Hush (2016)

Director:  Mike Flanagan

Written by: Mike Flanagan, Kate Siegel

A deaf and mute author defends her secluded country home from a murderous intruder.

Hush is brisk.  It clocks in at under ninety minutes, with most of the action taking place in real-time (though liberties are taken), in a single location, and with a cast of no fewer than five people.  It is precisely these constraints which make the film so rewarding.  Its focus is undiluted to a point that, as viewers, we always feel close at hand to the heroine’s plight.

It is no secret that most slasher films work largely by attrition.  The heroine and her stalker take turns in whittling each other down (mainly lacerating and bludgeoning), until a final scuffle — in which the heroine invariably lands the coup de grace — ends the film.  This routine is typically a bit frustrating, as the heroine is always bolting off after every check, rather than sticking around to finish the job.

Hush contains a number of scenes in which its heroine (supplied with humour and verve by Kate Siegel — also the film’s co-writer) is facing her attacker from a position of advantage, and yet, opts to limp away on a trick leg, rather than dispatch him.  Indeed, it often feels as though she could  best him at any moment.

However, the picture’s biggest offence is simply showing too much too soon.  Director Mike Flanagan squanders the opportunity to fully exploit his premise in the front-end, favouring instead a premature lurch into gory horror.

I couldn’t help but think the film might have done something really novel with its first kill.  The thought is undoubtedly there, but in execution, this set piece is somehow lacking.

In any case, these are only minor quibbles.  In the main, Flanagan has crafted an immensely enjoyable thriller, with enough momentum to hold its audience at full attention.  John Gallagher Jr. is especially unnerving as the smug, but gaffe-prone killer.  He plays the role with an inelegance, and a mouth-breathing coarseness, somewhere between Black Christmas’ Billy, and any number of young spree-shooters.  Commendably, he manages to capture the essential narcissism of sadists: a quality that many horror actors seem to overlook.

S.S.

Southbound (2015)

Directed by: Roxanne Benjamin, David Bruckner, Patrick Horvath, Radio Silence

Writing Credits: Roxanne Benjamin, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, David Bruckner, Susan Burke, Dallas Richard Hallam, Patrick Horvath

A sand-logged horror anthology in the vein of recent indies like V/H/S 2 and Trick ‘r Treat.  Southbound serves up five equally cryptic tales — all tied together by a shared time and setting — with much of the action taking place along a sinister strait of desert road.

By their very nature, anthology films are inconsistent.  Even the most worthwhile titles (Dead of Night, Creepshow, Wild Tales) are more than a little spotty in places — and those are pictures with solo writers & directors.  Southbound has four directors, and nearly twice as many writers on board.  The opening credits, which play over scenes of a speeding pickup, function almost like road sign, one which seems to read: ‘bumpy terrain ahead’.

As you might have already guessed, Southbound is not entirely successful.  Blending science fiction and horror, its stories and characters follow a kind of dream logic.  In the wraparound portion of the film, two murderers flee from a swarm of vengeful, scythe-wielding skeletons.  Then, after passing the same gas station a number of times, a hard truth dawns on them: this is an infinitely looping purgatory.   It’s an engaging enough setup, however the elementary dialogue in these scenes is so completely at odds with the fantastical situation, that the overall effect is one of discord.  Consider lines like ‘I’m not running.’ and ‘I know we’ve had a pretty fucked up day, but if you could keep it together…!’  These might land well enough in a chase flick, but they’re considerably less at home in a story about swarming skeletal phantoms.

These concepts might sound fairly novel, but there is precedent here.  For one, there are repeated echoes of the lesser known Quicksilver Highway; a double-bill portmanteau horror from 1997, also set against a backdrop of desert road.  Similarly, Southbound’s fourth segment — which concerns a reconciliation of estranged siblings, one of whom is a actually vampire — calls to mind the first kicker in Amicus’ The Vault of Horror.

This is a film which knocks over as many cliches as it clings to, and although there are enough glints of inspiration, even its most unfamiliar stories eventually collapse onto their hackneyed punchlines.  In the final reel there is a deeply unsurprising home invasion sequence (in which the wile daughter is left to fend off the intruders, following the murder of her parents), which I will credit for its final reveal, but which also falls largely flat.  I neglected to count the number of times a character says to a supposed stranger: ‘How did you know my name?’, after said enigmatic stranger calls them by their full name, although my guess would be: too many times.

