Noir and Technology: Fight Club, Mr. Robot, Metaphor of Sadness

“Noir is almost always about paranoia, eavesdropping, being spied on, loners and how do you catch them,” film noir expert, Dr. Foster Hirsch of Brooklyn College, tells The Creators Project. “What changes is, of course, state of the art. Technology is so different now than it was in the immediate post-war period. We’re more sophisticated. And I think what that does is it creates a greater sense of solitude and privacy and that is a breeding ground for pathological noir characters.”

The ubiquity of cell phone cameras and the nonchalance of modern day surveillance allow us to live out the narrative that classical noirs of the 40s and 50s foreshadowed. Today we’re living in the most epic of noir films, where modern technologies allow every person to record and be recorded, where surveillance is an afterthought, and no one seems to mind. Classic noirs from the Red Scare illustrate this permeable sense of unease. But now, according to Dr. Hirsch, “Everyone is under surveillance and you don’t suspect the communists as in the past, it can be anyone. [There is] no privacy. People are afraid of identity theft, computers are vulnerable.” Therefore everyone is vulnerable. When Ebert wrote that article 20 years ago, only 9% of Americans used computers daily, today only 15% don’t.

“Technology and noir have a long history together,” Hirsch continues. “Technology changes, but it doesn’t change the narrative patterns of the noir genre.” In fact, it heightens them. We’ve known for years now that technology has the potential to isolate, and that isolation breeds all those nasty inner demons that are generally checked by adequate and healthy socialization in childhood and adolescence. But did we ever consider that we are the personified products of a neo-noir lifestyle? John Donne’s famous poem, "No Man is an Island," now seems eerily prescient and a creed to revisit.

According to Ebert, “Noir thrives on pessimism and fear—and on guilt, the feeling that we have ourselves to blame for our troubles.” The 21st century existence is one shaped by Snowden, Salgado, and widespread personal surveillance. One that feels inherently frenetic, highlighted by loss (of nature, privacy) and one that, were Ebert to have reassessed the noir genre before his death in 2013, plays perfectly into his hand. Source: thecreatorproject.vice.com

In Fight Club (1999), you have Edward Norton’s Narrator; in Mr. Robot, you have Rami Malek’s Elliot. They’re not so different: both want a different world, one free of the tyranny of giant corporations, but neither are sure how to go about changing it. They each live largely solitary existences, have damaged love interests, and keep charismatic revolutionaries as mentor-companions. They also share one other key trait: undiagnosed schizophrenia.

Mr. Robot took the template for Fight Club and did it better. Flagrant misogyny isn’t the only issue of Fight Club’s that Mr. Robot corrects in its version of the story. Where Mr. Robot has affection for its characters, Fight Club has little to none. Where Mr. Robot attempts to give the audience some understanding of social anxiety and mental illness, Fight Club uses it as a narrative device and—after the reveal—mines the Narrator’s schizophrenia for comedy.

I’ll go further and argue that Mr. Robot’s phenomenal Rami Malek makes for a more interesting lead than Fight Club’s Edward Norton, an actor likened to Robert De Niro despite never giving a performance to warrant such a comparison; that Mr. Robot makes violence appear abhorrent, whereas Fight Club appears to relish in it. Fight Club is a solipsistic, middle-aged male fantasy, where Mr. Robot is a more welcoming, earnest plea with the world to wake up and save itself. Mr. Robot’s premiere season in isolation remains Fight Club’s better, a more compassionate, genuine, open call-to-arms. It’s Fight Club 2.0, a 2015 upgrade for a new generation; it’s David Fincher’s alleged classic taken, improved upon, and perfected. Source: www.pastemagazine.com

Mr Robot has much that is stunning. Cinematographer Tod Campbell composes his shots with rigorous beauty, conveying Elliot’s isolation and paranoia with expanses of negative space washed in limpid blues and greys, pushing Malek’s body to one side like an afterthought. His other favourite shot is a close-up on Malek’s wonderfully expressive face. The Trent Reznor-ish musical score and the sound design that pushes Elliot’s rambling inner monologue to the fore are both superb. Best of all is Malek’s twitchy, intensely sympathetic performance as a damaged genius trying and failing to connect. Source: www.metromag.co.nz

