Dope Thief

There are very few assignments that Apple TV will take on which they will not bring out with the utmost skill and delivery. I have always felt that the Apple Brand was associated with excellence and that the decision of Apple to make some inroads in the world of movies would further prove this fact. 

Dope thief is really a story about friendship and loyalty and yes betrayal as well. Two friends tied together at the hip meeting during their early years, victims of a system and failed state…not nation state and state in the US. Drawn together by troubles they are both involved in and whose friendship and bond will bind them together for the rest of their lives. 

You watch them deal with their past and the challenges of loving and living. One trying to piece together his past and future while healing the pain of his past. Relationship issues with a father who is incarcerated and an adopted mother who lives with him. His childhood friend in the meantime, struggles with an addiction as he manages a life with a lovely lady who is stuck between her love for him and this other guy who wants to take the role she believe is hers. 

Being stuck in a place that has no future and realizing your fate may be bound to this place, the desire to escape is universal but few will get to see it. These two then come up with a hustle that could be their way out of this cursed existence. 

As can be expected things go sideways. The rest of the show is a demonstration of resilience and the struggle to survive against all odds. It is about the triumph of the human spirit and the rescue of broken hearted men by simple acts of love. It is about people trying to prove that they have love even when they are so evidently broken. The show is delivered in a short 8 episodes but much of what has to be said is said. 

Thumbs up for me. 

Liaison and Black Doves

Part of the struggle that we face in the present day is the proliferation of information and the ability to extract data from that information. It affects us in many ways, but in a sense a little more for those who are in the entertainment business. The ability to draw your usage and viewer stats from a show means that you can now predict the success of a sequel or another season based on the viewership of the first installment. This seems to be the case with Liaison (Apple TV) and Black Doves (Netflix). Both a British shows and some argue that those who are behind them are trying to capitalize on the massive attention that has come from Slow Horses. This show now in its third season is very difficult to replicate but you cannot blame these others for trying. 

The spy genre is quickly becoming one of my favorite and these shows both fall under that category. They both have borrowed heavily from each other (making use of love interests one from a previous younger life and the other from an out of marriage romance). Black Doves is a little more cheeky and possibly enjoyable with quirky characters that are funny as well as brutal. It is a rarity to see female assassins although this show makes full use of them. I love the performance of Kathryn Hunter who plays the character of Lenny. A leader in the underworld who meets her clients in a busy restaurant and is charge of maintaining order in a chaotic violence filled city. She looks frighteningly similar to the late Judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg. 

Liaison on the other hand was quite frighteningly accurate or shall I say timely in  terms of how relevant its material was to the present day. I stumbled accross it and downloaded it on the same day that rebels made inroads in Syria and this country did feature a lot in this series. It is really a game between Syria, the US, the UK and France and their attempt to get their hands on a very skilled Syrian Hacker who is seeking to sell his information. 

All this takes place in the midst of some controversial arms deals between the British and the French (at least a French owned Arms Trading Company) high is bent on sealing this deal with or without the approval of its government. 

All this takes place in the midst of what Die Hard Called a Fire Sale a multi pronged Cyber Attack that focuses on Infrastructure by taking advantage of the dependence on the Internet. The conversation about these types of attacks sprung from an article called Farewell to Arms by John Carlin which was written in the late nineties. In Liaison the cyber security center is attacked first, then the rail system followed by a flood control system on the Thames after which the terrorists take control of a plane. 

Slow Horses

Image from http://www.impawards.com/tv/slow_horses_xxlg.html

Here is an interesting collaboration between British Actors and The Apple Company. While not sure if Microsoft plans to get into the movie making business, this directional shift seemed in some way really natural. With the input of Steve Jobs in the creative and design process and the skill with which the company delivered their famous Apple Computer ad in the early eighties, you could almost have predicted an entrance into Tinseltown. In the present day, there is quite a lot of emphasis on Ecosystems and this is leading companies to become one stop shops. Devices, Software, Microchips, Data, Entertainment and more. I suppose the great CEO’s brief expulsion from his own company and his subsequent entrance into a digital animation company also probably informed the company’s decision to get into film. 

Garry Oldman, Jack Lowden, Christine Scott Thomas, Rosalind Eleazar, Saskia Reeves and Christopher Chung.

As such there is a good list of very well done films including Slow Horses. 

The film’s first triumph is the use of a well chosen list of conflicting characters. Throw in a little office romance, failures in leadership (and repulsion by previous bosses higher up in the food chain), a smart but visibly troubled boss, an older caring secretary and a geeky slightly perverted techie, and you have the recipe for quite a show. 

The story revolves around this team that is cut off from the HQ of British Intelligence for previous wrongs and that has to handle less desirable cases as a means of being redeemed. This rag tag force though, has a super intelligent leader who is not afraid to bend the rules and whose deceptively old age often leads his adversaries to underestimate him. 

There are some stories in the series that are unique episodes but there is a sense of continuity. I have had some discussions about the use of location and sets to invoke certain feelings and this idea seems to be fully utilized with the sharp contrast between small office occupied by this small intelligence force and the large security-filled complex that hosts the HQ of the intelligence office.