Don't Look Up is flawed, but great fun and a savage satire for our times

The film that’s got everybody talking at the start of the year has been Don’t Look Up.

The central premise - the high concept - is that there’s a meteorite heading for the earth that’s going to wipe out civilisation. The scientists who spot this are rushed to the White House to brief the President so the powers that be can prepare for, or prevent, this apocalypse. 

The rest of the film is a parable for how science is trivialised, weaponised and manipulated. The obvious parallels are with climate change and the current pandemic.

It’s certainly been popular. It smashed streaming records with more than 152 million hours streamed around the world in a single week, according to Netflix.

It’s stuffed full of A-list megastars who all pull off superb if overblown performances, especially Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio as the scientists and Cate Blancett as a randy TV presenter.

The music is also sensational. From the original score by Nicholas Britell (who also did the music on my favourite TV show, Succession), a new song specially recorded for the film by Ariane Grande (Just Look Up) to the beautiful Second Nature by Bon Iver used at the end, right through to the inclusion of the Four Tops classic Bernadette. It is a masterclass in how to use music in a film.   

Yet the movie seems to have really divided opinion - and there have been lots of views expressed already - so let me get my stance out there early: I loved it.

Sure, if you overthink it there is plenty to pick it apart. It’s massively irritating for the usual American exceptionalism that runs through so many Hollywood movies, even ones where the whole plight of the planet is in peril. Like, the whole story is still told as if the only country in the world is America. Yet even this obvious niggle is turned into another layer of satire.

Then there’s the charge that the central character of President Janie Orlean, played by Meryl Streep, is just a crude caricature of Donald Trump. It is. She is. President Orlean is a narcissistic bully, in thrall to big tech, manipulating a supporter base. What else can she be?

British actor Mark Rylance plays a powerful tech tycoon who is socially awkward, downright rude and ruthlessly convinced of his own immortality and superior abilities. Again, the parallels with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are plain to see.

But if you think it’s just an attack on easy targets no one really gets off the hook  I liked the way the liberal media - a clear parody of the New York Times - lose interest in the biggest story in the world because of the missed opportunity to use it to attack the President close the mid-term elections.

So much of the film is so frighteningly close to the bone. Just see the reaction of the current media during any serious discussion on climate change. Piers Morgan hectors people about car use, Richard Madeley tries to pick at the reputation of Sir David Attenborough, while Talk Radio’s Mike Graham trying to claim concrete can be organic to a carpenter is probably the most egregious example of dumbing down any serious discussion about the real science behind climate change.

Even here in Greater Manchester, 20,000 people have signed a petition against a clean air zone charge aimed at discouraging tax polluting vehicles. No government is prepared to make any serious attempt to price air travel properly. The popularity of Don’t Look Up suggests many of us recognise that we are sleepwalking towards a disaster, but then isn’t Greta Thunberg annoying? 

(Column from the Glossop Chronicle and Tameside Reporter, 14 January 2022)

A new dawn has broken, has it not?

http://www.stanleychow.co.uk/

There's only one thing on all of our minds today. The election of decency back to the office of the President of the USA. Sorry for the headline (not sorry).

We've been glued to CNN all week, a change from our usual global 24 hour news channel of choice, France24. I could listen to John King all day long. 

It's hard to comprehend what an unpleasant and repugnant force Trump has been. The powerful reaction from CNN's Van Jones hit that home. ""Every day you're waking up and you're getting these tweets and you just don't know, and you are going to the store and the people who were once afraid to show their racism are getting nastier and nastier to you." That got me. Trump enabled all of that. In our country, we get a glimpse of it from the likes of Farage, but not from the leader of our country, aside from a few stupid old jokes, not at that scale, and frankly you can barely imagine it. In time we'll look back and be baffled not just at how he was elected but that how normalised his outrageous, ungraceful, rude style of governing became. Pundit Sam Harris described Trump's appeal and strategy as allowing people to feel OK about the worst version of themselves, someone incapable of casting moral judgement on people by default makes them feel fine about being hateful and racist.

I've been in a global echo chamber of like minded happy people today, which has made Twitter fun again (notably, John Niven has been immense). I have made a half hearted attempt to try and think of the opposite point of view. What has Trump done that's been good? Frankly, it's a short list. Taking out the Iranian General, maybe? Standing up to China, possibly? I do hear the cry that he's made a political cause of working people in left behind communities, but he harvested their votes and made them his base without any coherent economic plan, and did so on the premise of trade war with China, almost America's version of our false prospectus of Brexit.

