Daily Archives: October 12, 2016

Halt and Catch Fire <> Season 3

TV

Warning: Spoilers all over the place.

They could have named this season Flight of the Phoenix. The seasons starts with Mutiny starting to make a name for itself and not even by the end of the season, it’s all ashes.

Out of all of Joe’s failings, Ryan’s death was the worst of all of them. Ryan was young and inexperienced in just about every way. Like Cameron, brilliant, but he didn’t make it out the other end. Cameron got burned but her situation had a simpler path out of the rubble. Ryan never thought of (or knew of) how Joe makes his business moves in secret. This made him pull the trigger, for what he believed would be in helping and defending his mentor, when it actually was the worst thing he could have done. Plus, Ryan found out he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. That’s rough for a guy who thinks he’s the smartest person in every room. He thought he could cover his tracks only to find first hand that there was tech out there that he had no idea about.

Episode 8 I’ll call The Coup. Donna and Cameron had always been a great but dysfunctional team. They made it work for awhile, but those last few times where Cam would disappear (and she always held up progress on Mutiny because she insisted on doing everything herself) pushed Donna over the edge of tolerance. In this episode, Gordon is little more than a passenger, Voting Cameron out of the company is probably the best scene in the series so far. Intense and crushingly sad. Donna had her reasons and as everyone else did back her, it wasn’t a crazy idea. Cut off like a diseased limb, Cameron goes to Japan with Tom to work in the videogame industry.

Episode 9 sent me for a loop. They jump ahead 4 years to 1990. Donna’s plan failed. Mutiny collapsed. She’s divorced from Gordon and has made partner at Diane’s VC company. Gordon has managed to make the networking plan that he and Joe were working when Ryan killed himself to its fledgling status.  Joe is all alone day trading stocks by the look of it. Cameron has been in Japan the entire time making Space Bike into a successful series with Atari. When Donna finds out Cam is going to be at Comdex, she reaches out to Joe to help get all of them together to discuss a new business venture.

It was great to see Joe and Cameron together and having fun. Their scars healed over a little too much. Seeing bullheaded Donna was quite a bit different. So the big idea is the World Wide Web. In 1990 the Internet was still tiny. A few companies had access to it, it was tiny and was more or less just for academia. These people, the visionary, the engineer, the coding savant and Donna could be the ones to build the door that gets the public online.

The contempt in the room is a hurdle, to say the least. Joe butts heads with Tom (everyone more or less does that with Tom) but the real sticking point is between Cameron and Donna. When Cam admits that she’s as much to blame for the implosion of Mutiny as Donna, is a big revelation and admission for her. Then the other revelation comes on just as strong: she can’t work with Donna again. A flip comment about ditching Joe if Cam wanted to was all it took. What they originally had, what made their work so fun and exciting, is gone. She can never trust Donna again. Given the ultimatum, Donna leaves only to book a flight to Sweden. This leaves the original trinity to work together, for now.

A lot happened this season and it was all pretty great. It’s confirmed that next season will be the last and the fallout from season 3 has me teed up and ready to go for it.

The Jungle Book (2016)

Movies

junglebook

Jon Favreau is a hell of a director. He also knows how important a great cast and crew is. A reimagination of the decades old book and decades old animated Disney movie, The Jungle Book is an impressive movie and a technical marvel.

Found in the jungle as a very young boy by the panther Bagheera, Mowgli is being raised by wolves. Referred to as a “man cub” Mowgli has a hard time finding his place in the pack. When the tiger, Shere Khan, finds out a human is living amongst them he vows to kill him. In his journey to stay alive, Mowgli discovers fantastic characters, danger, and himself.

Right from the start, The Jungle Book grabs you by the eyeballs and guides you through a world that only great cinema can. From the Disney logo, we zoom away from Cinderella’s castle over the water into a river bed surrounded by foliage. Once through the film’s logo, the camera turns to the right and we’re in the Jungle Book. Mowgli is played by Neel Sethi, and aside from a quick scene with his father, is the only real life character in the movie. All the animals and 99% of the environment is computer generated. Cutting edge is putting it mildly. The animation on every level is amazing. The animals all have weight to them making them look that much more real. Even though talking animals is fantasy, it all looks right and is convincing to the point where my suspension of disbelief was locked in and I just believed that all of this was happening. The “Bare Necessities” song with Baloo (perfect casting Bill Murray) in the river is crazy. The finale is especially mind blowing.

The amount of care and planning to pull this movie off is impressive. Remaking a beloved classic is a daunting  task to start with and the way they pushed this story with new tech is daring. So much could have gone wrong.  The cinematography is genre defining stuff. It’s shot so well, the transitions are perfect and the soundtrack pulls everything together. With Favreau launching the MCU with Iron Man in 2008 and this, he is Disney’s golden goose. They’ll let this man do whatever he wants and we’ll all be waiting for it. This was a big surprise for me.