The Dropout (Hulu): A TV Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A middling misfire of a movie of the week posing as prestige TV.

Years ago, before streaming services and even before cable tv, there was a network television phenomenon called The Movie of the Week (MOTW). MTOW was usually a second rate, ripped from the headlines hack-fest, starring some up-and-comer or down-and-outer, that produced a compelling commercial for itself but an abysmal two-hour movie.

Hulu, Disney’s backwater repository for all of its non-Disney-fied properties, seems to want to brand itself the modern-day home for the MOTW which it has stretched out into Mini-Series of the Week.

For example, a few months ago Hulu premiered Pam and Tommy, starring Lily James and Sebastian Stan, a mini-series which tells the true story of how a celebrity sex tape of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee came to be and changed the world for the worse.

Hulu also recently premiered another mini-series called The Girl from Plainville, starring Elle Fanning, which tells the true story about a high-profile case about a high school girl who was prosecuted for allegedly talking her boyfriend into killing himself.

Hulu’s The Dropout falls into this now familiar category, as it stars Oscar nominee Amanda Seyfried, and tells the true story of a high profile, scandalous event - Elizabeth Holmes scamming most everybody with her smoke and mirrors blood testing company Theranos.

Like the old MOTW, Hulu’s star-studded, ripped-from-the-headlines mini-series make for better commercials than they do actual series. For instance, Pam and Tommy generated a lot of light but ultimately no heat as it was an exercise is play-acting and vapid socio-political pandering.

The Dropout produces similar results but is even more vacuous and artistically banal than Pam and Tommy.

Pam and Tommy at least started off promisingly enough and then went precipitously off the rails, but The Dropout is a tortuous slog from the get-go. I almost didn’t make it through the first episode. And then was so turned off by its amateurish script, its incoherent structure and mundane production that I stayed away for weeks until I finally bit the bullet and watched the rest of the eight-episode series.

As evidenced by her work in David Fincher’s Mank, Amanda Seyfried is a fine actress, and she does her best as the peculiar Elizabeth Holmes, but Holmes is such a cartoon character that she feels impenetrable (maybe the point of why she turned herself into a cartoon character!) and Seyfried’s performance feels more like imitation than acting.

Seyfried never pierces Holmes’ armor and thus we are left with a rather shallow performance with her doing little more than mimicking Holmes’ bizarre speaking voice and not much else.

Other performances are equally underwhelming if not uncomfortably broad. William H Macy is atrocious as Richard Fuisz, a neighbor of Holmes and competitor. His prosthetics are an embarrassment to the profession.

Much like Pam and Tommy turned their story into a feminist screed about the evils of the patriarchy, The Dropout follows this familiar path. The series paints Holmes as both victimizer and, of course, since she’s a woman swimming in the shark-infested, unfathomable waters of the patriarchy, also a victim.

The show never dares confront the most obvious and most interesting truth about Holmes which is that she rose to the power solely BECAUSE SHE WAS A WOMAN.

The big wigs, and she had a plethora of big wigs, from investor Don Lucas to Rupert Murdoch to former Secretary of State George Shultz, who backed her and went to great lengths to protect her, did so because they wanted to signal their virtue and 21st century feminist bona fides. Holmes sensed their weakness and exploited her femininity to manipulate the ‘noble intentions’ of these pillars of the male power structure.

The media gets off easy too in The Dropout, as its role in her rise to power is diluted if not outright ignored. The media’s gushing, deferential coverage is what built the formidable myth of Holmes as the girl power Steve Jobs. The media wanted Holmes to be a feminist icon and did all it could to print the legend and avoid the truth.

Both the media and the powerful men she duped, were promoting the credo of the 21st century, image over merit. This credo fuels the entirety of our society, and is a reflection of a country and culture in a death spiral.

Ultimately, the problem with The Dropout, and Pam and Tommy, and Hulu’s MOTW approach, is that it too is only interested in image and not in merit, not just in their storytelling but in their hiring and production.

Yes, the stories of Elizabeth Holmes and Pam and Tommy Lee are on their surface interesting, but Hulu doesn’t bring any insight to them, just shallow recreation and exploitation. We learn nothing about Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout, we just witness her do things we already knew she did.

The Dropout, like Pam and Tommy before it, seems to exist for no other reason than for Hulu to signal its virtue and to have viewers passively mutter, “oh yeah, I remember when that happened in real life” as they sit comatose on their couch watching famous people play-act as other famous people.