Imagine a fast-moving computer game set in the black-and-white environment of a 1940s detective movie and you'll begin to get some idea of the mixed metaphors that fill the air in K.W. Jeter's difficult but ultimately rewarding futuristic thriller. Jeter, who also writes a series of novels based on the popular Blade Runner film about apocalyptic Los Angeles, centers Noir in that same city, now a dark jewel of the dominant Pacific Rim. A detective named McNihil has had his eyes surgically altered so that everything looks like an early Bogart movie to him. "Gray newspapers with significant headlines--'Dewey Defeats Truman,' 'Pearl Harbor Bombed'--moldered in the gutters, or were nudged along the broken sidewalks by the same night wind that cut through McNihil's jacket," Jeter writes about the scene of a plane crash where the detective has been summoned by a corporate villain. Aided by a young woman called November, whose fingertips are alive with lethal magnetic currents, McNihil brings his--and Jeter's--unique noir vision to bear on a world that for all its weirdness is the ultimately believable extension of our present-day nightmares. —Dick Adler Source: www.thrillingdetective.com

The living woman’s name was November. Not the name her mother had given her, but the one she’d given herself and that her friends, when she’d still had a pack to run with, had endorsed as fitting. Snow touched her brow, whiter than the yellow-tinged bone beneath the dead woman’s parchment skin. Ice walked through the ventricles of her heart and down her pale arms, not as an indication of cruelty —for she wasn’t cruel, even when her living came at the price of others’ breath —but as the metaphor of sadness. When she had nothing better to do — when she was far enough ahead in her accounts that she didn’t have to worry about her own death, at least for a little while— she could ride down to the bottom of the Gloss, to the Pacific Rim’s southern crossing, where the trains worked their way across ice floes and polar fields, past the great sliding glaciers and over the storm-lashed seas. November felt sorry for the man —his name was McNihil— in her usual, nonempathic way. An intellectual process, like watching one ice floe grind implacably against another, the white fields cracking and splintering as though alive but not sentient. To be fatal and noncaring at the same time; it just worked that way. The ice surged and hammered against itself. —"Noir" (1999) by K.W. Jeter

Schizophrenic Process: World War II, Mr. Robot, The Heart Goes Last, Tillflyktens Hus

Rami Malek with his "Mr. Robot" co-star Portia Doubleday at PEOPLE's 'Ones To Watch' Event on September 16, 2015 in West Hollywood

Portia Doubleday as the Surrogate Date Isabella in Her (2013) directed by Spike Jonze

Their first night in Consilience, Stan watches uneasily as Charmaine goes into raptures over the dishwasher, “cooing over as if it’s a kitten”. But he adjusts quickly, rock music forgotten as Doris Day sings “Paper Doll” over the headphones. When The Heart Goes Last opens, Stan, is reeling. Nevertheless, he keeps his wits as life in Consilience goes haywire, largely by recalling his love for Charmaine. Despite her desperate longing for safety and stability, for immaculate sheets and scented fabric softener, she falls into a crazed affair with the alternate Max. The novel’s characters are drawn in shades of gray; only Ed is a wholly nasty piece of work, his income strategies nastier. He’s got a lucrative line in Possibilibots, high-end, custom made robotic sex dolls. Charmaine may love Stan, but like so many Atwood heroines before her, survival predominates. True love ultimately endures in The Heart Goes Last, but so do the real terrors present in Atwood novels, all too often manifesting in ours. Source: www.popmatters.com

