “relevant” beings they see themselves as. Of course, Matsson is endlessly relevant (“fudged” GoJo numbers or not). As far as anyone (apart from the Roys) is concerned, he’s a rich white man doin’ big thangs—and should be treated as such.

    Nonetheless, Lukas is feeling generally bored and resentful from the outset of showing up to Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Tom’s (Matthew Macfadyen) triplex in Lower Manhattan, where they’re hosting an election kickoff “tailgate party” (hence, the name of the episode being just that). It’s Shiv, playing the double agent throughout the ongoing and much talked about “deal” (one in which GoJo will absorb Waystar Royco), who urges Lukas to show up. Because not only will it throw a wrench into Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman’s (Kieran Culkin) plans to talk shit about him and GoJo, but it will also give Lukas a window of opportunity to shine bright like a diamond in front of the “most powerful people in America.” To Lukas’ surprise, it really is that easy to make an impact. More specifically, as he notes to Shiv in the coat room, “You know, I thought these people would be very complicated, but it’s…they’re not. It’s basically just, like, money and gossip” (ergo, Gossip Girl remaining the pinnacle of rich people life). And maybe that’s part of when the disenchantment with New York starts to sink in for Lukas. Sure, he’s been there many times and witnessed “the scene,” but never until this moment did it seem so clear to him how utterly lacking the innerworkings behind the veneer are. Like Dorothy and co. witnessing the Wizard of Oz being operated by nothing more than a little man behind a curtain, Lukas sees something far more disillusioning in these “movers and shakers.”

    Shiv confirms, “Oh yeah, no. That’s all it is.” Money and gossip. Synonyms for wheeling and dealing as a “key player” in New York. And being a key player, of course, automatically means you have to be rich. As the phrase that triggers so many people goes, “You have to pay to play.” No money, no skin in the game. And it is, as most are aware by now, a very rigged one. Matsson has been all too happy to be part of that ruse, particularly since he’s been putting one on himself in order to come across as “big enough” to buy out Waystar. Perhaps he was hoping that New York, for all its prestige and having a “solid reputation” as an epicenter of finance and “glamor,” would have more to it going on behind the scenes than merely more of the same.

    Kendall, committed as much to New York being the “end all, be all” as he is to his father’s company embodying that as well, insists that there is. And that Lukas is the inferior impostor who can’t hack it. In short, he’s no Anna Delvey when it comes to navigating New York as an impostor (as Kendall remarks to Shiv, “I fuckin’ knew he was a bullshitter. I’m tellin’ you…new money. You gotta hold those fresh bills to the light”). And yet, he actually does seem to know how to navigate. For he’s comfortable and confident enough in his own skin to “dare” to speak ill of the “greatest city in the world.” And amongst the “most powerful” people who run it, therefore all of America. Thus, we’re met with Lukas Matsson’s “Lexi Featherston moment” around forty-eight minutes into the episode. When he’s finally had enough of this blasé, bullshit party and wants to stir things up by asking, “So who’s, uh, who’s going out tonight in this shitty fucking town? Anyone? I gotta say, it’s pretty depressing from up here. You can really see how Second World it is.”

    For those who don’t remember Lexi’s own anti-New York monologue from season six of Sex and the City, it bubbled to the surface after being at her wit’s end with the banality of everyone and everything at the so-called party. Thus, Lexi snaps after being told she can’t smoke inside near the window, “Fuckin’ geriatrics… When did everybody stop smoking? When did everybody pair off? This used to be the most exciting city in the world and now it’s nothing but smoking near a fuckin’ open window. New York is over. O-V-E-R. Over. No one’s fun anymore! What ever happened to fun? God, I’m so bored I could die.” And then she does, tripping over her own stiletto heel and falling out the window. Previously, when Carrie encounters her in the bathroom doing coke and tells Lexi she only came in to get away from the party, Lexi replies knowingly, “Oh Euro-intellectuals. I don’t know why I pulled strings to get an invite to this piece of shit party.” Funnily enough, Lexi would probably view Lukas as one of the “Euro-intellectuals” she finds so dull merely because he happens to be from Europe. But at least his “right-hand man,” Oskar Gudjohnsen (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson), is “moon-beamed on edibles” according to Lukas. Which makes things slightly more amusing for him (like having a court jester or something) as he “mingles” among the “glitterati” of the political and business worlds.

