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Geeks Run Wild . . .
By JANET MASLIN
THE NEW DIGITAL AGE
Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business
By Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
315 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.
Picture this rosy scenario for your high-tech future: You awaken because your curtains open automatically, your coffee maker starts brewing and your bed administers a subtle hint in the form of a back massage. Your closet, having scanned your calendar, coughs up a freshly cleaned suit for the big meeting today. You head for the kitchen while reading the day’s news as a translucent holographic display. Thanks to motion detection, it stays right in front of you as you walk.
And when you stub your toe — because you will, pal, if you wander around scanning eye-level holograms — you can use a diagnostics app on your mobile device to see whether it’s broken. Speaking of your feet, you will have a smartshoe that pinches you to keep you from lingering over breakfast and being late for your meeting. Neither human error nor human nature will interfere with your gratingly perfect morning.
If this is the happiest news delivered by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen in “The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business,” imagine what the bad news is like. Actually, you don’t have to: the authors have come up with memorably batty examples. They say that the future will be a tough time to be a Malawian witch doctor because when everyone in the world has access to digital information, the witch doctors’ authority will be contradicted. It will also be hard to be a warlord in eastern Congo if warlords are touchy about negative publicity.
Maybe they are. “The New Digital Age” is much more prescient and provocative than it is silly. Its thinking got a little less futuristic when last week’s Boston Marathon bombings turned crowdsourcing and cameras into high-speed methods of needle-in-a-haystack detection.
The collaboration between Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman (and former chief operating officer) of Google, and Mr. Cohen, a foreign-relations expert and director of Google Ideas, is meant to explore the ways in which technology and diplomacy will intersect. “There is a canyon dividing people who understand technology and people charged with addressing the world’s toughest geopolitical issues, and no one has built a bridge,” they write.
The most frightening and important sections deal with the futures of war and terrorism, and it is here that the authors sound most assured. Until now, they point out, it has been relatively easy to use scare tactics and Web charisma to mobilize acolytes.
But a new accountability is coming, and a wired, well-informed public will be able to tell the difference between stardom and wisdom. “The consequence of having more citizens informed and connected is that they’ll be as critical and discerning about rebels as they are about the government,” the authors write.
This book articulates why any leaders, whether legitimate, revolutionary, self-styled or tyrannical, will need much more elaborate planning skills than they ever had before. “States will long for the days when they only had to think about foreign and domestic policies in the physical world,” it grimly says. Future political visionaries will have to devise policies for both the real and virtual worlds, and those policies will not necessarily be consistent with each other. There is already much evidence for the authors’ claim that cyberwarfare and drone strikes are apt to overshadow traditional combat — although technology may yield military uniforms that can generate sounds, camouflage themselves and even self-destruct rather than wind up in enemy hands.
Despite dry, dense prose and occasional weird misfires (will it be joyous or heartbreaking to watch holographic home movies, to have the dead visit your living room?), “The New Digital Age” throws off many worthwhile provocations.
Some are pop-cultural: It’s no longer true, the authors argue, that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes (per Andy Warhol). Thanks to the unforgiving nature of the Internet, everyone will be famous forever. “It’s only a question,” they say, “of how many people are paying attention, and why.”
Some are global: Making frequent swipes at China (the authors agree with certain experts “that China’s future will not be bright”), this book handicaps the prospects of both rebellion and suppression as if the fate of the world might depend on these things — because it might.
Any reader of “The New Digital Age” is sure to have a favorite point of contention. Like the book’s view of politics: The authors predict that we can expect many more Herman “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan” Cains in the future, candidates with big personalities who become momentarily popular but cannot withstand tough scrutiny.
Then they advise political consultants to map the brain functions of candidates for a scientific assessment of how well they handle stress and temptation. When a politician makes it past that kind of screening, we will have truly reached the robotic age.
Is it the worst movie of the year or a satire of the worst movie of the year . . .
