Swiped: Bad behavior in the tech industry

Swiped (2025) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated TV-MA, for profanity, nude images and deplorable behavior

Available via: Hulu

By Derrick Bang

The recent wave of tech-oriented origin sagas — 2023’s Blackberry and Tetris, and their ancestors, 2015’s Steve Jobs and 2010’s The Social Network — share an obvious characteristic: They’re all about young white guys, often working in a gender-hostile environment far closer to a frat house than a business office.

 

Having arrived as Texas' Southern Methodist University with the goal of getting sorority
and franternity gals and guys to sign up for their new dating app, Whitney (Lily James,
right) and Tisha (Myha'la) wonder where to start.

On top of which, the innovators often are arrogant, socially inept sociopaths: particularly true of Jesse Eisenberg’s handling of Mark Zuckerberg, in The Social Network ... a characterization that obviously was dead-on, given the actual Zuckerberg’s subsequent loathsome behavior.

All of which makes director Rachel Lee Goldenberg’s Swiped a breath of fresh air, since it giddily traces the rise, fall and rebirth of Whitney Wolfe Herd, who at the age of 31 became the youngest woman to take a company public, and also the youngest self-made billionaire.

 

(Clever title, just in passing.)

 

While fresh-out-of-college Whitney Wolfe obviously had some character shortcomings — chiefly naïvete and an overly trusting nature — she was then, and remains now, a rigorously honorable individual who has made a career of Doing The Right Thing, particularly on behalf of women.

 

Lily James’ performance gives Wolfe just the right blend of intelligence, breathless enthusiasm, sharp entrepreneurial impulses and an impressive ability to think outside the box.

 

Along with an unfortunate level of vulnerability, and a lamentable willingness to think the best of somebody, long past the point where self-preservation instincts should have kicked in.

 

But that comes a bit later. Goldenberg’s script, —co-written with Bill Parker and Kim Caramele — begins in 2012, as 22-year-old Wolfe tries to hustle her way into a sponsorship during a gathering of tech entrepreneurs and investors. She catches the attention of Sean Rad (Ben Schnetzer), one of several innovators brainstorming concepts in the Hatch Labs “incubator.”

 

Impressed by Wolfe’s enthusiasm and innovative suggestions, Rad puts her on his Cardify start-up. That’s just one of many potential projects in the Hatch Labs sandbox, and her attention soon turns to an embryonic dating app thus far known as MatchBox: a name that Rad dislikes. Given that existing dating apps are made for — and mostly used by — fortysomethings or older, Rad wants a catchy name for an alternative aimed at twentysomethings.

 

During a tempestuous meeting that typifies the mosh pit, dog-eat-dog behavior of her primarily male colleagues, Wolfe suggests Tinder. Delighted by this, Rad makes her the app’s vice president of marketing.

 

The additional all-important innovation comes from JB (Ian Colletti), who cleverly demonstrates what will become “the swipe.”

The Sea Beast: Monstrously entertaining

The Sea Beast (2022) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG, for dramatic intensity

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.15.22

Shrewdly thoughtful parables don’t get much better — or more enjoyable — than this one.

 

Director/co-scripter Chris Williams’ cunningly crafted “whale of a tale” deftly laces its gorgeously animated adventure saga with underlying themes of loyalty, inclusiveness, environmental awareness and — this is the biggie — the folly of blindly placing one’s faith in “accepted tradition.”

 

Despite his best efforts, Jacob always seems to get into trouble when Maisie is involved.

That’s a boatload of messaging, but the genius of Williams and Nell Benjamin’s script is that their film never feels like it’s preaching; such elements are an organic part of a thoroughly enjoyable story.

The setting is a somewhat familiar world, at a time akin to our late 17th century era of coastal towns and cities supported by sailing vessels. But these waters are laden with enormous sea beasts that prey on defenseless cargo ships, which has led to generations of heroic monster hunters who set sail in tall ships in order to attack these underwater giants.

 

It’s dangerous work, and the town orphanage is filled with children whose parents have perished in battle.

 

No ship is more respected than The Inevitable, helmed by the legendary Capt. Crow (voiced by Jared Harris) and his stalwart crew, most notably surrogate son Jacob Holland (Karl Urban). They’ve long defeated such monsters, at constant risk to life and limb, always returning to port with proof of kill — a tusk, a tail spike, a claw — for the King (Jim Carter), Queen (Doon Mackichan) and grateful townsfolk.

 

The film opens with a rip-snortin’ clash between The Inevitable and a Brickleback: an impressively nasty, hard-shelled behemoth with massive, ship-shredding tentacles. This is an exciting, tautly edited sequence — Joyce Arrastia, take a bow — that establishes the characters of Crow, Jacob, Lt. Sarah Sharpe (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and taskmaster Ms. Merino (Helen Sadler).