    Even so, just as Lexi did, Lukas finds himself utterly unimpressed by the goings-on at this “event.” Which, to him, feels like a sad attempt on these people’s part at pretending they’re living it up in some “fabulous” town with a lifestyle that couldn’t possibly be had anywhere else. Yet if it’s so fabulous, why does it bum him out so much as he stares out the window? Just as Lexi sort of did as she lit her cigarette and then turned her back to the city to give the “revelers” a harrowing recap on the state of affairs in NYC. A merciless “summing up” tailored to those who are still delusional about its “untouchable clout.”

    Kendall being one such person as he replies to Lukas calling it a shitty town with, “I don’t know, [it’s a] pretty happening town, famously.” “Really? Is it though?” “Yeah.” Lukas reminds Kendall of his quaint American perspective by saying, “Compared to Singapore, Seoul…it’s like Legoland.” Kendall insists, “You know we still run shit though?” Lukas ripostes, “Hmm, like as in…only in New York?” Kendall confirms, “Yeah.” Lukas titters, “Right. Okay. Well, uh, nothing happens in New York that doesn’t happen everywhere.” A fairly obvious statement, but one that actually needs to be said to those living in the self-deceiving bubble of “nothing else being like New York.”

    Starting to get offended as every NYC diehard does when a nerve is touched about “their” city, Kendall demeans in return to that comment, “You should get that written on a cup. Right? Shouldn’t he get that written on a cup? Like that would look so cool. You could sell that in a head shop in Rotterdam. Could be a good business for you.” Unfortunately, there’s still not much business in trying to “pull back the curtain” on New York blowing chunks, as it were. And even those who are “aware” of it still claim there’s nowhere else they’d rather be (especially if their choice is limited to staying in the U.S.).

    Including Carrie Bradshaw, as she claims to her “partner,” Aleksandr Petrovsky (Mikhail Baryshnikov), “I have a life here.” This being in response to his desire for them to move to Paris together. He answers, “Yes, but what do you want to come home to? What do you want your life to be?” These questions inferring that her continuing in the same way as she always has for the sake of “being loyal” to New York will only lead her down a path of despair and loneliness (something And Just Like That… ultimately confirms). And it’s for this reason that Lexi’s timing to appear as a cautionary tale plummeting to her death prompts Carrie to take her own plunge—by leaving New York. Even if New York is her “boyfriend,” as she called it in the first episode of season five, “Anchors Away,” wherein she tells us in a voiceover that she “can’t have nobody talking shit about [her] boyfriend” (this after a sailor named Louis [Daniel Sunjata] does exactly that). Unfortunately for Carrie and those committed to New York like a mental institution, this is what both Lexi and Lukas “deign” to do in their honest assessment of a city that “never sleeps.” Which is perhaps part of why it has the propensity to always disappoint.

    Genna Rivieccio

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  • No One in Movies Knows How to Swallow a Pill

    No One in Movies Knows How to Swallow a Pill

    There are two ways of taking pills—two and only two.

    You pinch the pill between your thumb and index finger, pick it up, and place it on your tongue. You take a drink of water. This method is the tweezers.

    Or else: You place the pill in your palm and launch it toward your mouth, as if your teeth were battlements and your arm a siege machine. Don’t bother with the water. This method is the catapult.

    In real-world situations, many people—let’s say most—make a habit of the tweezers. In the movies, the opposite is true. An on-screen pill bottle works like Chekhov’s gun: Eventually, its contents will be fired at an actor’s mouth, or smashed between his lips, or hurled into his gullet.

    Think of Austin Butler as the lead in Elvis, alone in his hotel room: He slaps those quaaludes in, liquid-free, sideburns tilted toward the ceiling. It’s a textbook movie swallow, the Stanislavski Fling. Butler got an Oscar nomination; so did Ellen Burstyn, popping diet pills in Requiem for a Dream. On Succession, Jeremy Strong and Kieran Culkin, each a two-time Emmy nominee, gobble meds on-screen. Going catapult is everywhere in cinema; it’s a gesture that befits the biggest stars. Angelina Jolie shoots her pills in Girl, Interrupted. So does Brittany Murphy. Jake Gyllenhaal catapults a pill in Donnie Darko. Albert Brooks in Modern Romance. In Goodfellas, Ray Liotta does it twice.

    Read: Elvis is utterly disappointing. That’s the point.