Biden's election is also a headache for the Boris Johnson government, as if they didn't have enough problems. A US trade deal that rides roughshod over the Good Friday agreement won't wash. And if I was an official in the Biden team, the mealy mouthed comments of Dominic Raab, our Foreign Secretary, would push the interests of the UK a little further down the list of priorities. 

At some point quite soon, Biden and Harris will have to make really difficult decisions - the kind of test of character that Presidents have to make. The obvious first one being a proper response that takes COVID-19 seriously.

They'll also be asked to tack left by the Bernie Sanders crowd, and rising stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of Congressional Progressive Caucus. The stoked up culture wars will be a further test. I had an immediate taste of it with a tweet about Iraq. But Biden has spent all of his political life negotiating and triangulating, finding a solution, working around the table, not just being righteous. He also has a strong Vice President, possibly the next President, at his side.

Many of us Brits are aware of Biden's shortcomings. Right now I'm very much looking forward to his acceptance speech. I just hope he starts it with - "We're ALRIGHT!" 

credits: illustration by Stanley Chow, punchline by Patrick Maguire.

Get this clown out of the White House

I've lived through scores of elections and they always seem very important at the time. But we're going to stop up tonight to watch this one and pray for Biden/Harris to win and get this horrible man out of the White House. I can't think of very much more to say than that. Plenty of other pundits are having their say, but I feel moderately optimistic that sense will prevail. My biggest fear is that Trump won't go quietly and is fermenting a civil war.  Like a lot of narcissistic leaders, it's always about him. 

Why I feel terrorised and what the former head of MI5 told me about leadership

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, former head of MI5
(pic from JLA, speaker agency)

Are there things you know, that we couldn't know, but if we did know, maybe we'd think better of our leaders?

That was the question I put to Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, at an event I hosted in Manchester in 2012. Given she'd been on duty and in charge during the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005 and we were discussing leadership it seemed a fair question to ask. It's at the forefront of all our minds now.

I'll admit this, I am terrorised. I shouldn't be, I can rationalise the numbers. And I'll sign up to any amount of "not afraid" pledges. I genuinely wasn't afraid when I lived in London through the early 90s. You just accepted it. Maybe I was younger and more reckless, but you always sensed the IRA usually intended to make life inconvenient and uncomfortable. That somehow the coded warnings would get us out of danger in time. That's how it felt. The deeper sense of fear and anger started when I made a trip up to watch Russia v Germany at Old Trafford during the Euro 96 Championships. That was the day when I heard a large boom in the distance - it was the IRA blowing up a big part of Manchester city centre. Warning or not, it made me angry and scared.

Three years later, while I was on constant standby for the birth of my first son, London was hit by bombings in three different spots - two of which were regular haunts, Soho and Brick Lane. The fourth target, before the maniac was stopped, was to have been Stamford Hill, the large Jewish area close to where I lived.

On September the 10th 2001 I looked around the Capitol building in Washington DC, visited Arlington Cemetery and gazed over in awe at the Pentagon building. Without illusions, but with great pride I enjoyed a few days steeped in the best traditions of a multi-cultural democracy. I flew home from Dulles Airport where I may well have been within feet of the murderous crew who hours later were flying the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 to Los Angeles into the Pentagon.

On the 7th of July 2005, my sister's birthday, I awoke to the awful news that London was under attack. I later found myself on a train from Manchester Piccadilly to Cardiff Central that day, both stations were closed due to security alerts, no coded warnings, no tactical avoidance of loss of life.

I mention those days of clammy mortal fear and anger, not just as a personal recollection, but to explain that I am terrorised. And that my pride for our society, how we congregate freely and how we celebrate diversity, universal human rights and the pursuit of love, however flawed, is who we are.

The London bombs were the work of Nazi nail bomber David Copeland. No one tried to say we were "reaping the whirlwind" of a society that was alienating him and turning him into what he was. Or that there was any basis to his justification that he was fighting the degeneracy encouraged by the Zionist Occupation Government. He is a murdering arsehole who deserves to rot in jail and so should the authors of the brainwashing garbage that turned him.

Likewise, I have no time for mealy mouthed moral relativism over terrorism, militant Islam and guilt about the West or that we "had it coming".

During a painful and emotional review of the Saturday papers for the BBC last weekend I could only conclude that being who we are, living as we do, is why they hate us. Why those people in Paris eating in an ethnic restaurant, watching football and going to a concert is an affront to a murderous death cult. It's who we are. I'm proud of who we are.

So, to come back to the point about leaders and what they know and how they react. I was fairly appalled by a paralysed George W Bush in the aftermath of 911 and impressed by Mayor Giuliani. Eliza Manningham-Buller confirmed I was right to be impressed by Tony Blair on all those occasions in London as well as all the threats we didn't get to hear about.