Rami Malek as Merriell 'Snafu' Shelton in The Pacific (2010). If Band of Brothers’ soldiers were fighting the last kind of war (World War II), in many ways The Pacific’s are going to fight the next one. They land on their first beach in a flotilla of armored ships, and we, like them, are dreading the kind of D-Day firefight we saw in Band of Brothers, and before that in Saving Private Ryan. Instead of tank columns and shelled European cities, they find oppressive heat, disease and an enemy using guerilla tactics, suicide missions and sometimes civilians. There are poisoned wells and bugs in the rice (“Think of it as meat”). It’s part Vietnam, part Iraq, part horror movie. Source: entertainment.time.com

Regarding the incidence of new cases of schizophrenia, no published studies were apparently carried out in Germany prior to World War II. The first postwar study was done in Mannheim in 1965, 20 years after the last patients had been sterilized or killed. Heinz Häfner and Helga Reimann at the University of Heidelberg identified all new cases of schizophrenia reported during the year among the city's 330 000 inhabitants. They reported an incidence rate of 53.6 per 100 000, which the authors noted was “more than twice as high as the mean of 21.8 per 100 000 calculated in 1965 by Dunham from different studies and two to three times as high as the rates of 23.8 or 15.8 respectively, … for the U.S.A. and England and Wales in 1969.” The German rate, they added, was comparable to the “rate of 52 per 100 000 given by Walsh for Dublin in 1969.” The sterilization and murder of hundreds of thousands of patients with schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders in Nazi Germany between 1934 and 1945 was the greatest criminal act in the history of psychiatry, based upon a mistaken belief that schizophrenia was a simple Mendelian inherited disease. Current research suggests that the cause of schizophrenia involves dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of genes and includes common variants such as single nucleotide polymorphisms. The cause of the high schizophrenia incidence rates in postwar Germany is thus not apparent and is an appropriate subject for additional research. Source: schizophreniabulletin.oxfordjournals.org

Elliot is one of the more complex characters to grace primetime during this golden age. He views himself as a kind of vigilante superhero, yet his actions – regardless of their intent – often cause extreme distress for others. He wants to be in control, yet he is addicted to morphine and Suboxone. And he suffers from various mental illnesses, rendering him unreliable to both the audience and himself.

-Popular Science: There have been studies that link people will mental illnesses to alcohol or drug abuse. Were you cognizant of this when you were creating Elliot?

-Sam Esmail: Yes, absolutely. Mental illness is such a sensitive topic in general, but they tend to try and manage their emotional distress through either self medication, closing people off, or creating a persona to sort of hide it. I found, because I actually suffered from social anxiety as well as compulsive disorder, that the biggest thing is hiding it. I did have friends who have suffered from schizophrenia and mild dissociative identity disorder, as well as more extreme cases of social anxiety disorder. Source: www.popsci.com

SHE/I WILL BE THE PRINCESS WITHOUT BLOOD OR WEAKNESS

As early as in her debut children’s book, De vita björnarna, (1969; The White Bears), Åsa Nelvin (1951–1981) depicts the conflict between the self and the world that will underpin her entire body of works. ‘N’ wants to be a third thing, neither man nor woman, but a ‘She/I’ or “the princess without blood or weakness” who meets the world as a new person. This gender-transgressing person can only gain new content if we imagine something that does not exist yet. To get there, ‘N’ must undergo a painful transformation, during which her personality traits and gender characteristics are shed and destroyed.

The road to the loss of identity in Tillflyktens Hus is a passage through hell, and in the blurb, the author calls it a schizophrenic process. When ‘N’ has hatefully settled with the traditional female roles, there remains a step into the darkest corners of the self. ‘N’ escapes to a boarded-up house that takes on several meanings: the house is the self, it is the body, and it can also be a hospital for the mentally ill. By the end of the book, ‘N’ decides to survive. What may be happening is an opening towards something unknown, which might be the utopian potential of a dissolved identity: the third gender, or the new human. The motto of the book is Simone de Beauvoir’s “Real sexual maturity only comes to the woman who accepts being flesh for better for worse.” But the novel transcends the motto, and must be read ironically. Source: nordicwomenliterature.net

Happy Anniversary, Lauren Bacall! Bogart's Baby

Happy Anniversary, Lauren Bacall!