    I love the movies! But it’s time we had a public-health announcement: The catapult is not, in fact, how a person should be taking pills. The act of swallowing a medication is so pervasive—and so intimate—that one easily forgets it is a skill that must be learned. In the U.S., roughly three-fifths of all adults are on prescription drugs; perhaps one-sixth will falter when they try to gulp it down. Twenty years ago, Bonnie Kaplan, a research psychologist at the University of Calgary, devised a new technique for helping people overcome this problem. Her method, as laid out in a mesmerizing video, suggests that you turn your head to make a pill go in. (No one has ever done this in a movie and no one ever will.) The turning motion helps open your upper esophageal sphincter, Kaplan says, though she does admit that more familiar postures have their own advantages. Some people like to raise their chins: “They say it is easier for the pill to slide down their throat, as if their tongue is a ski jump and it is a straight shot down the hill.” Others tip their heads the other way, chin-to-chest, “because they say it is more relaxing in the neck.”

    But on the all-important matter of the hand, Kaplan’s messaging is very clear: You pick up the pill between your fingers; then you place it on your tongue. Which is to say, you do the tweezers. Other training methods are consistent with this rule. One approach for teaching children, published in 1984, describes “correctly placing” a pill on the back of the tongue—which clearly cannot be accomplished via a whole-hand toss; another, from 2006, says to “place the pill on your tongue towards the back of your mouth.”

    That’s how people ought to take their pills. But how do people really do it, in real life? At the start of her research, Kaplan told me, she wasn’t telling takers what to do; she spent time observing how they liked to swallow medications on their own. The cinematic catapult was simply nonexistent in the wild, she said. “I never saw anyone just throw it back.” Never? Anyone? I asked Kaplan to describe the way she swallows pills herself, and she paused before she answered, as if she’d never really thought this through. “My husband and I both turn our heads to the right,” she said at last. First she’ll place the pill on the back of her tongue, and then she’ll twist and swallow. “But you know what?” she said. “I do often clap my hand to my mouth with my last pill or two.”

    “It’s very individual,” Cindy Corbett, a nursing-science professor at the University of South Carolina, told me. She’s on a team that uses smartwatch accelerometers to track patients’ adherence to their medication regimen. Their system knows when someone moves a hand up to their face, she told me, but it won’t distinguish how a pill is being held, or whether it is placed or flung into the mouth. (Indeed, the study’s four-step “protocol-guided medication-taking activity” includes this ambivalent instruction: “Place/toss pill to mouth.”) When I asked Corbett what she’s seen herself in this regard, as a clinician, she drew a blank. “I’ve never thought about it that much.”

    Read: What happens to a pill after you pop it?

    Maybe this is it: If you even have to think about the way you swallow pills, then you’re almost certainly someone who has trouble taking pills; and if you’re someone who has trouble taking pills, then you really should be taking pills in tweezer mode. In the off-screen world, to catapult is a privilege reserved for those with floppy throats. It’s the difference between the gags and the gag-nots. That inequality is only reinforced by the movieland fantasy of universal tossing, which sets up (as only Hollywood knows how) an impossible and unhealthy standard for behavior. Look, Elvis gobbles benzos; why can’t I? “People’s preconceived notions of how they’re supposed to swallow pills does lead to mental barriers,” says Marissa Harkness, a co-creator of the Pill Skills training kit, a case of sugar-based placebos made in different shapes and sizes.

    When actors catapult on camera, they get the benefit of looking more dramatic: bigger gestures, more to see. But something more important is going on in movie swallows, a deeper meaning to the movement—an implied relationship of power. Taking pills by catapult suggests that you’re a victim, that your body and your mind are under siege. A hand that’s driven by compulsion fires drugs into the face. A teenage boy is pelted by his Prozac. But some stories need to have this flipped, so the pill can be a tool instead of an affliction. In Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro tweezers bennies. He’s a man on a mission. And the most famous pill-taking scene in movie history, from The Matrix, has Keanu Reeves pinch a pill between his thumb and index fingers in dramatic close-up, and deposit it into his mouth. Then he drinks a glass of water. (Is that a movie first?) A character who tweezers is going on a journey, the film director John Magary told me. He’s curious. He’s in control. (From Magary’s films to date: two catapults, zero tweezers.)

    Perhaps the movies have this figured out. There are two ways of taking pills—two and only two. The tweezers or the catapult; self-knowledge or oblivion. In the end, the choice is yours.