Ultimately, Southbound remains watchable for the fragmentary nature of its stories; there is always something withheld, and as such, the viewer never feels completely in the loop.  Still, as the film winds on, it’s difficult not to find yourself growing less and less interested in the idea of a ‘loop’, as the question niggles: are these simply mediocre stories with a sci-fi gloss?

Southbound should be commended for everything that it tries, it’s just a pity these excursions don’t bear a richer fruit.

S.S.

The Parallax View (1974)

Director: Alan J Pakula

Written by: David Giler, Lorenzo Semple Jr., Robert Towne (uncredited)

Based on the novel by: Loren Singer.

Alan J Pakula’s film stars Warren Beatty as a down-and-out journalist who stumbles across an international conspiracy, three years after the assassination of a popular US senator.

The 1970’s might have been a tumultuous decade for American politics, but there can be no argument that it also fostered some of the preeminent talents in American cinema.  When you consider the sheer volume of singularly brilliant filmmakers to arrive on The New Hollywood roster, the sum of talent is overwhelming.  Even omitting those who have passed away, or sadder still, chosen to retire, the catalog is rich:

Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg, Roman Polanski, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, George Lucas, Clint Eastwood, William Friedkin, Francis Ford Coppola… These are all urgent filmmakers whose output has remained both interesting, and in-demand.  Scorsese films are still event films.  Scott films are still event films.  Spielberg films are still are, and will always be, event films.  It’s a testament to their collective expertise that these directors never fell off the radar, or lost touch with their medium.

You could say The Parallax view arrived at precisely the right time, or if you’d prefer, that historical events arrived at the right time for The Parallax View.  Whatever your view, Pakula’s film is unmistakably a product of its era, invoking every 70s neurosis — from the Kennedy Hangover, to Watergate, and Vietnam — to generate its paranoid atmosphere.

I’m a big advocate of Pakula.  I’ve got endless time for his filmography.  Like many of his peers, chiefly Brian DePalma and Bill Friedkin (both of whom I also rate highly), Pakula’s Hitchcock line is generally on the surface.  Tension is crafted with delicate attention, and subtextual terror is used to endow otherwise innocuous imagery with fresh foreboding.

There are several moments in the Parallax View which recall Hitchcock in this way, but one of the most memorable involves a stack of napkins.

Warren Beatty, our hero, has just boarded a plane in search of an elusive assassin, only to realise upon takeoff, that the perpetrator has fled — and left a time-activated bomb in the hold.  Beatty is now tasked with alerting the crew, but must do everything in his power to avoid drawing their suspicion.  After frantically scrambling for a way to communicate this warning, he eventually scrawls something onto a napkin, before slipping this missive onto a passing stewardess’ trolley.  A tense, unbroken shot of the undisturbed napkin follows; as the stewardess continues down the aisle, offering drinks, oblivious to the note.  The panic bubbles up as we watch and wonder: will she see it, will she disregard it, how will she react, will it be too late?

The film also benefits from an evocative, sinister soundtrack, courtesy of Michael Small, who worked memorably on films like Klute, and Marathon Man.  His music trips all the right emotions, evoking a mixture of dread, dashed hope, paranoia, and cynicism, with its stirring drum cadence, and powerful, dissonant motif.  I was reminded of John William’s JFK score, which for me, remains the heavyweight’s most simultaneously chilling, and rousing theme.

There comes, at around the film’s mid-way point, a tremendous, blind-sider sequence — in the form of an extended montage.  Beatty has infiltrated the Parallax corporation (an extra-governmental group which moulds psychopaths into assassins, and, just occasionally, patsies) and is being forced to watch five minutes of ‘visual materials’ as part of their testing procedure.  A slideshow of Images, punctuated by title-cards (‘MOTHER’, ‘FATHER’, ‘LOVE’, ‘ME’, ‘COUNTRY’), flicker over the screen at growing speed.  As the presentation wears on, pictures swap into different groupings (sexual imagery appears in the ‘MOTHER’ category, and nazi rallies appear alongside Nixon in ‘COUNTRY’).  This five minutes interlude remains both daring and electric to this day, capturing the viewer’s gaze like hypnotic propaganda.   Its effect is so potent, that afterwards, audiences may well find themselves asking a difficult questions about the plasticity of emotion, allegiance, and free-will..