 

Nobody admires them more than little Maisie Brumble (Zaris-Angel Hator), an orphan who has long dreamed of becoming a monster hunter: in part to avenge her parents, who went down with The Monarch. Maisie has devoured the many books that have mythologized Captain Crow, Jacob, The Inevitable and all their predecessors.

 

She’s also quite precocious and outspoken, with a tendency to “escape” from the orphanage — and then get dragged back — each time a monster-hunting ship returns to port. Needless to say, she’s not about to miss the Inevitable’s arrival.

 

But what should be a celebratory occasion is blunted by the King’s decision to decommission all monster-hunting vessels, and their crews. The task instead will be assigned to the Royal Navy, which has just developed a heavily armed battle ship: The Imperator, helmed by the vainglorious Adm. Hornagold (Dan Stevens).

 

In part, the King pompously adds, because Crow and The Inevitable never have been able to chase down the most fearsome of all sea beasts: the massive Red Bluster.

I'm Your Man: Absorbing parable on the nature of humanity

I'm Your Man (2021) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for sexual candor and profanity

Available via: Hulu and other streaming services

By Derrick Bang

I love intelligent, quietly thoughtful sci-fi films: an increasingly rare commodity in this era of Star Wars, Star Trek and all manner of superhero movies.

 

Although ostensibly a genre devoted to science and speculative advancement, the best examples focus on how futuristic technology impacts the human condition.

 

Anna (Maren Eggert) isn't wild about introducing Tom (Dan Stevens) to her museum
research team ... but she prefers this to leaving him alone in her apartment.

2009’s Moon comes to mind, as does 2014’s Ex Machina.

Director Maria Schrader’s Ich bin dein Mensch — released here in the States as I’m Your Man — belongs in their company. This disarmingly beguiling little drama is one of 15 films short-listed for this year’s International Feature Film Oscar. And deservedly so.

 

The script — by Schrader and Jan Schomburg, based on a short story by Emma Braslavsky — is by turns ingenious, whimsical, poignant and remarkably insightful. All concerned have concocted a cheeky modern riff on the ancient Greek Pygmalion legend; the result is equal parts rom-com and shrewd philosophical musings on the nature of humanity.

 

The setting feels like modern-day Germany — in terms of clothing, cars and personal tech — but clearly is a bit in the future, given the story’s focus. We meet Alma Felser (Maren Eggert) as she nervously joins the crowd at what appears to be a posh speed-dating nightclub. She’s greeted by a “handler,” (Sandra Hüller), who in turn introduces her to Tom (Dan Stevens), apparently her companion for the evening.

 

It’s a shame to telegraph all the little ways in which this initial encounter goes oddly awry; not knowing the reason robs viewers of the delight to be experienced by Stevens’ impeccably nuanced and oddly balletic performance. Suffice to say that Tom tries much too hard to be gallant and charming, his fervent declarations of love and devotion far better suited to couples married for a decade or two, than a first “date” … if, indeed, that’s what this is.

 

But it isn’t. At least, not exactly.

 

Alma, in turn, clearly isn’t happy, doesn’t want to be here, behaves like a trapped rabbit. Eggert radiates wariness and discomfort, her guarded expression revealing a bit of condescension, if not outright contempt.

 

All becomes clear when Tom is revealed to be a meticulously crafted AI: human in appearance and — theoretically — behavior, down to the last detail. (Rest assured, matters eventually do get down to the last detail.) Alma is an archaeological research scientist at Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, specializing in deciphering ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform writing; she’s also one of 10 “experts” selected to evaluate the newest line of robots made by a never-specified corporation.

 

Her boss, Dekan (Falilou Seck), is part of an ethics committee that will determine the degree to which these … beings … are entitled to some (any?) of the protective rights that society grants its human members. Dekan has dangled a plum trip to Chicago — where Alma will be able to examine some key cuneiform tablets in person — as a means of securing her participation in this three-week trial.

 

To that end, and following Alma’s exhaustive earlier battery of tests and psychological evaluations, Tom has been designed as her “ideal man.” He’s to live with her for three weeks, after which she’ll render a final evaluation.

 

And, so, she brings him home. Very reluctantly.

The Call of the Wild: Bad dog!

The Call of the Wild (2020) • View trailer 
Two stars. PG, for dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.21.20

This certainly isn’t Jack London’s Call of the Wild.

To a certain degree, that’s good; among other things, the novel’s handling of Native Americans is a lamentable reflection of its 1903 origins.

As they spend more time in the wilderness of the Canadian Yukon, John Thornton
(Harrison Ford) senses that his canine friend Buck is responding to something
instinctively more powerful than his attachment to mankind.