By A. O. SCOTT
To describe “Pain & Gain” as a Michael Bay movie on steroids would be accurate but also redundant and a little misleading. Pumped-up, aggressive, muscle-headed entertainment is Mr. Bay’s specialty, after all, and while this grisly true-crime drama is partly about performance-enhancing drugs and the bulky men who love them, it is also, compared with “Armageddon” or the “Transformers” series, a stripped-down, modest enterprise in which no major American city is reduced to rubble.
This is not to suggest that the film, written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely and based on a series of articles by Pete Collins (published in Miami New Times), is in any way subtle or restrained. The opening scene, a police chase from which the rest of the story flashes back, sets a tone of hectic excess. Mark Wahlberg, running from the heavily armed forces of law and order, dashes across rooftops and lumbers, sometimes in slow motion, through streets and alleys. The camera swirls around him, freezing as a glob of saliva pops out of his mouth, dropping down to allow us a peek up his nostrils and then tilting and sliding to register the impact of his face on the windshield of a car.
What follows is two hours of sweat, blood and cheerful, nasty vulgarity, punctuated by voice-over ruminations about Jesus, physical fitness and the American dream, along with a few tactical visits to a strip club. It all leaves you pondering whether you have just seen a monumentally stupid movie or a brilliant movie about the nature and consequences of stupidity.
Why choose? “Pain & Gain,” though it compresses some events and characters, hews fairly close to the facts as related in Mr. Collins’s deadpan chronicle of idiotic criminality and sloppy police work. Mr. Wahlberg plays Daniel Lugo, a personal trainer and bodybuilding enthusiast who lands a job at a Miami gym after serving time for an investment scam. Swearing that he has learned his lesson — that there is no substitute for hard work — he sets his sights on a South Florida vision of the good life, egged on by a self-help guru (Ken Jeong) who fills his head with slogans and three-point plans for success. “If I deserve it,” Daniel says, “then the universe will serve it.”
What he feels the universe owes him is more or less what a teenage boy raised on “Entourage,” Grand Theft Auto and the oeuvre of Michael Bay might demand, though, since “Pain & Gain” is set in 1995, not all of those inspirations are available to Daniel. But the world, then as now, is full of hot babes, fast cars and money, tokens of a high-rolling, hedonistic existence just beyond poor Daniel’s reach. He is motivated less by ambition than by a self-pitying sense of entitlement that is both democratic and Nietzschean. He says that he wants to be just like everybody else but also that he wants to set himself apart from the losers and suckers in whose ranks he unfairly languishes.
One day at the gym, Daniel spots a ticket out of palookaville in the person of Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), a pigeon-chested blowhard who hires Daniel to help him get into shape and brags endlessly about his offshore bank accounts, his boat, his mansion and the sandwich franchise near the airport that for some reason is his pride and joy. Victor is enough of a jerk that it is hard to feel too bad when Daniel enlists two fellow gym rats — Adrian (Anthony Mackie) and Paul (Dwayne Johnson) — to kidnap him. Rather than demand ransom, they decide to torture him into signing his assets over to them.
Adrian and Paul have dreams of their own. Adrian’s are to overcome his steroid-related sexual problems and to win the love of Robin (Rebel Wilson), a nurse who specializes in such ailments. Paul, an ex-convict who has found religion, is a bit less clear about what he wants, and he clings to a sense of his own righteousness, even after some dramatic backsliding. Some of this occurs in the company of Sorina (Bar Paly), a Romanian-born stripper who had previously dated Daniel and who believes that he and his partners are government agents on a dangerous, top-secret mission.
Sorina is blond and not very bright, which might count as an offensive stereotype if the guys she hung around with had any brains to speak of. Daniel likens himself to Tony Montana in “Scarface” or Michael Corleone in the Godfather pictures, but he and his accomplices — including his boss, played by Rob Corddry — would be more at home in “Dumb and Dumber.” Not that the local representatives of law and order are especially clever. The gang blunders from one disaster to another, with results that are sometimes horrifying, sometimes hilarious and sometimes both. More absurd, and more shocking, is how much they get away with. You start to believe that Daniel may be right, that the universe is organized to reward amoral, shallow cretins like him.