I would be remiss not to namecheck Soylent Green (released the same year as Parallax), for its virtuoso scenes of montage, all of which achieve, through comparable techniques, a similarly downbeat and nasty reaction.  Also present are distinct grammatical similarities between this film, and later paranoid Sci-Fi fare like Logan’s Run, and Kaufman’s Body Snatchers remake, to name but a few.

I watched Parallax on Netflix’s streaming service, and spent a good deal of time poring over the various reviews, after the fact.  Perhaps this was unwise.  Despite the numerous positive notes, there was a depressing trend of misinformed conjecture.  Cries of ‘hard to follow’, ‘pointless’, and most erroneously of all — ‘dumb’.  This didn’t entirely surprise me, though it did leave me eager to rebut.

The Parallax View does not trace a particularly complex plot.  Beat to beat, the story is brisk and linear, but unlike many contemporary offerings, it is told with a lavish, visually compelling style.  The mis-en-scene, interior and exterior, is always precisely composed in super-wide 2:35:1 (this is illustrated in the pictures accompanying this review), however it’s the little details (napkins and such) that really elevate the piece — and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was precisely this focus on ‘detail’ that threw off the film’s latter-day detractors.  They simply weren’t looking at the napkin, or the sack lunch (containing the poisoned sandwich), or the silver platter of drinks (which concealed the gun).  No, instead they were elsewhere, waiting for the explosion.

General appetites have changed since 1974, favouring a blander, glossier product.  This unfortunate depression in quality is likely the result of perennial, nervous, studio interference.  After all, genre films can be volatile statements.  Personally,  I think this is their purpose.  But challenging themes, a complex visual language, and open ended stories are no longer considered profitable.  Studios like to neuter genre films.

It seems that, increasingly, modern thrillers rely on a handful of hoary tropes to placate audiences.  A few examples of these, would be:

– Overwrought, uninspired, and typically superfluous chases — in which a constantly roaming and swinging camera, coupled with breakneck edits, flattens any spirit of tension.

– Loud pyrotechnics, usually achieved with glossy VFX, thrown in repeatedly and unimaginatively.

– All-too-frequent helicopter establishing shots (in case the audience forgot that cityscapes existed).  These scenes are almost always accompanied by an ominous groan of music.  God forbid one of these forms the film’s opening scene — there might not be a greater red flag…

For a meaningful comparison, take any number of modern paranoid thrillers — the Taylor Lautner Thriller Abduction, or Pierce Brosnan’s recent ‘Survivor’, do feel free to pick freely — and study their methods closely.  There is nothing about these films, speaking particularly about their command of a visual language, which suggests any ability beyond low-functioning competency.   No flair, no invention, no risk.  The images tell a story, but do so in a flaccid, by-the-numbers style.  Now return to Parallax, and take any one of its frames: they all mean something.

The worst part about all this, is that undiscerning viewers will often insist that a film like Abduction is the superior product.  After all, it’s newer, there are more explosions, more cuts, and at no point do the filmmakers stop to interrogate the images on screen, or pose any challenging questions.

So, considering all of the aforementioned, it is perhaps understandable that a decent handful of people would miss the net here.  And as I am loath to complain about the viewing habits of others (we’re all hypocrites in that respect, aren’t we?), I’ll curtail this rant for the time being.  Though as a final word, I should express that I do find pleasure in a number of (relatively) new filmmakers in this genre — Denis Villeneuve to name but one.  It’s certainly not all rotten apples.

The Parallax View is comfortably one of the quickest and most daring conspiracy thrillers of the 1970’s.  Daring for its willingness to counter mainline notions about political process, and assert something seedier.  It was controversial enough when Stone took this position in 1991, but he had nearly three decades of clearance — Pakula’s film had only one.

As the film posits: ‘there is a natural bureaucratic tendency to cover up mistakes’.  Pakula is indicting the entire US government, if not for first degree murder, than at the very least for malfeasance.  

S.S.

Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)

Director: George Clooney

Written by: George Clooney and Grant Heslov

Good Night, and Good Luck is George Clooney’s second film as director, after 2002’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.  An intimate retelling of CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow’s televised clash with senator Joseph McCarthy, at the height of the Red Scare.