    Daniel Engber

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  • My Favorite Ludicrously Capacious Bags

    My Favorite Ludicrously Capacious Bags

    “Why? Because she’s brought a ludicrously capacious bag. What’s even in there, huh? Flat shoes for the subway? Her lunch pail? I mean, Greg, it’s monstrous. It’s gargantuan. You could take it camping. You could slide it across the floor after a bank job.”

    Ah, Cousin Greg. Succession’s ultimate himbo who just can’t seem to dovetail into the corporate conglomerate world no matter how hard he tries. In Season 4’s debut, Cousin Greg (Nicolas Braun) brings a date to Logan Roy’s (Brian Cox) birthday party…big mistake for one half of The Disgusting Brothers.

    The issue Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfayden) has with Greg The Egg’s Tinder date, Bridget, isn’t that he’s jealous…it’s that she’s clearly trying too hard to fit in. Tom delivers the most iconic quip about poor Bridget’s Burberry tote that she probably wore because it was the most expensive thing in her closet. However, anyone sickeningly wealthy could tell you she obviously made the wrong choice.

    The Burberry Vintage Leather Check Satchel Bag may be valued at around $2,900, but we live in a world of Birkins. While Bridget’s tote may have been the talk of the party if she hung out with me, it was an eyesore amongst the likes of the Roy family. Do you think Gerri would be caught dead with a vintage Burberry as opposed to Gucci’s understated Jackie?

    @ikeacanada The OG ludicrously capacious bag. #whatseveninthere#SuccessionHBO#quietluxury#stealthwealth#ludicrouslycapacious#IKEACanada#IKEA#Trend♬ original sound – SSENSE

    To the upper echelons of society, there’s no worse crime than sporting a tote bag to a high society function. What could you possibly need in your bag besides your black card and perhaps a mirror? A clutch certainly would’ve been more suitable.

    But surely Shiv (Sarah Snook) doesn’t carry a bag so large that it could be used to complete a heist during her father’s birthday (if she were to show up). And would Roman (Kiernan Culkin) or Kendall (Jeremy Strong) be caught dead with such a crass woman?

    But let’s be honest here, Tom Wambsgans. There is nothing more satisfying than a Mary Poppins-esque bag. What if my makeup runs midday and I need a touchup? What’s going to hold a towel, a change of clothes, and my water bottle on the beach?

    @chargers a ludicrously capacious bag
    ♬ original sound – SSENSE

    Ludicrously capacious bags serve both men and women. My gargantuan bag indeed carries my lunch pail, a sweater in case the office gets cold, flat shoes for the subway, and I’d probably store egregious amounts of cash in it if I had the access.

    There’s nothing more satisfying than running errands and having my hands free. If I can make multiple stops only using my gigantic tote bag, then I consider it a success.

    And while a tote bag may not be the most functional “going out bag,” it certainly serves its purpose at all other hours of the day. If you’re in the market for the nightmarish, ludicrously capacious bag, here are some of my favorites:

      1. Beis The Work Tote
      2. Marc Jacobs The Tote Bag
      3. Kate Spade Kitt Large Tote
      4. Free People Sid Slouchy Vegan Tote
      5. Tory Burch Ella Bio Tote

    Jai Phillips

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  • Cameron Frye and Connor Roy: “My Old Man Pushes Me Around” No More!

    Cameron Frye and Connor Roy: “My Old Man Pushes Me Around” No More!

    Just as it is for the Roy family at large, for many viewers of Succession, Connor Roy (Alan Ruck) is pure background. It hasn’t really been until season four that he’s been permitted his moment to shine. To “take a stand,” as Ruck’s most famous character, Cameron Frye, would say. And it starts with episode two, “Rehearsal,” in which he displays the full extent of his vulnerability during a karaoke session. Not just because he opts to sing Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” but because, just as he did in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as Cameron, he decides to take a stand and defend it. And yes, singing Leonard Cohen at karaoke (even if only in a room as opposed to a more public stage) definitely counts among the ranks of taking a stand and defending it (regardless of Roman [Kieran Culkin] jibing, “This is Guantanamo-level shit”).

    It’s no coincidence that he should choose that particular song, either. Not with Cohen singing, “I hear that you’re building your little house deep in the desert/You’re living for nothing now, I hope you’re keeping some kind of record.” Lest one needs to be reminded, the early seasons of Succession find Connor living alone in the desert of New Mexico in his palatial palace. A cold place in a hot climate, where he still can’t seem to finagle something akin to love. Not even from his “girlfriend,” Willa (Justine Lupe), a call girl he pays to keep around. Eventually paying enough to make her want to be his full-time girlfriend. But back to the lyrics of “Famous Blue Raincoat,” also fitting for Connor’s sibling situation with the Cain and Abel allusion in the line, “And what can I tell you my brother, my killer?”