I'm not being mean spirited when I say I don't recall the statements of the leaders of the opposition back then.

Why then does it matter quite so much what the leader of our opposition says and does in the wake of the Paris attacks? It sort of matters to me because it's my party. And it matters because of everything he's ever said about terrorism, every caveat he's ever attached, every flaky position that the awful Stop the War Coalition have espoused, every element of the relativistic anti-Western "yebbutery" and "whataboutism" that has to find common cause with enemies of the rest of us.

Yet it wasn't really what Jeremy Corbyn was going to do or say this week that had me sitting up awake and anxious at 3 in the morning. I harbour a lack of confidence in David Cameron and don't yet feel he's gripped Britain's role in the world and has a strategy for a response to confront the threats we face, or to successfully project British values and Britain's interests effectively.

It all comes back to a point Eliza made three and half years ago in answer to my question - leadership is not about command and control, but vision and strategy. "You must be honest about difficulties, but demonstrate your confidence in the future and in your people."

That is quite some yardstick by which to measure our present leaders, is it not?

House of Cards Season 2 - theatre of the absurd - spoilers aplenty

We rattled through season two of House of Cards and finished it last night. Yes, the conclusion was inevitable, yes, Kevin Spacey is truly brilliant as Frank Underwood. And yes, like everyone else who has reviewed it, it wasn't as good as the first series.

For me, the big problems lie in the rushed script and storyline. So many questions are left unasked, never mind unanswered.

Characters behave in irrational and erratic ways with no attempt to explain - like the President resigning, like the FBI doing a deal with the ludicrous hamster-stroking Gavin, like everything to do with Doug and Rachel. So much time and effort is expended on storylines which go nowhere - Christina getting fired for example, it was like they just forgot about her. The constant presence of a noisy and lively demonstration outside the Underwood residence added another hyperreal layer of nonsense.

Just about all characters had lines that you actually laugh out loud at, because they are THAT absurd. Jackie explaining why she has all those tattoos. Claire, well, pretty much everything she says.

A lot of the politics didn't ring true either - not that I'd know - but it had a feeling like it was the West Wing, but with scumbags. Series 3 will be more of the same with the added presence of the Assange-like Gavin. Yes, we'll watch it, but it won't be worth the wait.

There are two problems for all mini-series now, which House of Cards has helped bring home. First, they simply suffer from a poor comparison to Breaking Bad, The Wire and The Sopranos - the High Concept, the powerful characters, the acting. But secondly, because it's on box sets, you tend to binge watch these days. On old fashioned TV, there's a lingering when something is left hanging, a number of stop-you-in-your-tracks moments that you'd collectively dissect the next day. I don't think House of Cards would scrub up to that level of scrutiny to be honest. You just want to rush to the end to see what happens. Did I do that? You may think so, I couldn't possibly comment.

Boomerang - The Meltdown Tour by Michael Lewis

Great book this, for the most part. Michael Lewis deals with the banking crisis of 2008 with detailed reportage from countries at the centre of the storm, but with mixed results Iceland (harsh), Ireland (fair), Greece (harsh and fair), Germany (over obsessed with scat). And then there's a very bizarre final chapter on California, which doesn't fit. It doesn't feel like a book, more a collection of associated long Vanity Fair magazine pieces, which it is.  But for my money, the journalism and analysis on the Iceland and Ireland pieces is peerless.

Contextual intelligence - how it works in Silicon Valley

So, there we were on the 25^th floor of a corporate law firm's offices on Market Street in the heart of San Francisco's Financial District, listening and taking notes in a meeting with Judith Iglehart from the Keiretsu Forum when the door flung open and in burst Randy Williams, the founder and CEO of the angel investing network.

He'd just dropped in to see us after taking a quick break from a screening committee on the floor above, where he'd been chairing a group of 12 heavy hitters and investors from some of Silicon Valley's brightest and best known businesses. He invited us into the room to watch him work. We lined the wall and stood transfixed as they first passed verdict on an entrepreneurial business that had just been in to present a pitch for funding – not clear, said one. Poor presentation said another. They all scribbled down their points on a slip, which would have decided whether the guy had a chance to come back and present.

Next up was a very confident and polished business owner punting his pitch for a modest amount of funding to get his business to the next level. To cut to the chase he had a slick and fast paced presentation but he rambled. He ran way over his time and you could sense the frustration around the table. He performed even worse in the Q&A, he couldn't explain what he needed the money for, or what his exit strategy was, nor could he articulate the differentiating factor in his business.