Good Night, and Good Luck is that rare period film that feels authentic down to its texture.  From the grey flicker of a tube, to the smoggy chatter of a typing pool, this is a closely-observed 1950’s Americana.

Director George Clooney blends extended sequences of raw newsreel into the scripted action, including footage from Annie Lee Moss’ deposition, and Joseph McCarthy’s infamous rebuttal to E.R. Murrow.  It is a testament to the film’s authentic texture, that these segments never jar.

Good Night, and Good Luck is an ensemble film, but I should note, not of the indulgent sort.

It is couched in memorable, unobtrusive performances, none of which overpower the engaging story.  At its core, this is an unembellished, unflashy retelling of events, one that feels very much in keeping with Murrow’s famously sober style of broadcasting.

Frank Langella plays chief executive of CBS, William S. Paley; a formidable performance reminiscent of Christopher Plumber’s turn as Mike Wallace in The Insider (both roles about the discord between corporate and editorial journalism).  However, it is character actor Ray Wise who steals the show here, proving in an understated fashion, that he’s just as consummate out-of-genre, than he is in it.  Clooney, of course, is perfectly at home in the house he built.

Good Night, and Good Luck has something of that Pakula-Lumet quality — we feel like flies on the wall in a smoky, lively, lived-in world.  Another obvious touchstone would be Robert Redford’s Quiz Show; an equally effective expose, centring on the world of commercial broadcast television during the 1950’s.  And just like Clooney’s film, Quiz Show was also a passion project helmed by an established actor turned director.

Slick, but carefully restrained filmmaking.

S.S.

Future Shock! The Story of 2000AD (2014), and Being Evel (2015)

Director: Paul Goodwin (Future Shock!…) / Director: Daniel Junge (Being Evel)

An interesting double feature.  Future Shock! The Story of 2000AD (2014) is Paul Goodwin’s documentary about the British comic magazine ‘2000AD’.   Being Evel (2015) is a documentary about American icon Evel Knievel, directed by Daniel Junge.  It was financed in part by Johnny Knoxville’s ‘Dickhouse Productions’, and also features Knoxville as a talking head.

“Don’t Trust Your Heroes”

Topically and geographically, these two documentaries couldn’t be further removed.

One is the chronicle of a firebrand motorcycle daredevil, and the people he hurt — not least himself — over the course of a 15 year stunt career.

The other is the tale of the British comic anthology 2000AD, which originated cult characters like Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog, to name but a few.

One is about a huge cult of personality.  The other is about a niche cult of comics.  And yet, despite these obvious differences, there is plenty of thematic crossover here.

Markedly, they’re both about the myth of superheroes.

In Being Evel, director Daniel Junge gets to have his cake and eat it too.  The film’s portrait of Knievel is at once contentious of his mythologised status (early scenes establish that he was formerly an unscrupulous insurance salesman), whilst also paying homage to the hyperbole (in the same sequence, we are told that Evel sold a staggering number of policies, more than any of his coworkers).

Junge’s cutting style is linear.  He lays out the pertinent beats of Evel’s life from beginning to end, in an uncomplicated fashion.  This linearity serves the film perfectly, and the daredevil’s fascinating trajectory contains more than enough torque and momentum to power it.

Being Evel is a 99 minute documentary that straps you in early and holds you for its duration.  It also contains some hysterically funny ad-libs (most of which come courtesy of Evel’s old ground crews), and the knackered footage of his various leaps remains worry-making stuff to this day — more than thirty years from the fact, my hands still clammed.  Clearly Junge has a lot of archival material to work with here (the film is bursting with it), but this doesn’t overclutter the story, and the proceedings maintain a tight and fast style throughout.

Future Shock! The Story of 2000AD is markedly less linear.  Sections of the film are organised into titled chapters, dealing variously with the publication’s relationships with violence, UK politics, sexism, editors, Hollywood, and plenty else.  These chapters are chock of great stuff, but the lack of a through-line means the final product lacks something of the bullet-focus so distinct in Junge’s film.

But I digress.  Back to that ‘myth of the superhero’ part.

