August (2008 film)

Discussion in 'Educational Resources' started by Pekelo, Nov 1, 2010.

  1. Pekelo

    Pekelo

    Just ran into this, it is aviable on Netflix for instant play. The story is 1 month before 9/11... Josh Hartnett is the lead actor and a guy called David Bowie is also in it... Will check it out...

    "This movie has two story lines: the first is the survival of "Landshark" Inc, a startup dot com company with a shaky product that recently went public, only to see its share price drop from $60 to $1; the second story is the family dynamics of the start up founding brothers, and their parent's influence. The first business story line may lose a lot of people if you aren't familar with Wall Street jargon - basically it's all about investors' perceptions of you as a dot com company, not what you actually deliver as a product. Tom (Josh Hartnett in possibly his best role ever) is the Spin master, street savvy (Wall Street that is), brother who is trying to keep the company afloat as the dot com industry is in meltdown mode, while Joshua (Adam Scott) is the techie brother who is trying to provide a salable product in the quickly changing dot com world. The second story line deals with brotherly relationships as things start falling apart, and brotherly tensions rise. "

    Another review:

    "This movie drops you right into the hysteria, hype and promise of the dot com era. This movie makes an accurate portrayal of the sometimes shameless and often clueless promoters, and the brilliant techies that drove it. So many movies about computer technology use stupid, meaningless phrases like "drop down to the COBOL root level" (see The Score, an otherwise excellent movie) that are disrespectful to the audience. Not this movie - it caught the rap and lingo exactly. For people who weren't around for it, the entire thing may seem baffling and pointless, but I have lent this to a number of my friends who were in the biz during this era, and they all enjoyed its frantic energy."
     
  2. While that would be the low budget vaporware version of the start up dot com tale...I would highly recommend "Extraordinary Measures," as a highly plausible account of a successful start up (in the biotech space) with great acting as well. Not saying there isn't any truth to the film, but the 2nd is far a far superior testament to the difficulties of making it (and the subsequent fantastic rewards) in a true start up; as well as top notch acting and production quality.

    I most definitely would not call it "Josh Harnett's" best role; terrible acting all around, IMO. 2c