“There is no way Bogie and I could be in the same room without reaching for one another and it just wasn’t physical. Physical was very strong but it was everything — heads, hearts, bodies, everything going at the same time,” Bacall wrote. The secret of their happiness is something that they shared both on screen and off: “Chemistry — you can’t beat chemistry,” Bacall told People in 2007. Even their kid agreed! “Everyone could see their love right there on celluloid,” Stephen Bogart wrote of his parents’ scenes in To Have and Have Not. “He was the great love of her life, and she his.”

In her memoir, Bacall candidly recounted what went down when “Bogie had to see his Baby… what it felt like to be so wanted, so adored! No one had ever felt like that about me,” she wrote. “It was all so dramatic, too. Always in the wee small hours when it seemed to Bogie and me that the world was ours — that we were the world. At those times we were.”

And it perhaps went deeper than that for this actress with admitted daddy issues: “Bogie was kind of my father. He showed me the way,” Bacall told Vanity Fair in 2011. “I knew everybody because I was married to Bogie, and that 25-year difference was the most fantastic thing for me to have in my life,” she added.

The pair’s fame transcended mere movie stardom; in their own way, they also came to represent changing post-war gender roles. According to A.M. Sperber and Eric Lax’s 1997 biography of the actor, “Bogart was, by the early 1940s, one of the top movie stars in the world and also a timely symbol of post–Pearl Harbor America: Tough but compassionate, skeptical yet idealistic, betrayed yet ready to believe again…”

Bacall, meanwhile, embodied the strong, independent modern American woman — one audiences had rarely witnessed on the silver screen. Her essence is summed up in Joseph McBride’s book, Hawks on Hawks, in which the legendary director Howard Hawks wonders aloud: “Do you suppose we could make a girl who is insolent, as insolent as Bogart, who insults people, who grins when she does it, and people like it?” The answer proved to be a resounding yes, with success at the box office and public adoration alike.

And so Hawks instructed the Bronx teenager — born Betty Joan Perske — “to sass men,” according to The New Yorker’s Richard Brody. “Bacall, at 19, was already fast and knowing. When her character calls out Bogart’s lines a step ahead of him, it doesn’t seem scripted,” noted Brody.

“The only cause my husband Humphrey Bogart ever gave me to be jealous was not of a woman but of a boat — a racing yacht called the Santana,” joked Bacall in her memoir. Their jet-setting romance — and Bogart’s Oscar-winning career — took them all over the world: Palm Springs, where they crashed at Frank Sinatra’s house, Venice, Rome, even the Congo, where Bogie filmed The African Queen. “The movie won him an Academy Award, and that night we were so happy,” Bacall recalled. “Bogie had his yacht, me, success, our son... and now our second child was on the way.”

None other than John Huston read the eulogy at Bogart’s funeral. “Bogie was lucky at love and he was lucky at dice,” said the veteran director. “He got all that he asked for from life, and more. We have no reason to feel any sorrow for him — only for ourselves, for having lost him.”

But ultimately, Bacall maintained an attitude of gratitude until the end. “He taught me his philosophy of life,” she wrote. “He taught me the rules of the Hollywood game. He taught me the usage and abusage of actors, called stars by the press, which couldn’t have cared less what happened to any of us…. We were expendable — he taught me that, too. He taught me about standards and the price one must pay to keep those standards high.”

Bacall said she was partly inspired to write her memoirs because she hoped Bogart would be remembered as a man with “so many, many layers that, as well as I knew him, I’m sure I never uncovered them all.” Even now, a year after Bacall’s death at age 89, more than a half-century after Bogart’s, we have only begun to grasp the complexity of her own inimitable and unforgettable character, not to mention her legendary love story. Source: www.etonline.com

Bogart once wrote, “Each of my wives has been an actress. Betty’s a good one as well as a good-looking one. I guess it would be plain hell to marry a bad actress. I never could have stood that. Of course, when an actor marries an actress, their differences usually develop into something more intense than they started out to be. You find you are playing a dramatic scene. And some of the arguments I’ve had in my time in married life have gone on long after either of us remembered what the tiff was about. I guess we were each thoroughly enjoying a leading role.”

