| | | | Jason Bateman and Laura Linney chasing and running from the American dream in "Ozark" Season 2.
(Netflix) | | | | | | “Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.”
|
| |
| | rantnrave:// I loved the first season of NETFLIX's OZARK. It was a deliberate slow build. A great setup. An accountant and his family move to the Ozarks to continue laundering money for the Mexican drug cartels. And to stay alive. JASON BATEMAN plays the accountant. His performance is measured and calm. Really calm. Scarily calm. But underneath that calm is the fear and anxiety of the famous cocaine / stir the sauce / deliver the guns / helicopter scene from GOODFELLAS. But he keeps it under control and yet always on the verge of cracking. You can see it in his face. Bateman doesn't even need the dialogue to show the strain. Last night, I finished watching season 2 which drops August 31st. It's fantastic. The revelation this season is WENDY BYRDE - Marty's wife, and accomplice, played by LAURA LINNEY. She's the strategist. The politician. The boss. The longball thinker. And she is amazing. Prediction: She is nominated and wins the EMMY next year. The cast may now be one of the best in television. JULIA GARNER as the older than her years deputy to Byrde. PETER MULLAN and LISA EMERY as old Ozark family heroin manufacturers, THE SNELLS. Spooky, frightening, complicit and at odds. JANET MCTEER as the cartel's lawyer. Commanding and threatening in a corporate package. Each episode is like a set of falling dominoes that the Byrdes are constantly trying to reorder. Actions and reactions. And consequences. Lots of consequences. It's a show about family, greed, crime, tradition, pride, murder, corruption, sacrifice, compromise, threats, faith, desperation, violence, problem-solving, power, patience, business, politics, law, money, parenting, drugs, addiction, law, safety, and survival. It's set in a part of America we don't see much on TV. Replete with all the problems of America in a microcosm. Binge season 1 now if not already. And get ready for one of the best shows out there. I love it... Duplicate DAFT PUNKs, imitation IRON MAIDENs and more mock MORRISSEYs than you could comfortably fit in the city of MANCHESTER. And more than one tribute bandleader who eventually joined the band he was paying tribute to. MusicREDEF MATTY KARAS takes a look in "Tribute Bands: Even Better (or Not) Than the Real Thing"... Are you a media company-owned streaming service? It's not just about the content stupid! Netflix's product expertise is at the heart of everything it does, including why and how it makes its original content. This culture is easily overlooked, but doing so can be fatal. Netflix is as much a tech and product company as FACEBOOK, GOOGLE or AMAZON. "Netflix Is a Product & Technology Company (Netflix Misunderstandings, Pt. 2) " is a must-read... Lately, fiction seems outdated. Nuance and degrees are dead. Unbridled vengeance is the new black... I've written more about ANTHONY BOURDAIN than any other subject in my REDEF columns. He used his love and knowledge of food to explore the commonalities and differences in all of us. I traveled the world following the places he ate. I never met him, but he meant a lot to me. And the world is a lesser place without him. I miss him every Sunday and beyond. "Remembering Anthony Bourdain, The Chef of Curiosity"... Friends doing well. BRETT BOUTTIER, BETSY MORGAN, JEFF BERMAN form MAGNET COMPANIES, "a holding company looking to buy and build direct-to-consumer companies and maximize their reach, engagement and revenue"... Happy Birthday to JIMMY PITARO, STAN CHUDNOVSKY, MAYA BARATZ JORDAN, ALEX ISKOLD, and JOSEPH LAFALCE | | | - Jason Hirschhorn, curator |
|
|
| An oral history of General Magic, an influential tech company founded by ex-Apple engineers, which invented important forerunners to the iPhone and other smartphones like the Sony Magic Link. | | |
|
| Duplicate Daft Punks, imitation Iron Maidens and more mock Morrisseys than you could comfortably fit in the city of Manchester. And more than one tribute bandleader who eventually joined the band he was paying tribute to. | | |
|
| To debate whether Trump acted criminally is to miss the greater point: He’s a national-security threat. | | |
|
| In an excerpt from her memoir, "Small Fry," the author reflects on Jobs’s privacy, his temper, and watching a legend grow before her eyes. | | |
|
| Visionary Argentine filmmaker Quirino Cristiani created full-length animated films between 1917 and 1931. He has since been all but forgotten. | | |
|
| Annually, the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative conducts the most comprehensive and intersectional investigation into inequality in popular films. We catalogue every independent speaking or named character shown on screen for gender, race/ethnicity, LGBT, and disability as well as a series of contextual variables across an 11-year sample spanning 2007 to 2017. | | |
|
| The Clade X simulation, created by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, shows how vulnerable the world is to the spread of a pandemic virus. According to the scenario's creator, if efforts to create a vaccine continued to fail, a disease like that could kill 900 million people. | | |
|
| The new film's creators turned down a "gigantic payday" at Netflix to ensure the first Asian-American-focused studio movie in 25 years would be seen in theaters and, if all goes well, reshape the Hollywood landscape: "The biggest stage with the biggest stakes -- that's what we asked for." | | |
|
| In Littleton, Colorado, where two deadly school shootings occurred fourteen years apart but within just a few miles, the school district is a study in preparedness, compassion, and an intense focus on what might go wrong. | | |
|
| Two weeks ago, Masayoshi Son, the Japanese billionaire who has become the talk of Silicon Valley over the past 18 months, held a dinner at the Chinese restaurant Yomeiden in Tokyo's Prince Park Tower. The meeting took place during SoftBank World, an annual conference for the Japanese telecom giant's customers and suppliers, but this was a particular audience of start-up CEOs. | | |
|
| How did cowboy hats and boots become the visual iconography of American rural music? | | |
|
| And was only mildly humiliated in the process. | | |
|
| A TV drama has rekindled interest in anti-technology terrorist Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber. Ironically enough, his followers now congregate online | | |
|
| One day in 1989, Francisco Alcaraz, then the master distiller at Tequila Siete Leguas, was leaving the company's twin factories in Atotonilco el Alto when a man wearing sunglasses and a half-unbuttoned shirt called out to him. "Can you help me?" the man asked. | | |
|
| Musicians and fans look back on the niche online hub they cultivated 25 years ago, and how it framed dance music that wasn't really for dancefloors. | | |
|
| As an analyst, I’d like to have a universal fact checker. Something like the carbon monoxide detectors on each level of my home. Something that would sound an alarm when there’s danger of intellectual asphyxiation from choking on the baloney put forward by certain sales people, news organizations, governments, and educators, for example. | | |
|
| Inside the making of "Ozymandias," the harrowing, violent end to the reign of Walter White. | | |
|
| How a couple of crusading journalists made a fortune selling adult escort ads and in the process became unlikely, and widely reviled, first amendment advocates. | | |
|
| At the end of the day, observes a16z crypto general partner Chris Dixon, Satoshi's whitepaper [the original bitcoin paper outlining a peer-to-peer decentralized network and blockchain sans centralized third parties] is nine pages of incentives. | | |
|
| It’s not just because some of those smoothie supplements, bath soaks, and CBD teas actually work. | | |
|
| The state must decide how jealously to guard its clean energy progress. | | |
|
| © Copyright 2018, The REDEF Group |
|
|