The presence of Ed Harris as Ed Dubois, a private detective who seems to be the only decent, reasonably intelligent person in all of South Florida, does not do much to challenge this idea. Mr. Harris is, as always, an admirable actor, but the other guys — the slobbery, hammy Mr. Shalhoub; the manic, weirdly sweet Mr. Mackie; the histrionically nervous Mr. Johnson; and the buff, dense, irritable Mr. Wahlberg — are much more fun.
Mr. Bay, while not exactly glorifying the crimes of the Sun Gym gang, does not entirely condemn them, either. A different kind of director might have made “Pain & Gain” into a gamy, gritty sunshine noir, or else a knowing satire of idiot America. The easy move would be to invite the audience to look down on Daniel, Paul and Adrian, but Mr. Bay’s brand of populism holds them rigorously and maddeningly at eye level. The movie and, by implication, those of us watching it are no better than these guys. I found that unspeakably insulting and also impressive.
“Pain & Gain” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Sex, violence, drugs and other stupid stuff.
Pain & Gain
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Directed by Michael Bay; written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, based on articles by Pete Collins; director of photography, Ben Seresin; edited by Joel Negron and Thomas A. Muldoon; music by Steve Jablonsky; production design by Jeffrey Beecroft; costumes by Deborah L. Scott; produced by Donald De Line, Mr. Bay and Ian Bryce; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes.
WITH: Mark Wahlberg (Daniel Lugo), Dwayne Johnson (Paul Doyle), Anthony Mackie (Adrian Doorbal), Tony Shalhoub (Victor Kershaw), Ed Harris (Ed Dubois), Rob Corddry (John Mese), Bar Paly (Sorina Luminita), Rebel Wilson (Robin Peck) and Ken Jeong (Jonny Wu).
both in today's NYT.
By JANET MASLIN
THE NEW DIGITAL AGE
Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business
By Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
315 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.
Picture this rosy scenario for your high-tech future: You awaken because your curtains open automatically, your coffee maker starts brewing and your bed administers a subtle hint in the form of a back massage. Your closet, having scanned your calendar, coughs up a freshly cleaned suit for the big meeting today. You head for the kitchen while reading the day’s news as a translucent holographic display. Thanks to motion detection, it stays right in front of you as you walk.
And when you stub your toe — because you will, pal, if you wander around scanning eye-level holograms — you can use a diagnostics app on your mobile device to see whether it’s broken. Speaking of your feet, you will have a smartshoe that pinches you to keep you from lingering over breakfast and being late for your meeting. Neither human error nor human nature will interfere with your gratingly perfect morning.
If this is the happiest news delivered by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen in “The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business,” imagine what the bad news is like. Actually, you don’t have to: the authors have come up with memorably batty examples. They say that the future will be a tough time to be a Malawian witch doctor because when everyone in the world has access to digital information, the witch doctors’ authority will be contradicted. It will also be hard to be a warlord in eastern Congo if warlords are touchy about negative publicity.
Maybe they are. “The New Digital Age” is much more prescient and provocative than it is silly. Its thinking got a little less futuristic when last week’s Boston Marathon bombings turned crowdsourcing and cameras into high-speed methods of needle-in-a-haystack detection.
The collaboration between Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman (and former chief operating officer) of Google, and Mr. Cohen, a foreign-relations expert and director of Google Ideas, is meant to explore the ways in which technology and diplomacy will intersect. “There is a canyon dividing people who understand technology and people charged with addressing the world’s toughest geopolitical issues, and no one has built a bridge,” they write.
The most frightening and important sections deal with the futures of war and terrorism, and it is here that the authors sound most assured. Until now, they point out, it has been relatively easy to use scare tactics and Web charisma to mobilize acolytes.
