WEIRDLAND: August (2008) starring Josh Hartnett

Saturday, December 08, 2012

August (2008) starring Josh Hartnett

"Anyone who thinks that Josh Hartnett isn't a true movie star should see his riveting, high-wire performance in August, a shrewdly dramatized look back at the bursting of the dot-com bubble. As Tom, the hipster CEO of a start-up that's about to crash and burn, Hartnett has a scruffy glamour worthy of Brad Pitt, as well as a whiplash gift-of-gab intensity all his own. Tom knows he's running on fumes, and the director, Austin Chick, and the screenwriter, Howard A. Rodman, use the summer of 2001 to comment on a culture that is still lethally leveraged. They've made an indie Wall Street for the Internet era of virtual-profit hucksterism." Source: www.ew.com

When the dot-com bubble swelled and burst in the late 1990s, it left in its wake a trail of stunned, short-lived multi-millionaires, and one hell of a story. Look at any of the young, charismatic, and sometimes devilishly sexy entrepreneurs who made and lost hundreds of millions in as little as a few months and you’ll wonder why their five minutes of fame haven’t been immortalized on screen. That’s where August comes in. Directed by Austin Chick, this zeitgeisty film brings to life the astronomically steep rise and fall of Tom Sterling (Josh Hartnett), a hipster version of a wunderkind who flew too close to the sun. Source: film-forward.com



August (2008) - directed by Austin Chick, starring Josh Hartnett, Naomie Harris, Adam Scott and David Bowie

"It’s gratifying to see that people are so eager to react to perceived threats to the freedom of cyberspace — something that too many of us probably take for granted. And there is no question that there are major dangers to the openness of the internet out there. However, it is not the UN that we should be really worried about. “The real threats to the internet come from nation states,” says Milton Mueller, a professor at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies. “And that includes some of the western governments as well as the more authoritarian governments.” Some of them want to erect protectionist barriers that would compel the big western internet companies like Facebook and Google to pay for access to their national markets." Source: gulfnews.com

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