As Orwell once wrote, “to see what is in front of one’s nose is a constant struggle”, and the makers of The Dropout are disinterested in life beyond their proboscos. The story of Elizabeth Holmes is chock full of lessons and morals for our decadent and delusional age, but The Dropout is incapable of seeing what is in front of its own nose, and instead prefers to close its eyes and imagine a different, more politically Twitter friendly, less complex, more Manichean, world instead.

The bottom line is that The Dropout, like Pam and Tommy before it, is a terribly wasted opportunity. It’s nothing more than an empty-headed movie of the week posing as prestige TV, stretched out over eight grueling weeks. There is absolutely no reason why anyone, anywhere, should ever waste their time watching this middling monstrosity.

©2022

Pam and Tommy: A TV Review

HULU’S PAM AND TOMMY STARTS STRONG BUT ENDS UP BEING A RATHER FLACCID FABLE.

Pam and Tommy, the Hulu miniseries that dramatizes the events around the creation, theft and distribution of the infamous 1990’s Pamela Anderson-Tommy Lee sex tape, could have been great.

For instance, the eight-episode series boasted remarkable performances from its two leads, Lily James and Sebastian Stan, who transformed into Baywatch babe Pamela Anderson and Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee respectively, and turned those walking cartoon characters into multi-dimensional human beings.

The series also performed the miracle of making Seth Rogan (also a producer on the series), who plays Rand Gauthier – the guy who stole the sex tape from Lee’s safe, less repulsive than usual. No small feat.

In addition, Craig Gillespie, the director of the terrific 2017 film I, Tonya, directed the first three episodes of the series, which were immensely entertaining and intriguing.

Yet, despite having all of these things going for it, Pam and Tommy in its final five episodes managed to, like a drunken Tommy Lee, stumble over its giant dick and fall flat on its face.

The series opening Gillespie directed Pam and Tommy episodes were imaginative, visually interesting, taut and well-paced. But the wheels came off the wagon after Gillespie left the directing chair and the series went from a hearty jaunt to a grueling death march.

A major issue in episodes four – eight was that the series lost its deft touch and became egregiously heavy-handed in its cultural politics. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with using cultural politics as the sub-text for a story, and Gillespie does that masterfully in the first three episodes, but the other directors, most notably Lake Bell in episodes four and seven, get bogged down in the mire of heavy-handed misogyny moaning and man-hating to the point of absurdity.

For example, in episode seven, Pamela Anderson is not only portrayed as an exploited victim of a ruthless and misogynist patriarchy, but also as some undiscovered cinematic genius for how she shot the sex tape in question. The women waxing poetic about the subtle intricacies of the sex tape want you to think Pam was Kurosawa with fake tits because she had the camera aimed at Tommy’s face as opposed to his genitals while they had sex. Maybe, just maybe, that shot wasn’t an artistic or creative choice, but was just a function of Pam being unable to think straight under orgasmic duress or her not being able to get a wide enough shot to capture the infamous anaconda in Tommy’s trousers.  

Regardless, Lake Bell’s direction in episode seven, in particular, is laughable for its ham-handedness and amateurish lack of subtlety and nuance.

What makes the final five episodes so disappointing is that the first three were so good. For example, the sequences where working class Rand has to interact with detached-from-reality-rich-guy Tommy, and the ones where the emotionally walking wounded Pam and Tommy meet and fall in love, are fantastic. And the sequences where Tommy and his personality-plus pecker have a tete-a-tete are the height of director Gillespie’s absurdist glory.

But once the players and the basics of the story are established in the first three episodes, the final five fail to close the deal as the story loses momentum and wanders aimlessly and repetitively through a melo-dramatic desert.

As disappointing as the series is overall, there is no denying the extraordinary work of Lily James and Sebastian Stan. James gives an amazing performance as she perfectly captures the persona of Pamela Anderson, and imbues it with a genuine humanity that is captivating and often quite moving.

Stan too is astonishing as the aggressively adolescent Lee. Stan gives the cartoonish drummer a vivid inner life and fills all of his endless mugging and posing with a profundity and poignance that is startling to behold.

The rest of the cast though do mostly mediocre work mostly because they’re not asked to do much more. As previously stated, Seth Rogan at first is interesting as the religiously and spiritually conflicted Rand, but then as his story becomes less compelling, so does Rogan.

Taylor Shilling, Andrew Dice Clay and Nick Offerman all have supporting roles of various sizes, but none of them do any notable work at all.