But a new accountability is coming, and a wired, well-informed public will be able to tell the difference between stardom and wisdom. “The consequence of having more citizens informed and connected is that they’ll be as critical and discerning about rebels as they are about the government,” the authors write.
This book articulates why any leaders, whether legitimate, revolutionary, self-styled or tyrannical, will need much more elaborate planning skills than they ever had before. “States will long for the days when they only had to think about foreign and domestic policies in the physical world,” it grimly says. Future political visionaries will have to devise policies for both the real and virtual worlds, and those policies will not necessarily be consistent with each other. There is already much evidence for the authors’ claim that cyberwarfare and drone strikes are apt to overshadow traditional combat — although technology may yield military uniforms that can generate sounds, camouflage themselves and even self-destruct rather than wind up in enemy hands.
Despite dry, dense prose and occasional weird misfires (will it be joyous or heartbreaking to watch holographic home movies, to have the dead visit your living room?), “The New Digital Age” throws off many worthwhile provocations.
Some are pop-cultural: It’s no longer true, the authors argue, that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes (per Andy Warhol). Thanks to the unforgiving nature of the Internet, everyone will be famous forever. “It’s only a question,” they say, “of how many people are paying attention, and why.”
Some are global: Making frequent swipes at China (the authors agree with certain experts “that China’s future will not be bright”), this book handicaps the prospects of both rebellion and suppression as if the fate of the world might depend on these things — because it might.
Any reader of “The New Digital Age” is sure to have a favorite point of contention. Like the book’s view of politics: The authors predict that we can expect many more Herman “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan” Cains in the future, candidates with big personalities who become momentarily popular but cannot withstand tough scrutiny.
Then they advise political consultants to map the brain functions of candidates for a scientific assessment of how well they handle stress and temptation. When a politician makes it past that kind of screening, we will have truly reached the robotic age.
Is it the worst movie of the year or a satire of the worst movie of the year . . .
By A. O. SCOTT
To describe “Pain & Gain” as a Michael Bay movie on steroids would be accurate but also redundant and a little misleading. Pumped-up, aggressive, muscle-headed entertainment is Mr. Bay’s specialty, after all, and while this grisly true-crime drama is partly about performance-enhancing drugs and the bulky men who love them, it is also, compared with “Armageddon” or the “Transformers” series, a stripped-down, modest enterprise in which no major American city is reduced to rubble.
This is not to suggest that the film, written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely and based on a series of articles by Pete Collins (published in Miami New Times), is in any way subtle or restrained. The opening scene, a police chase from which the rest of the story flashes back, sets a tone of hectic excess. Mark Wahlberg, running from the heavily armed forces of law and order, dashes across rooftops and lumbers, sometimes in slow motion, through streets and alleys. The camera swirls around him, freezing as a glob of saliva pops out of his mouth, dropping down to allow us a peek up his nostrils and then tilting and sliding to register the impact of his face on the windshield of a car.
What follows is two hours of sweat, blood and cheerful, nasty vulgarity, punctuated by voice-over ruminations about Jesus, physical fitness and the American dream, along with a few tactical visits to a strip club. It all leaves you pondering whether you have just seen a monumentally stupid movie or a brilliant movie about the nature and consequences of stupidity.
Why choose? “Pain & Gain,” though it compresses some events and characters, hews fairly close to the facts as related in Mr. Collins’s deadpan chronicle of idiotic criminality and sloppy police work. Mr. Wahlberg plays Daniel Lugo, a personal trainer and bodybuilding enthusiast who lands a job at a Miami gym after serving time for an investment scam. Swearing that he has learned his lesson — that there is no substitute for hard work — he sets his sights on a South Florida vision of the good life, egged on by a self-help guru (Ken Jeong) who fills his head with slogans and three-point plans for success. “If I deserve it,” Daniel says, “then the universe will serve it.”