The relationship progressed in platonic fashion until one day about three weeks into the shooting of To Have and Have Not, Bogie came by Bacall’s dressing room to say goodnight. “He was standing behind me,” Bacall said. “We were joking, the way we always did. Then suddenly he leaned over and he placed his hand under my chin. He lifted my face toward his and he kissed me. It was very romantic, very sweet really, and [Bogie was] quite shy about the whole thing. Then he took an old matchbook out of his pocket and asked me to write my phone number on it.”

In 1953 Bogart did an interview for the London Daily Mirror and he talked about “four real hot babes that stand way out in my twenty-five years of movie making.” The four were Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and, of course, Lauren Bacall: "Lauren Bacall, well sure, she’s Mrs. Bogart. But she doesn’t figure in my favorite foursome just because of that. She’s a big beautiful baby who’s going to make a big name for herself in the business. She’s bright, brainy and popular with women as well as men. Look at that face of hers. There you’ve got the map of Middle Europe slung across those high cheekbones and wide green eyes. As an actress she hasn’t got a lot of experience. It’s going to take a long time to get it. But Baby is going to get there. As a woman she holds all the cards. She’s beautiful, a good mother, a good wife, and knows how to run a home. She’s a honey blonde and in her high heels she comes up to the top wrinkle in my forehead. She’s got a model’s figure, square shoulders, and a kid’s waist. Met her in the film To Have and Have Not then afterward we made The Big Sleep. After that film I said, ‘That’s my baby,’ and I’ve called her Baby ever since.”

Postmodern dystopian bleakness: "Mr Robot" and "High-Rise" (Technology as Ultimate Destroyer)

Almost all the scenes are dark — certainly all the scenes in Elliot’s apartment are — and feel gloomy in that familiar way. The brightest sources of light we can see are computer screens and Malek’s eyes, usually reflected in some kind of screen. It’s that same eerie, sleep-wrecking glow you get from checking your phone or laptop in bed. The most horrifying stuff isn’t what we can see. It almost doesn’t matter who is knocking on Elliot’s door at the end of the episode. The real violence in Mr. Robot isn’t what happens to other people, outside, on-screen. The real violence is internal, personal. It’s hallucinations clashing with reality; competing moralities waging war within. It’s not what’s out there. It’s all in your head. Source: thinkprogress.org


In an interview with Variety, Christian Slater reveals, "After reading episode 9, contemplating my future and wondering what was going to become of Mr. Robot and what his future would be, I felt those feelings of fear and panic - and I realized there was one person I could call to get these answers. And that's Sam Esmail. I asked him what the future of Mr. Robot is. And he shared that Mr. Robot is to Elliot what the Hulk is to Bruce Banner. So whenever Elliot is feeling backed into a corner, overwhelmed, scared, unable to take certain actions, Mr. Robot will step in and pull the trigger."

Slater adds if Mr. Robot knows where Tyrell Wellick (Martin Wallström) is , "I know that Mr. Robot knows and he's going to keep it locked in a vault until he feels Elliot is capable and ready to handle what that answer is." Source: www.mstarz.com

It's based on a cult favorite dystopian novel, directed by a daring indie director, and features one of cinema's most exciting new stars. So it's not surprising that "High-Rise" has become one of the most anticipated titles of this year's Toronto International Film Festival.