The story of the sex tape of Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee, and how it came to be and saw the light of day and spread via the internet, is a truly interesting and relevant story, as it says a great deal about the decadent and decaying state of our culture and country.

Watching Pam and Tommy, who are so desperate to be famous, become victims of the celebrity culture they cultivate and the fame to which they’re addicted, should have been insightful if not profound, but unfortunately, Pam and Tommy fails to elevate this modern-day myth and fable into anything more than a tedious tabloid tantrum.

 ©2022

I, Tonya: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. See it in the theatre or at the very least on Netflix/cable. 

I, Tonya, written by Steven Rogers and directed by Craig Gillespie, is the biographical story of infamous American Olympic figure-skater Tonya Harding. The film stars Margot Robbie as Harding with supporting turns from Allison Janney, Sebastian Stan and Juliette Nicholson. 

Bio-pics are notoriously hard to make with any sort of artistic originality. They usually fall into the same trap of simply showing the main events in the protagonists life so everyone can go, "oh yeah, I remember that", and then the movie is over and no one cares or learns anything they didn't already know. What is worse is that these films are usually a cinematic exercise in the dramatically mundane, with nary a daring or artistic vision to be found. 

Well, if you are looking for a bio-pic with some cinematic flair, I, Tonya is the movie for you. I, Tonya avoids all of the well-worn traps of the bio-pic by utilizing multiple perspectives and shamelessly embracing the idea that not only is it impossible for all of the differing perspectives it tells to be true, it is most likely that none of them are. I, Tonya is an unabashed lie of a movie about liars telling THEIR truth…and that is what makes it so utterly fascinating and so relevant to our current age of subjective truth. 

In execution, I, Tonya isn't quite a great film, but it certainly is an entertaining one, and I truly admired the movie for its ambition. Director Craig Gillespie takes the tabloid saga of fallen white trash princess Tonya Harding and turns it into a scathing indictment of America and the illusion and delusion of the American dream. Gillespie successfully pulls the scab off of America's festering class wound and exposes the cancerous rot at the center of American capitalism that threatens to kill its host via class and cultural warfare. 

The entire cast does fantastic work, with lead actress Margot Robbie leading the charge. Robbie does solid and at times spectacular work as Harding. Robbie, for all of her obvious beauty, disappears into the rapacious inelegance of Harding with vivacious aplomb.

Robbie's Harding is, like Donald Trump, a compulsive liar who confuses her truth with "the truth". Robbie imbues Harding with a deep-seeded yearning that is encased in a cover of defiance and petulance. In one of the more fascinating scenes in the film, Harding sits alone before a mirror and like Jake LaMotta in Scorsese's Raging Bull or Dirk Diggler in PT Anderson's Bogie Nights, this is when her true, tortured, disfigured self emerges from behind the mask, if only for a moment. This mirror scene is a subtle bit of brilliance, and is the best work of Robbie's young career and reveals an artistic depth that I hope she is able to thoroughly mine going forward.

Allison Janney plays Tonya's mother, the incomparable LaVona Fay Golden. Janney devours every scene she inhabits with the ferocity of a grizzly bear in a honey factory. When I originally saw the trailer for I, Tonya I was turned off because they made the film, and Janney's performance in particular, seem completely comedic and over the top. Thankfully, Janney's work in the film is subtler, more nuanced and much more genuinely human than it appears in the trailer. 

Janney's work as Tonya's mother has been compared to her Oscar competitor Laurie Metcalf for her work in Lady Bird as the protagonist's difficult mother. I will tell you right now, there is no comparison between the two. Janney gives a far superior performance because she is able to fill her abrasive, peculiar character with a grounded inner life that is vibrant and humanizing. Janney's LaVona is definitely a monster, but there is a pained and tortured person buried within that monster, whereas Metcalf's distant, dead-eyed mother is a one-note performance that rings more and more hollow with her every appearance on screen. 

Sebastian Stan plays Tonya's husband Jeff Gillooly and does excellent work. Stan masterfully disappears into the nothingness that is Jeff Gillooly and at the center of his being places a primal scream that echoes throughout his inner void and reveals itself in Gillooly's impotent frustration. 

Paul Walter Hauser nearly steals the entire film with his portrayal of Shawn Eckhardt, one of Gillooly's friends and Tonya's "bodyguard". Hauser deadpans with such skill it is nearly miraculous. Eckhardt is a character that in lesser hands than Hauser's could have been an over-the-top buffoon, but Hauser turns him into a fascinating, compelling, hysterical and heartbreaking figure.