The discussion, after the pitchee left the room, reflected the obvious frustration they all felt. There was a business idea there, they agreed, but the presentation and failure to answer questions concerned them all. Get him back for some advice – sharpen the idea, said one of the investors. And here's the thing, Randy Williams reckons they'll get the funding from somewhere else. No idea is perfect, no pitch a sure fire winner – do you stick, or twist? That's the risk, this is what angels have to do.

And so this is how business angel financing in the Valley works. This is quickfire, brutal and unforgiving - you can't waste time. You get to the point, you get it across. And if you can't do that in front of a panel of people who want to give you money, what chance would you have with customers. But it's not the structured reality of Dragon's Den, there was a theatricality about it, an energy, a sense of urgency. Another incredible insight.

The last visit of the trip was to Plantronic, a 50 year old company that started making the telephonist head sets the receptionists may wear in Mad Men. What was fascinating about this tour de force was the thought that has gone into how voice technology will change – and how work patterns have changed too. The chief executive Ken Kannappan described it as contextual intelligence – understanding the waves of innovation and social change and being there.

It's been amazing how many themes keeping cropping up again and again with these successful companies – creating an emotional connection between product and consumer, often through design.  

What's the story? Silicon Valley glory

It's difficult to know where to start with summing up our visit to Google's funky downtown San Francisco offices – so I'll follow the money. The business makes 95 per cent of its profits and revenues from advertising. They also give a large number of their 25,000 global workforce tough and aggressive targets – they hire the best people with a gruelling interview process. That's a hard and commercial facet of this powerful expanding business that is disrupting and dismantling the traditional media channels and processes. And they measure absolutely everything, most notably their people through Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).

I bet you weren't expecting to hear that. Certainly the Google presentation and discussion was mainly about the development of their fun creative culture and the strategy in all of their markets ranging from YouTube to Gmail and back through to Adwords and Adsense. Yes, the company give everyone 20 per cent time to work on their own projects. In reality that though is 120 per cent time. Yes, they innovate through accessibility. And yes, genuinely Google stays true to its mantra of making the world's information accessible and organised for everyone. They are tactics that ultimately serve the strategy – all the time, relentlessly. They provide relevance, they innovate to take advertisers ever closer to real opportunities. None of it is an accident.

It is an awesome organisation.

So Jerry Engel starts telling us all a story about the conversation at his book club the night before. There were a few VCs, some entrepreneurs, and him of course a guru of innovation and entrepreneurship and an adjunct Professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. You know, he says, your typical crew. Wow.

This man is a powerhouse of ideas, a real thinker. He pushed and prodded us all, tied his thoughts into what he knows about Manchester and the potential to create a Graphene Valley in our home city region.

Innovation happens he says when it collides with waves of change – what waves of change are you part of, he asked? Position yourself at the crossroads of innovation and exploration. He went a long way again, to describing how Silicon Valley works.

From the hallowed halls of Berkeley it was then a drive to the Valley past the prime premises of Facebook and Google and into the home of LinkedIn to meet one of the founder Allen Blue.

We signed non-disclosure agreements and so can't say too much about what we talked about. Suffice to say just this – what you see in LinkedIn now is just the beginning and there is so much more to come.

Allen told us the story and we debated the various ways we use the current LinkedIn, there were reasons for why it looks how it does – and if we had anything to say, then here was the guy who was ultimately responsible – so we were saying it to his face! Incredible – just another day on the Learning Journey.

The last stop of the day was at the post-industrial creative factory of ideas that is Obscura Digital, officially the coolest office in the world. where the strikingly handsome Shawn Biega, their VP of sales treated us to a demonstration of innovation and technology in action – how these awesome interactive video wall installation transform a retail experience, but also how they work in hotels, businesses and even as projected light shows on buildings. Yes, these guys have lit up the Coca Cola HQ in Atlanta, a mosque in the United Arab Emirates.

Their mission statement is 'If you can imagine it, we can create it.' They've even lit up the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas with an interactive display of music artefacts, we particularly liked playing with the Beatles and Oasis pieces.

My Learning Journey in San Francisco

I'm in San Francisco on a Learning Journey, an organised tour around businesses and institutions in California with a group of entrepreneurs from around the UK. It is an incredible life changing experience.

