BEFORE: Well, I finished watching "Good Omens" on Amazon Prime, and I can't say enough good things about it. It's everything that an adaptation of a Neil Gaiman (with Terry Pratchett) novel should be, and SO much better than "American Gods" on Starz, which is already two seasons longer than it should be, and there's no end in sight. "Good Omens" was 6 episodes, boom, done, that's exactly as long as it should have been, since it's basically a short novelette, so they kept it moving right along. I'd vote for a Season 2 if they could extend the characters beyond the book, but there's really no need. Now I've moved on to "Stranger Things" Season 3, two episodes per night, and I'm already half done. They try to make each season a little different, but it's really the same shit as season 1, for the third time now. The best thing I can say about it is that it's feeding my need for fiction, and should get me through the last few waning days of Documentary Month.
Do I NEED to watch another movie about Steve Jobs, after having seen both of the fictionalized versions of his life? Well, perhaps - I think both of those movies had some serious narrative flaws, like the one that only focused on five days out of his entire life. I guess that's maybe an intriguing way to tell a story, but the chances of leaving out some of the better moments are just too great, right? Like, are we going to ignore 99% of the days of his life, or are we going to just move important moments and interactions on to those days, just to be on the safe side? I think that was playing a bit fast and loose with the rules - not that documentaries are incapable of doing that, but they have a different way of presenting the facts, one that might be a bit more straight-forward.
Here's hoping.
The voice of director and interviewer Alex Gibney carries over from "Going Clear".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Jobs" (Movie #2,092), "Steve Jobs" (Movie #2,729)
THE PLOT: A look at the personal and private life of the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
AFTER: In honor of Steve Jobs, I'm wearing a fresh pair of New Balance sneakers - my BFF Andy noticed that I favor that brand and mentioned to me once that it was Job's sneaker of choice also. (Sorry, but my black turtleneck is in the wash today.) But I was due for a new pair, anyway - I remember I was always in the habit of buying new sneakers a few days before going to San Diego for Comic-Con, because that trip always involved so much walking around - and I needed to give myself a few days to break them in and get the proper arch supports.
Now I see my organizational mistake - I should have dropped in "The Inventor" between "Going Clear" and this film - but I didn't know for sure that Alex Gibney could be heard in that documentary, he wasn't listed in the IMDB, so I had to make the connection through Errol Morris instead. But "The Inventor" would have worked quite well thematically between "Going Clear" and "Man in the Machine", by all accounts Elizabeth Holmes admired Steve Jobs, modeled herself after Jobs, dressed like Steve Jobs, but there was probably also a little bit of David Miscavige in her. Plus I really should have paid more attention to the directing credits and put all the Alex Gibney films in a row, boom boom boom. (But even that wouldn't have done the trick, because he also directed "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room".) Hell, the scheduling is never going to be perfect, I should just learn to accept that.
But as it is, with the Scientology film abutting the Apple Computers film, I'm forced now to acknowledge the similarities between the two organizations. Both had humble beginnings, and were pitched as the "alternative" to mainstream religion and computing (I guess the Catholic Church and IBM are analogous here?) and each relied heavily on the imagination of one man (Hubbard = Jobs) and now the organizations have to continue moving forward without their leaders and original driving forces. Plus, both organizations are fully (or nearly) tax-exempt, thanks to Scientology's status as a "religion" and in Apple's case, creating offshore holding companies in Ireland to shuffle all their profits to, thus avoiding most U.S. tax laws.
But that would mean that Apple is some kind of cult, right? Hmm, maybe there's something to this notion, with a bunch of ardent followers who swear by their products, right or wrong, and have adopted a mindset where they're forced to cut themselves off from friends or family members who practice a different religion, or use PC's. Then there's the indoctrination methods (your iPhone is free if you sign up for a 3-year calling plan...) and being forced to endure abuse from the cult leaders (standing in long lines to buy the new phones, constantly needing to upgrade hardware and software...). Yeah, I think I'm going to stick with this analogy, despite using only Mac computers myself and owning an iPhone (it's an iPhone 6, I'm refusing all attempts to get me to upgrade). So even though I'm IN the cult, I'm still trying to see it for what it is.
And for a long time, it was a cult of personality, centered on Jobs. Remember that when he left Apple, suddenly they weren't innovating any more and financially, they were in the dumps? Then he came back to Apple (as interim CEO, after their acquisition of NeXT) and suddenly they were pumping out the iMacs and the company was back from the dead? And then before you knew it, everybody had an iPod or an iPad or an iPhone? I was good for two out of three there, but then when it came time to join the iCloud revolution, I said "No way." I'm not storing my stuff where everybody else can hack in and access it, that's what got Pee-Wee Herman in trouble. If you want to know about me, read my blog and my Twitter feed like everyone else.