    Both Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman have no need of killing their half-bro, however—for he’s so irrelevant to their patriarch, Logan Roy (Brian Cox), that wasting any energy on him would be wasting much-needed focus on “securing the position.” CEO of Waystar-Royco. Something that was never going to belong to “hapless” Connor, who spent three years of his childhood without seeing his father at all. “Attachment” isn’t exactly a thing between him and Logan, nor is it between Cameron and Morris, who never appears once in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off—merely looms large as a source of fear. Especially after Ferris (Matthew Broderick) gets Cam (“Con” also has a shortened version of his name) to take his dad’s Ferrari out for the day.

    Not one to be disagreeable, Cameron ultimately concedes to loaning out the car after several half-hearted attempts at protesting. Lying in bed genuinely sick (even if only in the head) as opposed to Ferris’ fake-out version of sickness, it’s clear Cam’s family doesn’t need to be played to in order for him to get out of school. They’re never around anyway. Least of all his father, off being the “provider” of the family, therefore excused from anything like involvement. Yes, it sounds a lot like Logan Roy. And Cameron, like Con, leads a privileged existence with the trade-off of never experiencing any emotional attachment or care whatsoever. With regard to “Con,” there’s one in every family, to be sure. Someone who never gets quite the same amount of attention or consideration. Whether because their personality is more demure or they don’t seem “special” enough to warrant as much care. Connor falls into both categories, with Shiv (Sarah Snook) in the Sloane Peterson (Mia Sara) role and Kendall and Roman trading off on being the overly arrogant Ferris Bueller (Roman obviously being more Ferris-y than Ken). A scene of Cameron stuffed in the back of the Ferrari that Ferris and Sloane are effectively using him for speaks volumes vis-à-vis this dynamic. The only time anyone bothers with Con is when they need him for something…so basically they never much bother with him.

    Sure, he’s there for “ceremonious” events like birthdays and family vacations, but, by and large, he’s out of the fold. Until season four rolls around and, suddenly, the “Rebel Alliance” that is Shiv, Kendall and Roman ends up prompting Con to say, “This is how it is, huh? The battle royale? Me and dad on one side, you guys on the other.” This after Willa has walked out on their wedding rehearsal dinner, leaving Con with no one to “turn to” for “comfort” but his so-called family. The trio of his siblings (all of whom show up late because Logan cut off their helicopter access) amounts to one giant Ferris Bueller, the narcissist in the dynamic constantly taking up space and demanding more from the Cameron/Connor of the outfit. Meanwhile, all Connor is asking for is a round of karaoke at Maru, one of many overpriced options within the parameters of Koreatown’s 32nd Street.

    Upon arriving to said location (under duress for most of them), Connor is quick to admit that he told Logan where they are, and he’s coming over to “talk things out”—presumably the deal that Shiv, Kendall and Roman want to fuck by asking for more money of Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) in exchange for merging his streaming company, GoJo, with Waystar. In defense of himself, Connor replies to the sibling backlash, “My life isn’t filled with secrets like some people. And I want my father to be at my wedding.”

    To everyone’s surprise, though, Logan wants to make an “apology.” Or the closest he can get to one. But with all the hemming and hawing, Kendall is quick to redirect his father’s messaging by demanding, “What are you sorry for, Dad? Fucking ignoring Connor his whole life?” He later adds, “Having Connor’s mother locked up?” This being why Connor refers to the cake at his wedding as “loony cake.” A type of dessert he apparently associates with Victoria sponge cake and doesn’t care for at all because it was what was fed to him for a week after his mother was institutionalized. So yeah, even Kendall can take a moment here and there to stand up for his older brother and acknowledge that Con might have had a more emotionally bankrupt childhood than all of them.