As I watched I, Tonya other films kept popping into my head. The first film I thought of was Goodfellas, not because I, Tonya is anywhere near as great a work of cinema as Scorsese's classic, it isn't, but because the film uses similar techniques to break the rather stale mold of the bio-pic, like breaking the fourth wall and showing multiple perspectives. If you look closely at the film poster above, you'll notice I am not the only one to have recognized the similarities between Goodfellas and I, Tonya. 

Another film that came to mind was The Post, which I had just reviewed a few days before seeing I, Tonya. The reason I thought of The Post is because that movie and seemingly every single critic and media person who writes or talks about it, always refers to The Post as "timely". In my review I pointed out how I felt The Post was rather untimely…but you know what is a "timely" film? I, Tonya. Unlike The Post which was shot in a hurry in June of 2017 in response to Trump's presidency, I, Tonya was conceived before Trump was even elected and began shooting before he was inaugurated…and yet, I, Tonya is considerably more prescient and insightful in terms of political relevance than Spielberg's flaccid ode to the establishment because it highlights class warfare and the elite versus working-class American divide. As opposed to The Post, and all of Spielberg and Hanks' films, which portray America as it wishes to see itself through the heavy gauze of its delusion, I, Tonya strips Trump's America bare and exposes the nation for what it TRULY is, not what it wants to be.

The third film I thought of was this year's critical darling, Lady Bird. The reason I thought of Lady Bird is because it is a sort of Disney channel lite-version of I, Tonya. Lady Bird playfully attempts to show the struggle of a lower middle class/working class young woman yearning to break free of her creatively suffocating world whereas I, Tonya shows a creative young woman, Tonya Harding, whom Lady Bird would ridicule, fighting for her literal survival in a country full of liars who despise her for not telling them the truth they want to hear. Unlike Lady Bird, I, Tonya shows real American poverty and the accompanying hopelessness that is strangling our country and is the birth mother of Trumpism. The obstacles Lady Bird must overcome are all imaginary and are the result of her selfishness and sense of entitlement. In I, Tonya, the obstacles facing the generationally poor in America are revealed to be the result of systemic causes that are baked into the American cake that result in self-destructive impulses and idiocy that knows no bounds. Lady Bird is a movie by an elitist about the world she's glad to have escaped, whereas I, Tonya is a movie about the type of dead-end people Lady Bird left behind, or more accurately, doesn't even know exist.

The hopelessness of the left behind dead-enders is fertile ground not only for the desperation that gave us Trump, but for the desperation that has given us the Opioid epidemic. I, Tonya is a funny movie in many ways because it has to be, for if it played itself as a straight drama it would be far too depressing to bear, the proof of which is played out over large swaths of America where Opioid-addicted zombies roam the streets and the stench of death and Narcan fills the air over vast swaths of the country all because people cannot face the meaninglessness of their lives and the emptiness of their reality. 

Another film that came to mind while watching I, Tonya, was The Florida Project, which I have seen but have yet to review. The Florida Project is about a little girl growing up in numbing poverty in the shadow of Disney World. The film is difficult to watch, not because it is poorly made, but because it tells such uncomfortable truths that I, and maybe most people, would rather forget or never know about in the first place. The protagonist in The Florida Project is basically a young Tonya Harding without the skating talent…which is a chilling thought for her, and America's, future. 

As for I, Tonya, the biggest drawback of the film for me was that it isn't shot particularly well. The film is a bit flat visually and lacks the cinematic vigor and camera panache of say, Goodfellas, but that hardly disqualifies it from being worth seeing. In some ways, the less than polished and professional feel of the film enhances the movie's working class appeal.

In conclusion, I, Tonya's ambition extends beyond its execution but in my eyes that it is a noble failing at worst. I encourage you to go spend your hard earned money and time to go see I, Tonya in the theatre because its courageous telling of the real story of class in America is not flattering, but it is revealing as to how we all ended up imprisoned in Trump's America. The real America, the America of I, Tonya and Trump, that Lady Bird and the rest of the elites want to pretend doesn't exist, is a Reality TV, celebrity obsessed, subjectively-truthy, Opioid-addicted, vapid, hopeless, white trash, fast-food nation. Trump is now King of I, Tonya's America, but twenty some-odd years ago, Tonya Harding was its Crown Princess, and she was a harbinger of the vacuous plague to come. I, Tonya is reminder of the warnings we have failed to heed, and the depth of the pit into which we have dug ourselves. 

©2017