We still can't quite fathom why Steve Jobs denied having a daughter for so long - the hint here is that it had something to do with the ownership of the company, perhaps, that it somehow would interfere with the image of a single guy working around the clock for his company, that he couldn't even have the appearance of being tied down because then the shareholders might feel that his priorities were focused on family and not the company, or something like that. Otherwise it's hard to understand why someone who was given up for adoption as a child would be so willing to not be there for his own daughter. Or maybe it's not, it's all very foggy and still hard to discern what his motives were. But the reporter who found out that he had a daughter who shared a name with Job's first stab at a home personal computer is still treated as the bad guy for breaking the news in the first place. Hey, if you don't want people poking their noses into your personal business, maybe don't give the computer your daughter's name. Or maybe don't invent something that will connect everyone and make it possible for people to hack your personal data, just sayin'.
A bigger scandal over the years was probably Job's ongoing health issues - it turns out that when you're the CEO of a large corporation, you have some kind of responsibility to stay healthy, and if not, then to at least apprise the board and the shareholders of the state of your health. Jobs first had pancreatic cancer in 2003, but did not announce it to his company until mid-2004. Reportedly he spent nine months pursuing "alternative medicine", yet he had the type of cancer that was treatable and curable. Whether the pursuit of herbal remedies, a vegan diet and psychic treatments as a cure for cancer constitutes desperation or a form of suicide is for each person to determine. But he finally had the tumor removed by surgery in July 2004. Questions about his health persisted until he had a liver transplant in 2009. Though he returned to work after that, 18 months later he was back on medical leave.
It's still a bit hard to get a handle on Steve Jobs, a man credited with the "invention" of so many Apple products, though he wasn't an engineer or even a designer, he was essentially a marketer. Yet his name is on so many patents, it seems he was keenly involved in every aspect of the invention and design, unless that's all "in name only". Someone who believed in the philosophies of Zen Buddhism, yet persistently parked his car in the handicapped spaces in the Apple parking lot. Someone who was loved, adored by Apple's consumers, yet all of his co-workers and friends admit here that he was an enormous dick with a hair-trigger temper. Is that accurate?
Alex Gibney sounds a LOT like Michael Moore in the last third of this film - you know how Moore tries to sum things up at the end of each film, regardless of the subject matter, with one of those "What's it all about?" diatribes? Like, "Well, I guess this means our kids will have to start wearing body armor to school. And I guess our politicians don't really care about balancing the budget. But maybe we should be more like Swedish people and eat herring." Gibney tries to pull off something similar here by looking for the "meaning" of Job's life and work - but it's all around us, it's the phone in everybody's pocket that's also a camera and also a TV and also an internet browser.
But these devices were meant to connect us all, and though they've done that, they've also isolated us from each other at the same time. Look at a bus or train full of people, they've all got their earbuds in and each one is in their own world, when the original intent was to get everyone to share the SAME world. Now it's easier than ever for each person to watch their favorite movie or TV show, listen to their favorite music, and tune the rest of the world out, which is counter-productive to Apple's goal. Oh, OK, there's also social media connecting everyone, but that rapidly turned into "I'm right about this, and everyone who disagrees should go kill themselves." Plus we've created a generation of self-obsessed (and selfie-obsessed) vanity cases, who can't seem to stop taking pictures of themselves and posting it 12 times with different filters. Like, HOW MANY pictures of yourself in your feed do you need, just tell me. Can't we cap it at some point?
Also starring Bob Belleville, Chrisann Brennan, Nolan Bushnell (last seen in "Atari: Game Over"), Jason Chen, Nick Denton, Jesus Diaz, Peter Elkind, Andy Grignon, Michael Hawley, Yukari Itawani Kane, Daniel Kottke, Brian Lam, Michael S. Malone, Regis McKenna, Michael Moritz, Joe Nocera, Jon Rubinstein, Andy Serwer, Avie Tevanian, Sherry Turkle, with archive footage of Steve Jobs (last seen in "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley), Katie Couric (ditto), Muhammad Ali (last seen in "Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic"), Bono (last seen in "Quincy"), Richard Branson, Tom Brokaw (last seen in "Get Me Roger Stone"), Al Gore (ditto), Dan Rather (ditto), Tim Cook, Bob Dylan (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), The Edge (last seen in "Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me"), Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Mahatma Gandhi, Jim Henson (last seen in "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey"), Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Luther King (last seen in "Life Itself"), Ted Koppel, Carl Levin, John Lennon (last seen in "Quiet Riot: Well, Now You're Here, There's No Way Back"), Claire McCaskill, Andrew Napolitano, Yoko Ono (last heard in "Isle of Dogs"), Kobun Otogawa, Charles Payne, Pablo Picasso, Diane Sawyer (last seen in "Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer"), Ridley Scott, John Sculley, Jon Stewart (last seen in "The Last Laugh"), Ted Turner (last seen in "Jane Fonda in Five Acts"), Stuart Varney, Ali Velshi, Brian Williams (last seen in "Gilbert"), Steve Wozniak.
RATING: 5 out of 10 Bob Dylan songs in a playlist
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