On the Rocks (2020)

Bill Murray's Felix, who---thankfully---gets the lines, the suits, and the personality, is surrounded---inexplicably---by stick figures of characters who do not belong in a movie, certainly not in the same one. Mr. Murray does his best to lift other characters from their catatonic state, but the script has other plans. Laura spends her days trying to connect with her creative self in an overpriced building invariably shot from an awkward angle, while her husband, Dean, is busy losing himself trying to excel at a generic job in a generic city only to come back home to a generic family life that he would have long sought refuge from in therapy had the script not instructed him to feel---rather unpersuasively---otherwise. Laura and Dean marry, work, and New York because the New York Times has told them so. Felix lives.

Cinematography and acting (except for Murray's) pale in comparison with what one has come to expect from a random episode of a good television series.

Rochester, New York

The city is a spaceship.

"Sizing People Up" by Robin Dreeke (2020)

The book's thesis is that Homo œconomicus placed in the right strategic environment is the most trustworthy of men. The thesis is unashamedly repeated over and over again, for the benefit of those who find comfort in repetition. Reckless repetition does not render this thesis wrong.

"Russians Among Us" by Gordon Corera (2020)

The book covers pre- and post-2010 illegals in middlebrow journalistic prose. Conceptually, the book reveals little about pre-2010 illegals that cannot be gleaned from The Americans. Perhaps, more is revealed by The Americans, which had the luxury of the innuendo and the artistic licence. The pre-2010 story makes for a more comfortable narrative both because more information about that period has leaked and because the narrative had time to mature. Post-2010 illegals are portrayed as more numerous, more opportunistic, and more destructive. While one can make a case that both the US and the USSR were better off with the espionage of 1980s, it is harder to make an analogous case for the benefits of the mutual sabotage of the 2010s.

Corera observes that it were easier to motivate Russians to go undercover in the US than to motivate Americans to go undercover in the USSR because the US was a nicer place to live. (Or maybe Americans just have not been caught.) What made it easier to turn Russians was the purported lack of meritocracy, which motivated them to be open to outside opportunities for advancement. If so, large meritocratic society is stable society. Size matters, for it determines how tall the meritocratic ladder is.

"A Gentleman in Moscow" by Amor Towles (2016)

Count Rostov is a rooted cosmopolitan and a gentleman. A gentleman is an optimist. An optimist seeks to master his circumstances lest he be mastered by them. A gentleman has his most valuable possessions always on him at all times: memories, friendships, languages, and logical structures. Rostov lives as if there were tomorrow.

Like Starbucks, like a product of many a multinational, the Hotel Metropol is an Embassy of Civilisation. It is a whore---the best one money can buy. It is an education. It is where life comes to expose herself to you if are too busy to live or are otherwise engaged.

A rooted cosmopolitan, Amor Towles cherishes the language, for he knows---just as his protagonist does---that the journey will be a long one, and that language is a dependable companion, especially when spoken with Nicholas Guy Smith's versatility.

But Towles delicately blows his own cover. He does not bow down before fate. He celebrates a moment of supreme lucidity accompanied by an opportunity to act.

Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates (2019)

This vulgarly titled mini-series is an alien's look at a man who thinks, a species that is on the brink of extinction in public life but is probably still familiar first-hand to most viewers. The species also reads. And then reflects on what it has read. Which is supposed to be a shocker, as is Gates's admission that he does not seek to inspire but rather to be effective, to optimise. Nor is the failure to eradicate every single case of polio or to solve the world's energy problem is Gates's personal failure---or indeed a failure at all. There are guiding problems in mathematics, in science, and in each individual's life, which are not meant to be solved but rather to inspire and direct smaller victories.

The series is worth watching if only to observe Gates's fast, incisive mind and his superior interior designs. Gates is intelligent and erudite enough to salvage any conversation. His offices are cosy, conducive to work, and rivalled only by the views of Washington. The ever-in-the-frame troop of Coca-Cola cans is a reminder of Gates's proletarian allegiances. He optimises all that which is both a necessity and a luxury for each of us: a toilet, a drink, an operating system, electricity.

Westworld (Seasons 1, 2 and 3)

The series is concerned with the noblest of all pursuits: the pursuit of immortality. The show has its moments, which are mostly concerned with winning lighting and Ed Harris. While the entire show appears to have been written by a sizeable committee, Season 2 was likely crowdsourced on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, with contractors majority-voting on each scene and every directorial decision. A team of copywriters must have been charged with writing not-too-tired one-liners, to be pasted on buses and, if good enough, fed to Anthony Hopkins's and Ed Harris's characters, as their contracts must have specified. Speaking of contracts, it seems that starlets view sex as career sinking and violence (if delivered, not received) as career enhancing, and make sure to craft their contracts accordingly. The audiences have to suffer through the consequences, of which Season 2 the worst offender.

Overall, what's missing in Westworld is a vision and passion. Instead, the show is a well-connected machine held together by professionalism.