But prudent adjustment on behalf of cultural sensitivity does not justify the insufferable Disney-fication of this otherwise classic saga. Although Harrison Ford does his best — as both narrator and human star — the story’s nobility has been lost in scripter Michael Green’s clumsy, tone-deaf and wildly uneven adaptation.

On top of which, the decision to rely on CGI fabrications — as opposed to actual dogs — is a serious miscalculation. That may fly with the wild animals in The Lion King and The Jungle Book; most of us aren’t intimately familiar with how lions, tigers, elephants and the like actually move. But we all know how dogs think, behave, walk, run and jump … and this film’s faux canines frequently look wrong, wrong, wrong.

No surprise, given that visual effects supervisors Ryan Stafford and Erik Nash “built” their canine star — Buck — from the athletic movements of a former Cirque du Soleil performer pretending to be a dog.

Are we to imagine that Hollywood lacks real dogs that could have served as models for London’s powerful, 140-pound St. Bernard-Scotch Collie mix?

Poppycock.

OK, fine; the SFX grants Buck more insight, sensitivity and expressive personality than we’d likely get from an actual dog actor (although seasoned canine trainers likely would argue that point). But this anthropomorphization constantly feels false and phony; it was fine for the wholly animated pooches in Lady and the Tramp and 101 Dalmatians, but here it’s merely distracting.

Green’s script follows most of the significant plot beats in London’s novel, so we initially meet Buck as the pampered, wholly out of control pet in the genteel, staff-laden household of wealthy Judge Miller (Bradley Whitford). This prolog marks an inauspicious beginning by director Chris Sanders, who unwisely channels the dreadful 1960s Disney comedies that involved animals — often dogs — running amok and destroying furniture, spilling the contents of every container in sight, and generally making as huge a mess as possible … supposedly because this was the height of hilarity.

It wasn’t then, and it isn’t now.

The Man Who Invented Christmas: Clever take on a holiday chesnut

The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG, for no particular reason
By Derrick Bang

This is a droll bit of seasonal mischief.

Les Standiford’s scholarly, quasi-biography of Charles Dickens — 2008’s The Man Who Invented Christmas — seems an unlikely source for a mainstream, holiday-themed film; scripter Susan Coyne deserves credit for an unusual (if hardly original) approach.

As Charles Dickens (Dan Stevens, seated) struggles to work his way through the five
"staves" of his new book, he's helped — and hindered — by his imagined personification
of Ebenezer Scrooge (Christopher Plummer).

The result proceeds briskly under the capable guidance of British film and TV director Bharat Nalluri, perhaps best known on these shores for 2008’s charming Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. Nalluri and Coyne similarly concentrate on whimsical character dynamics here, presenting us with a 31-year-old Dickens — played with agreeably feverish anxiety by Dan Stevens — beset by all manner of troubles.

The film begins with a brief prologue in 1842, with Dickens celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic, his stage readings standing-room-only sell-outs in the wake of his wildly popular novels Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop. Flash-forward a year and change, and Dickens is in dire financial straits after three published flops, including — most particularly — the unloved Martin Chuzzlewit.

Dickens is at wit’s end: unable to pay the craftsmen appointing his luxurious new home; forever harried by his spendthrift father (Jonathan Pryce, as John Dickens); and newly panicked by the news that his wife Kate (Morfydd Clark) is expecting their fifth child. Worse yet, he’s months into a ferocious case of writer’s block, the public disdain for his recent output having paralyzed his creative juices.

Best friend and sorta-kinda agent John Forster (Justin Edwards) isn’t much help, his advice limited to little beyond “Well, just write another book.” Dickens’ publishers — Chapman (Ian McNeice) and Hall (David McSavage) — are similarly useless: actually worse than useless, when they reject the pitch for his next book.

They hardly can be blamed, as it’s a crazed notion: a vaguely defined story about Christmas. Nobody writes about Christmas; nobody cares about Christmas. As the boorish husband of one of Dickens’ aristocratic readers sniffs, Christmas is “just an excuse to pick a man’s pocket once a year.”

If that line sounds familiar, you’ve recognized one key element in Coyne’s script.

The narrative conceit here is that Dickens overhears and jots down names, comments and possible plot contrivances from family, friends and random strangers. (Young Irish housemaid Tara — winningly played by Anna Murphy — helps him come up with the name “Scrooge.”) It’s a delightful notion, particularly for those well-versed in A Christmas Carol’s characters and quotable lines.

Beauty and the Beast: Stick to the original

Beauty and the Beast (2017) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG, for fantasy violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.17.17

This is a curious beast.