Like I stated up there, both of these documentaries do something, rather pointedly, to confront the fallacious nature of superheroism.  As writer Neil Gaiman notes: “don’t trust your heroes” was the mantra of 2000AD.  Artists with the magazine wanted to unseat the flawless comicbook hero (see: Clark Kent), in favour of a less splendid, morally grey alternative.  Their mission, as they saw it, was to plant distrust for authority, distrust for broad ideas, in a new generation.  This modus was accomplished with the invention of Judge Dredd — a fascistic, mass-murdering stormtrooper, in the guise of a superhero.

In Being Evel, Junge seeks to do something similar.  With candid interviews, press recordings, and home video, Junge pares away the stuntman’s heroic facade, the one peddled by Hollywood and Ideal Toys, and reveals the selfish philanderer underneath.

But this isn’t the only way in which these two documentaries intersect.

In Future Shock!, a great deal is said about the efforts of certain writers to elevate the status of the comic books, which had long been relegated to toy racks, disregarded by many as simple juvenilia.  One of the core aims of 2000AD was to upend this notion, and to finally intellectualise the medium.

It is in much this same way that Junge’s film seeks to elevate the stunt performances of Evel Knievel — postulating that the daredevil was a figurehead of truth, in a decade (the 70’s) polluted by lies and uncertainty.  In a particularly memorable segment, actor Guy Hamilton asserts that Evel’s enduring popularity may well be the result of his commitment to an act without artifice.  And he has a point.  With so much popular entertainment that is spurious and bloated, it’s hard not to appreciate Knievel’s feats for their honest simplicity.

S.S.

Berberian Sound Studio (2012), and Duke of Burgundy (2014)

Director/Writer: Peter Strickland

Peter Strickland both writes and directs these handsome, but frustratingly top-heavy, chamber pieces.

To date, I have seen two of Peter Strickland’s films.  I was lucky enough to catch The Duke of Burgundy in the cinema (where it had only a limited run), and later watched Berberian Sound Studio on television, when it aired on Film4.

The two films share a lot of the same pros — both are beguiling, atmospheric, period-set character studies.  They also share the same core problem — namely, the absence of a satisfying conclusion.  This is probably a little overstated, and I’m aware that complaining about a lack of closure in art cinema is wholly redundant, but I was irked all the same.

In both films, Strickland creates a microcosmic world, out-of-joint with reality, and ornamented with stylised filmic horror.  In Berberian, it is the world of gory Giallo, and in Burgundy, it is the world of softcore sexploitation (think Black Emmanuelle meets Hammer’s Karnstein Trilogy).  Both aim for a sumptuous 70’s style-set befitting of their analogues.

Burgundy’s premise is fascinating, and the conceit of Berberian is no less so.  The former is about two lesbian lovers, both lepidopterists, whose relationship is gradually consumed by one party’s escalating fetishism.  The latter concerns a quaint English foley artist, tasked with designing the sound for a splattery Italian horror film.

When I first heard these loglines I was sold.  They were so singularly evocative that I determined to see both films as soon as I possibly could.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Strickland had that same eagerness when he conceived of them.  I imagine both ideas were expedited to the page slightly too soon.  I suppose the trap is: ‘this idea is so good, I needn’t plan it.’, when in reality, the opposite rule applies.  Of course, I am just speculating here.  These ideas might have been gestating in Strickland for decades.

As I have stated already, my biggest gripe with these films is their endings.  Both tumble into paranoia just slightly before their last reel, and it is at this point (with story tensions coming to a head) that Strickland falls back on his visual language — for the last ten minutes, there’s precious little dialogue, and instead, a montage of images takes over.

In both cases I was reminded of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, a film which I admire greatly.  It is after this fashion that Strickland crafts his climaxes — however, whereas the climax of Don’t Look Now threads images and music together coherently (and movingly), Strickland throws coherence out of the window.  There is no longer any semblance of story, and every bit of intrigue, every question (‘Are these lovers going to kill each other?’, ‘Is the technician going to fall victim to a malevolent force, or insanity?’) is lost in the confusion, as the subtly built-up tautness unspools.

Imagine a child crafting, in laborious and painstaking detail, a highly ornate sandcastle… and then trampling it.

This ‘tease and denial’ of a resolution is more apropos in The Duke of Burgundy, given its context (it is a film about sadomasochism), but Berberian Sound Studio (the weaker of the two films, in my opinion) has even less of an excuse.