    In that regard, his bid for normalcy is earnest when he declares to his brothers and sister, “I would like to sing one fucking song at karaoke because I’ve seen it in the movies and nobody ever wants to go.” Perhaps he saw it in a certain form in the movie that he co-starred in with Broderick, as the latter plays the titular character lip-syncing to Wayne Newton’s “Danke Schoen” and The Beatles’ “Twist and Shout” on a parade float in the middle of Chicago. Something Cameron nor Connor would ever do. Possibly because attention-seeking is a type of love-seeking. And that’s never been either character’s “game.” Though both slowly start to realize that maybe it should be. Even as Connor notes something as heart-wrenching to his siblings as, “The good thing about having a family that doesn’t love you is you learn to live without it… You’re all chasin’ after Dad saying, ‘Oh love me, please love me. I need love, I need attention.’ You’re needy love sponges, and I’m a plant that grows on rocks and lives off insects that die inside of me. If Willa doesn’t come back, that’s fine. ‘Cause I don’t need love. It’s like a superpower.”

    Cameron Frye knows that’s not entirely true. It’s also a curse that causes severe anxiety and depression, finally pushing him toward the revelation, “I’m bullshit. I put up with everything. My old man pushes me around…I never say anything! Well he’s not the problem, I’m the problem [cue a lawsuit against Taylor Swift]. I gotta take a stand. I gotta take a stand against him. I am not gonna sit on my ass as the events that affect me unfold to determine the course of my life. I’m gonna take a stand. I’m gonna defend it. Right or wrong, I’m gonna defend it.” Something Connor must decide to do in “Connor’s Wedding,” easily the most landmark episode of Succession ever aired. And yet, as usual, just because his name is in the title doesn’t mean he gets the theoretical spotlight. No, this is all about his father. Just as it always is. The same geos for Cameron and Morris, inciting the former to finally lose it and kick the shit out of the Ferrari as he screams, “I’m so sick of his shit. I can’t stand him and I hate this goddamn car! Who do ya love? Who do ya love? You love a car!”

    To this, Logan Roy might placate, “I love you…but you are not serious people.” These are his final sentiments directed at his children. Though no one is aware of it until the next day, when Logan’s heart fails (ironically appropriate) while on a private jet to negotiate the deal again with Matsson…thanks to his own kids painting him in a corner to do so. It was the previous night at karaoke that Logan understood the scope of his disgust with them. For here he is, the affluent, distant father figure (like Cameron’s) being unclear what more his children could “take” or want from him after everything he’s already given. Back out on the street with his latest “right-hand woman,” Kerry (Zoe Winters), he clocks a homeless man digging through the trash and seethes, “Look at this prick. They should get out here. Some cunt doing the tin cans for his supper, take a sip of that medicine. This city…the rats are as fat as skunks. They hardly care to run anymore.” Obviously taking a swipe at his lazy, greedy children. Except for Con, who really just wants it all to be over. Unfortunately, it’s only just getting started now that Logan is dead. And as usual, Con is the last to know about it, gently informed by Kendall only to instantly reply, “Oh man, he never even liked me,” trying to smooth that statement over with, “I never got the chance to make him proud of me.”

    Of course, that was never going to happen. Because there is no “pleasing” a man like Logan or Morris. And Connor always getting the short end of the stick from his father reaches a poetic peak with him dying on Connor’s wedding day, casting a dark, attention-stealing pall over the event. All Con can finally assess about it to Willa is: “My father’s dead and I feel old.” Cameron probably would have said the same thing. And he, too, probably would have soon after carried out his intended plans for the day. After all, he’s not one to let his old man push him around anymore, especially not now that he’s dead. He’s going to take a stand (for “love”) and defend it. Right or wrong.

    That’s why, in the end, he goes through with the wedding, not bothering to join his three half-siblings as they go to deal with their father’s body and make a statement to the press. In this sense, Connor has always been the freest, learning long ago not to bother chasing down the love of a patriarch who was incapable of it. Perhaps learning that from the person he was in another life: Cameron Frye. Meanwhile, Connor’s siblings will continue to volley for Logan’s invisible favor in not-so-subtle ways even after he’s gone.

    Genna Rivieccio

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  • It’s The End of the World As We Know It, And White Liberals Feel Like Shit: Armageddon Time

    It’s The End of the World As We Know It, And White Liberals Feel Like Shit: Armageddon Time

    When one is a child, the world is seen at its clearest—its most straightforward. Because of their innocence and a lack of understanding the “need” to cater to artifice, it is the child who, so often, sees things as they are and for what they are. Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), the sixth-grader at the center of James Gray’s autobiographical coming-of-age story, Armageddon Time, is just such a kid. And what he sees all around him at his Queens public school in 1980 is discrimination. Specifically against a Black classmate he befriends named Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb). Because Johnny’s already been held back a year, their teacher, Mr. Turkeltaub (Andrew Polk)—a last name that gets plenty of comedic mileage—is even more blatantly prone to not caring about his academic growth. Plus, he’s Black, so what does his education really matter, right? Paul himself is Jewish, susceptible to racial discrimination in his own right (cough, cough—Ye), but still somewhat relishes the perk of having white skin.