Try as she might, Belle (Emma Watson) cannot dissuade Gaston (Luke Evans) from
attempting to win her hand in marriage. Sadly, this dynamic will become quite
uncomfortable, once Gaston becomes vengeful.

Every frame of director Bill Condon’s film looks terrific. Sarah Greenwood’s production design is breathtaking, from the gingerbread quaintness of Belle’s adorable town of Villeneuve; to the Lovecraftian opulence of the Beast’s labyrinthine castle, with all of its brooding corridors and shambling minarets; to the darkly spooky, wintry forest that separates the two.

Visual effects producer Steve Gaub seamlessly integrates the live-action characters with their enchanted comrades, and the voice acting is superlative: Ewan McGregor as the ever-gracious candelabra, Lumière; Emma Thompson as the kindly teapot, Mrs. Potts; Ian McKellen as the blustery mantel clock, Cogsworth; Stanley Tucci as the defiant harpsichord, Maestro Cadenza; Audra McDonald as the operatic, overly enthusiastic wardrobe, Madame de Garderobe; and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as the coquettish feather-duster, Plumette.

The primary characters are equally well cast, their performances admirably suited to the story’s fairy-tale atmosphere. Luke Evans steals the show as the arrogant, boorish Gaston, determined to wed Belle by any means necessary; the always impish Josh Gad — apparently Disney’s new secret weapon — gets all the best lines as Gaston’s snarky sidekick, LeFou.

Kevin Kline is sublime as Belle’s doting father, Maurice: a role that easily could slide into cliché, with all of the aging gentleman’s quirks, eccentricities and easily flustered nature. But Kline surmounts such stereotyping with a persuasive blend of dignity, devotion and vulnerability; he sets a new standard.

It’s difficult to determine how much credit Dan Stevens deserves, as the Beast, given that he’s completely concealed beneath Jenny Shircore’s extraordinary make-up. But we’re seeing plenty of evidence of Stevens’ extensive acting chops, on TV’s Legion, so I’m willing to believe that he deserves plaudits for the credibility of the Beast’s complex emotional swing. And Stevens certainly does a lot with his eyes and voice, giving us the very definition of a tragic, doomed character.

And then there’s Belle, the story’s anchor, played with pluck, sincerity and resourcefulness by Emma Watson. Belle is delightfully bookish and ingenuous as the story begins, and yet bold enough to reject Gaston to his face; Watson’s early scenes with Evans are marvelous, as Belle struggles to remain polite while her eyes convey utter disgust for this boastful creep.

A Walk Among the Tombstones: Well-executed noir

A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for strong violence, disturbing images, profanity and fleeting nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.19.14

Veteran novelist Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder hasn’t been seen on the big screen since all the way back in 1986, when Jeff Bridges played the character in director Hal Ashby’s lamentably sloppy adaptation of the series’ fifth book, 8 Million Ways to Die.

Having persuaded TJ (Brian "Astro" Bradley, right) to accept the offer of a hot meal,
Scudder (Liam Neeson) is increasingly amused by the kid's determination to somehow
help out with the developing investigation.

Director/scripter Scott Frank has done a far better job, with A Walk Among the Tombstones (tenth novel out of 17, for those keeping track). Frank economically blends Scutter’s essential “origin story” with this book’s core plotline, and the result is a brooding, thoughtful detective thriller firmly set in the modern noir genre.

Frank certainly knows the territory. I praised his scripting chops just last week, noting his involvement with some of the genre’s best modern authors: James Lee Burke (Heaven’s Prisoners), Elmore Leonard (Out of Sight, Get Shorty and even TV’s woefully under-appreciated Karen Sisco) and now Block.

Frank’s scripting chops are measured, intelligent and — most important — faithful to the tone and atmosphere of whichever author he sources. The result always has been a compelling, tightly wound thriller, and his handling of A Walk Among the Tombstones is no exception.

Bridges looked much too young and exuberant as Scudder, back in the day; this film’s Liam Neeson is a far superior choice. He radiates just the right amount of world-weary melancholy, Scudder being a classic flawed and tragic figure: a man never able to forgive himself for past sins, yet forever struggling to do just that.

He’s also a rather unusual knight errant: an alcoholic ex-cop gone private, but not quite. Scudder can’t be bothered with a license, and he doesn’t advertise his services; as he explains, Neeson’s wry smile wrapped around the words, he “does favors for friends.”

His concept of “friendship” is both broader and looser than most, and this particular case begins with a request from Peter Kristo (Boyd Holbrook), a semi-regular in Scudder’s Alcoholics Anonymous group. The potential “client” actually is Peter’s brother Kenny (Dan Stevens), whose wife was just kidnapped and brutally murdered ... after the ransom was paid.