I hate to kvetch, especially when there’s so much artistry and intelligence in these films — barely any of which I’ve talked about — but frustratingly, it’s the disappointment I remember best.  After all, even the most fruitful relationships can be tainted by a messy breakup.

In my search for closure, I may just have to watch his 2009 debut Katalin Varga.  Wish me luck.

S.S.

Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999)

Director/Writer: Martyn Burke

From the book by: Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine.

Martyn Burke writes and directs this made for TV adaptation of Paul Freiberger and Michael Swain’s book Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer.

As a votary of the recent Steve Jobs biopic, and a long-term fan of the trophy laden Social Network, it’s probably no surprise to anyone that I enjoyed this flick.  But I really, really, did.  I was already half-asleep when it started, but within the first five minutes (maybe four), my fatigue was gone.  I was riveted.

Firstly, I like the script.  It’s full of effective little setups and payoffs, and Burke’s commitment to a tight structure makes the film an engrossing and effortless watch, even if some of the dialogue is a bit on the nose (When Jobs visits his wife after months of estrangement she broaches by saying “It’s been what.  A year?”).  Continuous threads of voiceover buoy all of the action; in the Microsoft chapters, future CEO Steve Balmer (exuberantly handled by John DiMaggio) gives frequent asides, sometimes walking right out of the frame, and directly addressing the audience (the kind of shtick you imagine Balmer doing on stage, at an exposition or a tech launch).  In the Apple chapters, voice-over duty falls to character actor Joey Sotnick, in an honest and affable turn as Steve Wozniak.  Like their real-life counterparts,  DiMaggio and Slotnick are engaging for their sheer charisma.  Both characters are essentially lackeys; subjugated, undervalued, and in the case of Wozniak, frequently  maltreated.  We warm to them almost at once, and their flair for narration is perfectly apt, given that both Balmer and Wozniak are, in reality, great raconteurs.

In the foreground we have Noah Wyle and Anthony Michael Hall; both commendably nuanced as the two warring moguls, though perhaps moreso Wyle.  Jobs is captured as a manic perfectionist — benevolent at turns, violent and coercive at others.  His performance falls somewhere between a barker at an upscale carnival, and a demented cult leader — with shades of a Manhattan apothecary thrown in.

Gates, on the other hand, comes off as equally driven, but a lot less alienating.  Hall makes the character gauche and clumsy, but also shows us why: his priorities are elsewhere.  Gates simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to spare for fashion or social graces, and is disdainful of Jobs’ fanatical new-age spieling.  Instead, he divides his time between two things: making computers, and goofing off with friends.  Unlike his rival, Gates is made to appear as essentially good-humoured, with a  sense of fun that, at times, borders on the reckless.  Perhaps the biggest disconnect between the two figureheads lies in Gates’ ability to tolerate a ribbing — usually from the outrageous Balmer — whereas Jobs is simply too postured to stoop.

It was undeniably refreshing to see Hall as a lanky, inelegant nerd once again — after the Brat Pack disbanded, he eschewed a decade of typecasting in order to play a string of bullying jocks (Tales from the Crypt, Edward Scissorhands etc.).  This is understandable, given that he filled out a rather big frame, but all the same, it’s fun to have him back, and wearing the role so comfortably.

If I have one complaint, it’s that the 1:33:1 version of the DVD has not yet been made available.  Instead, home audiences will have to contend with the original broadcast version in 4:3.  At least it’s not a panned-and-scanned conversion, being that this project was always — for better or worse — intended for the small screen.  In any case, don’t be put off by its origins (I appreciate that even in the age of Netflix and VOD, the words ‘TV MOVIE’ still carry a fair stigma), this is deft and intelligent filmmaking, with none of the Hallmark trappings.

Spirited performances and economical pacing make sure that every scene — whether characters are tinkering in garages, or conferencing with suits — is hugely compelling.  And as the sense of achievement (or ‘revolution’, as Jobs repeatedly states) mounts steadily to a pitch, its hard not to be swept up in the fervour.  Like its contemporaries Steve Jobs and The Social Network, Pirates of Silicon Valley delivers more thrills, and more invention, than most blockbuster fare, and does so on a fraction of the budget.  I can’t praise the cast enough.  This is an impressively successful film in every department, and certainly one deserving of a revival.  Did I mention that it has a kicking soundtrack?

S.S.