"Ballard used to say he wasn't writing about who we are, but about who we might become... his books are like a roadside warning on a highway, as if to say: 'Caution: bends ahead.'" -Tom Hiddleston

Hiddleston plays Dr. Robert Laing, who is looking for anonymity among the thousands of residents in a 40-story apartment complex. Instead, he finds chaos, madness and violence escalating all around him as the building descends into tribal factions. With a cast that also includes Jeremy Irons, Luke Evans, Sienna Miller and Elisabeth Moss, the film is a disturbing microcosmic allegory that examines the perils of both joining in and shutting oneself off, a savage attack on consumerism, complacency and lifestyle obsession.

Few authors are so distinctive as to become a word all their own, and yet the term "Ballardian" has come to officially define a postmodern dystopian bleakness. After the long wait, Thomas said, "I think J.G. Ballard would be delighted with this adaptation." Source: www.latimes.com

Technology as the Ultimate Destroyer - Amazon Review of "High-Rise" by Jeffrey Leach: "J.G. Ballard's 1975 novel High-Rise contains all of the qualities we have come to expect from this author: alarming psychological insights, a study of the profoundly disturbing connections between technology and the human condition, and an intriguing plot masterfully executed. Ballard, who wrote the tremendously troubling Crash, really knows how to dig deep into our troubling times in order to expose our tentative grasp of modernity. What starts out as a book about living in a technological marvel quickly morphs into a study of how technology can cause human beings to regress back into primitivism. Ballard shows in detail how the residents of the apartments sink back into the morass, passing through a classical Marxist structure of bourgeoisie-proletariat, moving on to a clan/tribal system, to a system of stark individuality. In short, Ballard tries to equate our striving towards individuality through technology with how we started out in our evolution as hunter-gatherers, as individuals seeking individual gains. The promise that technology will liberate the individual is not the highest form of evolution, argues Ballard, but is actually a return to the lowest forms of human expression." Source: www.amazon.com

Holding in the pain: "Joi Lansing: A Body to Die For" (2015) by Alexis Hunter

"Joi Lansing: A Body to Die For" colorfully chronicles personal and intimate details of the last four years of the talented ‘50’s “blonde bombshell” star’s fascinating life. After three decades of successful TV and movie appearances and Vegas singing stardom, Ms. Lansing died far too young at just 43. Though her funeral was attended by luminaries of the day (Frank Sinatra sent a huge floral display), her light went out relatively unceremoniously.

Always just on the verge of “making it big,” Joi packed them in with standing room only in Vegas, but when the curtain came down and the audience was gone, who was she? Sadly, the one relationship where she was loved for the sweet, gentle woman she really was, the friendship that might have given her the strength to finally cross the finish line for that one moment of glory for which she had run since she began in show business as a little girl of 14, was ended at her death from breast Cancer in the arms of her dear friend, “Rachel.”

Author Alexis Hunter (“friend/baby sister”) was the only person who really knew Joi and knew how she struggled with a suicide-obsessed self-image and deadly drug problem after being a child star at MGM where “uppers” were a common way to keep the kids working 20 hour days. Source: www.bearmanormedia.com

Joi’s face was perfect, with no lines or imperfections. Her hair was a gorgeous and full platinum blonde, not the overbleached blonde that looked tacky and fake, but a warm, soft color. Her eyes were a beautiful green, and she was tall and thin. Not too thin, just no excess fat. She wore a peach minidress that was to be her costume throughout the film. It was quite low-cut and exposed her trademark cleavage. She was magnificent!

It wasn’t that busy for a twenty-four-hour coffee shop in the middle of Hollywood. Joi was dressed quite modestly and was not recognizable as the sex goddess she was portrayed to be. We sat in a booth next to a wall, rather than in the middle of the room where our conversation could be overheard by strangers. We talked until the sun shone through the window. There was no shooting going on that day at the studio. Exterior shots were being finished in Griffith Park, and neither of us had to be there. I can’t remember all that we talked about, it was like a dream. I only know that, during those hours of conversation, we connected as if we were soul mates long ago parted. As we spoke, our eyes met and didn’t wander. Each word that was said made us closer. She would reach across the table and touch my hand, and, with each touch, my heart would skip a beat. When it was time to leave, she asked me to go next door to a little shop with her. Since I didn’t have a phone of my own at the Studio Club, she said she’d call, and we’d get together.