    This is why, when Paul draws a picture of Turkeltaub’s face atop a turkey’s body and is forced to confess to it, he doesn’t really get in all that much trouble. Yet when Johnny is forced to join in the same punishment of wiping the blackboard in front of the class while Turkeltaub continues to teach, he’s the one automatically blamed for making the other students laugh behind Turkeltaub’s back when it is, in fact, Paul who does a whimsical, mocking dance to make them do so. It is subtle “nuances” like these (what are known as “microaggressions” in the present), building up slowly and cringingly, that all add up to one big racist shitshow throughout the film (and, of course, in life).

    In the backdrop of it all, the presidential election is imminent, with Ronald Reagan campaigning openly as an “evangelical Christian”—at least, per the interview he gives to Jim Bakker, one that Gray opts to include at a moment when Paul’s family is watching TV. During it, Reagan ominously warns of how ceding leadership in the 80s to Democrats a.k.a. “non-Christians” will result in all hell breaking loose. Thus, his wielding of a favorite keyword when he tells Bakker, “If we let this be another Sodom and Gomorrah… we might be the generation that sees Armageddon.” Bakker couldn’t be more in agreement when he adds, “This is the most important election ever to face the United States.”

    And, at that time, it was. For it would change the entire trajectory of American values for good. Where there might have been a chance to decelerate the coveting of all things material, the unabashed worship of capitalism. As Jimmy Carter tried to do in his famed “Crisis of Confidence” speech in July of 1979. Months before what he said was apparently too much for White America to hear when it opted to shift toward the other side of the political spectrum entirely.

    All because Carter “dared” to say, “It’s clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper, deeper, than gasoline lines or energy shortages. Deeper even than inflation or recession… Some people have wasted energy, but others haven’t had anything to waste.” This referring to the phenomenon so overtly presented in Armageddon Time—that those without privileges to begin with never notice much difference when it all goes to shit for “the elite” (which, obviously, it never really can—what’s losing a few hundred thousand to a millionaire, or a couple million to a billionaire?). Carter went on to gently chastise the nation for what it was solidifying into as he favored the “no candy for you” approach to speech-giving by declaring, “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.”

    Evidently, though, owning and consuming things was satisfactory enough for Reagan supporters who then vindictively took America into what would become known as the Decade of Excess. At least for white yuppies. For average Americans, most especially the Black population, the system patently working against them would only worsen. Yet simultaneously be all the more accepted, especially by people like Paul’s family, who condemn it amid finding their own ways to profit from it.

    As Carter concluded the speech that would be too much for Americans who loved sugar-coating, it was plain to see that, like the Republicans and the evangelists they courted in the 1980 election, Carter believed, “We are at a turning point in our history.” An “Armageddon time,” if you will. Unlike the conservatives, however, Carter believed it was because “the path it leads to [is] fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom. It is a certain route to failure.” And here America is some forty-three years later fulfilling Carter’s all too real prophecy. One that Gray himself is highly aware of, and is certain to make his viewers comprehend that part of why the nation is where it’s at today is because of the past. Appropriately, Paul’s beloved grandfather, Aaron (Anthony Hopkins), is the one to remind him that you should never forget your past, because it always ends up haunting you in the present. Which is precisely what has happened to the United States politically. Paying for the sins of the Reagan Era as it continues to embrace them. Including the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

    On that note, while the Trump family is not as central to the story as certain reviews might lead one to believe, Fred Trump’s (John Diehl) peripheral presence at the private school where Paul ends up is a key aspect to absorbing the hypocrisy of an institution that calls its attendees future “leaders” because of all the “hard work” they’re doing and the ambition they have. Ambition that wouldn’t mean anything without the very privilege of their backgrounds. And clearly, Fred’s looming presence over the school had a pronounced effect on Gray, who incorporates a scene of Paul’s first day of school being vaguely tainted by Fred homing in on him in the hallway. As Gray recalled, “Fred was on the board of trustees of the school, and he would sort of stand in the halls, his arms folded. I walked in with my attaché case and he saw me as weird immediately. He had prospective parents to show the school to, and here was the little Jew with the suitcase.”