We headed south first thing in the morning to Mountain View in Silicon Valley for the first appointment with Symantec with company evangelist Dale Zabriskie. The security software company is best known for consumer security software product Norton Utilities. The presentation was an expansive overview of the threats to data security and the constantly changing nature of those such perils – from hackers, activists, organised crime and even hostile states. They do this specifically through their three Security Operations Centres (SOC) – one is in Reading – which track what the bad guys do. But we learned too about how Symantec has embedded a culture of innovation into the business to make them able to provide the thought leadership that can maintain their business and on top of their sector and even acquire businesses that give them a strategic edge. And to innovate the key is to fail quickly, take heed, move on. This was evident in how business has started analysing the weight of data now being produced – had you ever heard of a Zeddobyte or a Yottabyte? Big numbers with 24 zeroes. We are a generation that is data rich but information poor, so much we have, but so much is also irrelevant, 75 per cent, Dale suggested. What matters is being able to understand which bits of data require a layer of information that make them intelligent and worth backing up and securing.

Then we headed back to the city to meet Salesforce.com.  It takes balls of steel to cull a chunk of your business at a time of maximum growth. Especially so when you grow by 40 per cent a year, every year, for 13 years. That was just one of the hundreds of anecdotes, insights, facts and spellbinding insights from a trio of presentations and discussions we were part of at Salesforce.com the most innovative company in the world. At the centre was the transformation of the business – essentially an internet based sales CRM management system - into a social enterprise – one that embraces and enhances the social networking revolution and places it at the centre of everything the company does. Woodson Martin kicked us off with his analysis of how the explosion in mobile devices is changing everything – his you can even read this here – 50 ways to become a social enterprise. Part of this is embedded in the ways in which Salesforce have implemented Chatter – essentially a bespoke secure internal communications network that edits out the noise we all suffer from with Facebook and Twitter. It's improved productivity, communication and the flow of ideas – indeed CEO Marc Benioff has tagged these the Chatterati – and radically flattened the whole organisation. Innovation is at the heart of Salesforce and Cloud computing and keeping that edge is what gives the business a premium. Clarence So, senior VP of strategy, spoke to us about how the business fought off various challenges over the years with a characteristic cheeky humour and attitude. One way they do this: how tactics dictate strategy that recognises how many of the best laid plans end up going wrong anyway – tactics and what we learn from them inform our strategy.

To understand the entrepreneurial mindset of Silicon Valley it's important to get your head around the contribution of the universties – in particular Stanford and Berkeley, our next stop off. We were hosted at Stanford by Tom Byers, the head of the technology ventures program. Though the university has a proud legacy of creating businesses in the technology field, the purpose of Tom had worked Symantec beforehand and so had some rubber on the entrepreneurial road. His talk included video presentations from a bunch of his friends – Jack Dorsey, one of the creators of Twitter, venture capital investor Marc Andressen, entrepreneur Steve Blank, evangelist Guy Kawsaki, and Randy Komiser author of Getting to Plan B. He capped it off with a clip of Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO and a hot tip to be the first female President of the United States. The themes included business models and planning, as well as some of the the resources are here.

More tomorrow.

Shining a (City) light on a brave new world

Gareth, Nick, Jamie, Will and Jeff

Travelling around San Francisco and taking in the delights of this energetic diverse city has been a journey of discovery and rediscovery. I first walked the steep streets of San Francisco in 1986. One of the reasons I was drawn here as a 19 year old was the spirit of the Beat Poets like Alan Ginsberg and cult author Jack Kerouac. Both have an important cultural legacy here, held up at City Lights bookstore in North Beach.

I support independent retailers and love the curiosity and magic of a bookstore, but I was a little deflated by this visit to City Lights. Amongst the shelves of Anarchist poetry and rows of Noam Chomsky there was no place for two contempary and important books I would like to buy while I'm here - books by Richard Florida and Michael Lewis, both authors with something relevant to say about the world and modern America.

Anyway, ten minutes of browsing and I was off. Back over the road to have a chat to the rest of my party about other things that fascinate us - the new Raspberry Pi, University spin outs, satellite technology and IBM's re-invention. And City Lights wouldn't have any books that had anything to say about any of that. More's the pity.

If you are going to San Francisco...

My favourite American city is San Francisco. I'm delighted to be heading there next weekend. If there are any tips and hints and places to see then I'd be delighted to hear them as I've not been for ten years. I'll be staying in Union Square in the centre of the city and therefore pretty handy. I've got a tour of Alcatraz booked in, which I'd not done before, and I'm not drinking at the moment. Anything else considered.

When I stayed in 2000 I saw an art deco poster from the 1920s. I have never been able to find it online or in any shop in the USA. I also tracked down the poster from an Oasis concert in 1996 I went to and it was rubbish - quite embarrassingly so - and therefore developed a bit of a mission to find some San Francisco art for our home that reminds me of this wonderful city. The fall back position is this poster, left from designers Anderson Design Group.