She said she’d love to have dinner or go to a movie and asked if I would like that. We spent the evening talking as if we’d known each other for a hundred years. The more we spoke, the closer we sat to one another. She would reach out and touch my arm or gently brush her hand against my face. Her life had been filled with many men and brief affairs, and she expressed how sad and alone she had felt for too many years. Joi had been involved with Sid Caesar for a while, and, before him, it was Frank Sinatra. She had really liked Frank, but said he was quite troubled. The time they spent together was interrupted by his sadness at the loss of one of his friends. He would cry, and his depression destroyed any intimacy they had. That was the end of their affair.

She told me about the creeps and the scum in Hollywood — the producers and directors who demanded favors for work in a film. Talking about her experiences made her start to cry. She had been holding in the pain for too many years. I held her close, and she sobbed for hours. Time passed, and she was finally comforted. She felt safe, and, at this moment, she knew she was loved. —"JOI LANSING: A BODY TO DIE FOR - A LOVE STORY" (2015) by Alexis Hunter

Struggling with depression: Mr Robot (Rami Malek) and Demolition (Jake Gyllenhaal)

When Mr. Robot debuted back in June, the show was pitched as a ripped-from-the-headlines techno-thriller, with the return of Christian Slater to TV as its main attraction. Now, two months and 10 episodes later, the USA network has an unlikely hit on its hands: a visually striking, subversive, and often surprising drama about the dehumanizing effects of our corporate-controlled, internet-addicted modern world.

And a lot of the credit for the show's out-of-left-field success belongs to the man who plays the series' troubled hacker hero — the 34-year-old character actor Rami Malek.

Getting the lead in an unexpectedly popular cable series is a long way from where the Egyptian-American actor was a decade ago, when he was staying up all night in his family's cramped apartment to stuff resumés and head-shots into envelopes. "I heard 'no' a lot back then," Malek laughs. "But like my dad would always say, 'This kid's tenacious.'" "It raises some pretty dark questions about the world we live in," Malek says of the show's wobbly-reality tone and plot twists. More importantly, he's excited to be working on "one of the finest shows on television... it feels like it's bleeding out of the screen," which may explain why it’s captured the attention of people who don't ordinarily tune in to USA. It doesn't look or feel like anything else on TV — and with his sunken eyes, sharp jaw, and deep, halting voice, neither does its star. Source: www.rollingstone.com

Variety: -What’s in store for next season?

Rami Malek: Sam and (girlfriend) Emmy (Rossum) just got engaged. I saw him the other night and congratulated him. I told him, “I couldn’t imagine what you were going to put Elliot through if she said no.” The truth of the matter is I have loved the weight of the emotional roller coaster that he threw me on.

I didn’t want Elliot to be this guy who wears his heart on his sleeve all this time. He’s very guarded. I had to pick and choose when I was going to fall to my knees, when that was going to happen. In the Times Square scene, I remember feeling like the most restrained performance was the strongest. And that was the hardest to do that day. Source: variety.com


Fox Searchlight has released the first trailer for its Jake Gyllenhaal-Naomi Watts drama “Demolition” two days before its world premiere as the opening night film at the Toronto Film Festival. The trailer is launching months before the film’s April 8, 2016, release.

Gyllenhaal portrays a successful investment banker who struggles after losing his wife in a tragic car crash. He continues to unravel despite pressure from his father-in-law, portrayed by Chris Cooper. His character then forms an unlikely connection with a customer service rep and single mother, played by Watts, after writing a complaint letter to a vending machine company.

The trailer starts with Gyllenhaal unable to extract a pack of Peanut M&Ms and subsequently explaining that this was a problem because his wife had died 10 minutes earlier. The trailer ends with a bulldozer knocking down his house. “You can buy almost anything on e-Bay,” he jokes about the bulldozer. Source: variety.com