What he feels the universe owes him is more or less what a teenage boy raised on “Entourage,” Grand Theft Auto and the oeuvre of Michael Bay might demand, though, since “Pain & Gain” is set in 1995, not all of those inspirations are available to Daniel. But the world, then as now, is full of hot babes, fast cars and money, tokens of a high-rolling, hedonistic existence just beyond poor Daniel’s reach. He is motivated less by ambition than by a self-pitying sense of entitlement that is both democratic and Nietzschean. He says that he wants to be just like everybody else but also that he wants to set himself apart from the losers and suckers in whose ranks he unfairly languishes.
One day at the gym, Daniel spots a ticket out of palookaville in the person of Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), a pigeon-chested blowhard who hires Daniel to help him get into shape and brags endlessly about his offshore bank accounts, his boat, his mansion and the sandwich franchise near the airport that for some reason is his pride and joy. Victor is enough of a jerk that it is hard to feel too bad when Daniel enlists two fellow gym rats — Adrian (Anthony Mackie) and Paul (Dwayne Johnson) — to kidnap him. Rather than demand ransom, they decide to torture him into signing his assets over to them.
Adrian and Paul have dreams of their own. Adrian’s are to overcome his steroid-related sexual problems and to win the love of Robin (Rebel Wilson), a nurse who specializes in such ailments. Paul, an ex-convict who has found religion, is a bit less clear about what he wants, and he clings to a sense of his own righteousness, even after some dramatic backsliding. Some of this occurs in the company of Sorina (Bar Paly), a Romanian-born stripper who had previously dated Daniel and who believes that he and his partners are government agents on a dangerous, top-secret mission.
Sorina is blond and not very bright, which might count as an offensive stereotype if the guys she hung around with had any brains to speak of. Daniel likens himself to Tony Montana in “Scarface” or Michael Corleone in the Godfather pictures, but he and his accomplices — including his boss, played by Rob Corddry — would be more at home in “Dumb and Dumber.” Not that the local representatives of law and order are especially clever. The gang blunders from one disaster to another, with results that are sometimes horrifying, sometimes hilarious and sometimes both. More absurd, and more shocking, is how much they get away with. You start to believe that Daniel may be right, that the universe is organized to reward amoral, shallow cretins like him.
The presence of Ed Harris as Ed Dubois, a private detective who seems to be the only decent, reasonably intelligent person in all of South Florida, does not do much to challenge this idea. Mr. Harris is, as always, an admirable actor, but the other guys — the slobbery, hammy Mr. Shalhoub; the manic, weirdly sweet Mr. Mackie; the histrionically nervous Mr. Johnson; and the buff, dense, irritable Mr. Wahlberg — are much more fun.
Mr. Bay, while not exactly glorifying the crimes of the Sun Gym gang, does not entirely condemn them, either. A different kind of director might have made “Pain & Gain” into a gamy, gritty sunshine noir, or else a knowing satire of idiot America. The easy move would be to invite the audience to look down on Daniel, Paul and Adrian, but Mr. Bay’s brand of populism holds them rigorously and maddeningly at eye level. The movie and, by implication, those of us watching it are no better than these guys. I found that unspeakably insulting and also impressive.
“Pain & Gain” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Sex, violence, drugs and other stupid stuff.
Pain & Gain
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Directed by Michael Bay; written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, based on articles by Pete Collins; director of photography, Ben Seresin; edited by Joel Negron and Thomas A. Muldoon; music by Steve Jablonsky; production design by Jeffrey Beecroft; costumes by Deborah L. Scott; produced by Donald De Line, Mr. Bay and Ian Bryce; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes.
WITH: Mark Wahlberg (Daniel Lugo), Dwayne Johnson (Paul Doyle), Anthony Mackie (Adrian Doorbal), Tony Shalhoub (Victor Kershaw), Ed Harris (Ed Dubois), Rob Corddry (John Mese), Bar Paly (Sorina Luminita), Rebel Wilson (Robin Peck) and Ken Jeong (Jonny Wu).
both in today's NYT.