    The private school in Armageddon Time is called Forest Manor, while the real-life one is Kew-Forest School. Where, needless to say, Donald Trump was also an attendee (until his father put him in a military academy at thirteen after he threw a desk in the middle of Jackie Robinson Parkway, called Interboro Parkway when Donald decided to tamper with it). So was his older sister, Maryanne Trump (portrayed briefly but effectively by Jessica Chastain). The alumna who shows up to give a speech about success to the current students, an event that Gray can confirm actually transpired while he was attending the school (basing Chastain’s monologue off of memory). And while Gray might not have fully grasped what was happening around him as a child, he did confirm, “I’ll tell you what was obvious to me at the time. When Maryanne Trump came to give a speech at school, I remember very clearly being like, ‘What the fuck? What is she talking about?’ Because I was like, ‘You’re really rich, lady. What’s the problem?’ I remember thinking that. The [old] joke, ‘born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.’”

    Paul’s reluctance to attend the same private school as his brother, Ted (Ryan Sell), is, in large part, because of how much he values his friendship with Johnny. Yet, at the same time, he doesn’t value it enough to stick up for Johnny when he’s flagrantly treated “lesser than.” Even by people of his own race. An instance that occurs when Paul and Johnny are on the subway together and the latter talks of going to Florida to become an astronaut as he looks at the space-oriented collectibles he received from his stepbrother who lives there. Overhearing the conversation, a Black passenger leaving the train feels the need to inform Johnny of his NASA ambitions, “The won’t even your Black ass in through the back door.” But maybe he was only trying to spare Johnny the later pain of indulging in a dream. Dreams that only white kids get to have. This extending to Paul’s desire to become an artist.

    Although “discouraged” by his parents, Esther (Anne Hathaway) and Irving (Jeremy Strong), Paul’s grandfather urges him to follow through with that dream, even buying him a professional paint set. By the same token, the burden of knowing that Paul’s still just another “Jew boy,” likely to be excluded once a certain “quota” is met, prompts Aaron to contradictorily advocate for Paul’s enrollment at Forest Manor. Especially after being caught smoking weed in the bathroom with Johnny, of whom Esther regards with ostensibly racist sentiments. Something Paul calls her out for. She, in turn, incites Irving to beat the shit out of him as punishment for his illegal activity.

    At the core of the “unpleasantness” of it all is the fact that white liberals are as guilty as any conservative for allowing systemic racism to thrive. Benefitting from the “getting ahead” advantages of that system themselves. As Gray puts it, “…you can be both the oppressor and oppressed at the same time.” Paul becomes more than just “faintly” cognizant of that when he’s put in a position that finds him facing the ultimate moral dilemma by the end of the movie. And maybe, in his mind, he wouldn’t have been faced with that dilemma if he had evaded the clutches of Forest Manor. The first day he’s made to attend, he seethes to his father, “You just want me to be like you.” Irving responds, “No, I don’t want you to be like me. I want you to be so much better.” This is the very type of parental thinking that only perpetuates the system’s flourishment. For every generation of white liberals ends up succumbing to its seduction. The promise of, “Your kids can have what you never did. But you have to play the game.” And now, so do their children—permitting the cycle to persist.

    Somewhere between The Squid and the Whale and Triangle of Sadness, Armageddon Time is in the middle of the Venn diagram. With the former still being among the greatest New York-based coming-of-age films and the latter being a scathing diatribe on privilege. With Armageddon Time’s integration of race and the varying strata of whiteness that allows for “success,” it can readily be classified as a unique and vital addition to the coming-of-age canon.

    Moreover, it isn’t just Paul that comes of age (via a jaded comprehension of “how the world works”) by the end of the movie, but so does the America we know today. The one where “racism doesn’t exist” and “everyone is equal,” but the masses are tacitly attuned to the reality that it’s still a matter of working a broken and, yes, highly inequitable system if one wants to get that coveted “leg up.”

    Encapsulating the commingling of Paul’s coming of age with that of neoliberal capitalism’s in 1980s America, Gray noted, “You can’t monetize integrity, and it’s become a catastrophe, because you find that someone like Donald Trump is completely transactional, right? ‘What can you do for me? If you do this for me, I’ll do it for you.’ Everything’s about the brutality of the exchange of goods and services. At some point, life is more than that. And I saw this story as being representative of something bigger.” That it is, dear viewer, that it is.

    Genna Rivieccio

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