August

Screened this at the Sundance 2008 Festival. This movie actually caught me by surprise, it was very hip and surprisingly Josh Hartnett really brought it. The movie has a modern "Wall Street" type vibe, the story follows Tom (Hartnett) who is a super confident .com entrepreneur who is in crisis mode during the downward spiral of the .com stock bust just before September 2001. Hartnet nails this role with high energy output and makes this a very watchable flick. Austin Chick the director is obviously very talented and throws just the right amount of style and cool music into the film to keep it slick and contemporary which should broaden its appeal past just the Gen-X group. The one downside is that the film gives the other characters so little room to make their presence felt, especially David Bowies character who gets only a few minutes of face time. Other then that the movie really has a nice pace and the ending worked very well when you consider all the superficial things that Americans thought they cared about until Sept 2001, and then realized there are somethings much more important then money and stature.

Film should get some nice play on the indie circuit, though indie folks probably will be hard swayed to pay over for a Hartnett movie. I would reckon that Josh Hartnett will win over some who doubted him with this performance and maybe even get a little award type talk. I know its hard for me to believe either :)

This movie has some problems but overall captures the moment better than any other movie i've seen...better than the over-rated Wall Street or Boiler Room and ten times better than margin call.

The sub-story w the family didn't work at all and shd have been cut. the whole brother thing was stupid.

The final scene (set in the real-life Pussy Cat Lounge. 96 Greenwich St., New York, NY, 10011) is a work of genius...as the movie closes the news coverage of the plane crash of the almost-star Aaliyah comes on the bar's TV, and this sets the time, the few days before the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the WTC and Pentagon.

The movie doesn't even mention the terrorist attacks, so the audience has to remember themselves the time for this to be effective...but if they remember it just kills.

btw, my old girlfriend workd on Aliyah's make-up the month before her death and dremt about her returning to her for make-up after her crash...this was spooky as hell.

I like this film, takes the viewer into a strange world that had really existed Perhaps I'm too much of an insider to judge this film from a purely objective orientation, but as a quasi refugee of sorts from the dot com frenzy days, "August" does connect on multiple levels.

Sadly, I've met more than my share of "Tom" characters in real life, and for the most part, that entire world has faded away into obscurity. It was a strange time, when the real world seemed evermore like an episode of the Twilight Zone.

Though there might have been some minor glitches in the film, I think overall it captured the essence of that period and its odd collection of characters surprisingly well.

If there is any one film that is a portal into that culture and time, and does so in an entertaining but reasonably accurate way, this would be that film. It certainly deserves notice and the time it takes to watch, which is a lot more than can be said for some other attempts at this genre'.

Josh Harnett's portrayal of Tom, a super confident ballsy CEO of an internet start-up who sees it all go wonky is much better than expected.

The film scores even more points for avoiding simple messages and instead turns a captivating tale of an internet start-up bankrolled to the hilt who finds its IPO is going south fast into something richer, a true character study.

The relationships, family, work, ex-girlfriend are all handled with a nice touch of real human values, the conversations (mostly) ring true.

And yes, Bowie is great, if rather brief.

All in all, a real surprise, beautifully shot, and well-crafted, and who knew, Josh Harnett can deliver complex characters...

Recommended

In "August," Josh Hartnett plays a cocky, twenty-something entrepreneur named Tom Sterling who, for the past several years (the movie is set in the early 2000s), has been riding the dot.com wave to easy fame and fortune - though he isn't quite prepared, either financially or emotionally, for the crash that is to come. Landshark, the company he founded with his brother, Joshua (Adam Scott) and of which he is currently CEO, has a couple hundred employees on its payroll, but pretty much everyone who works there is at a loss to explain just what it is the firm does or produces. Even worse, the company that was once valued at well over three-and-a-half million dollars is now worth just a paltry fraction of that amount, the "business model" having apparently failed to pan out as expected.

As written by Howard A. Rodman and directed by Austin Chick, "August" is essentially a cautionary tale set against the get-rich-quick hysteria that came to dominate in the early days of the internet, when virtually anybody with a half-baked idea and a smidgen of techno-savviness could become a high-stakes player on Wall Street. That many of these people were making their fortunes out of little more than the cyber equivalent of chewing gum and bailing wire – while producing nothing of any real substance or value in the long run – is what eventually led to disaster for so many of them and for the economy as a whole.

"August" does a reasonably effective job capturing the moral emptiness and emotional shallowness of the characters and the world they inhabit, but, when all is said and done, the movie lacks the dramatic heft and focus needed to turn it into a profound and major work. The minor characters are bland and insufficiently developed, and even Tom is deficient in the kind of depth and shading he would need to make him a representative "tragic hero" for our time. That being said, the movie does offer some intriguing insights into the way the business world works these days and into which type of individual typically succeeds in the new arena. And which type fails.