August

In Austin Chick's August, Josh Harnett is having a forged day. As pre-9/11 dot com company hotshot Tom Sterling, he's seen his parents and tech nerd brother treating him with contempt, the girl he's pining for giving him the brush-off, and his startup Internet company blowing up in his side. Drinking morosely at a bar (or as morosely as Hartnett can fetch) he lashes out at a lad techie brigand who has just returned to the bar with a condemnatory, "Guys care you ain't got no vision, ain't got no passion, ain't got no soul." True enough. Tom is of course talk about himself but too, by extension, Hartnett's performance and Chick's film.


Chick's morals tale (a sort of insipid remaking of Force of Evil except with techno sharks instead of gangsters) is all semblance and pizzaz but mostly pizz and no azz. August deals with deuce brothers, Tom and Josh (Adam Scott), who alive large during the dot-com boom of '01, creating an in-the-moment start up called Landshark that is riding the top of the bubble with Joshua as the creative fashion designer of the site and Tom as the objectionable highfalutin plugger and occupant SOB. Much like the World Wide Widget society in the satirical musical How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, there is no explanation given for what Landshark actually does; the company just is. But and so it isn't. Soon afterward the opening credits and five months after its inception, the company is in the toilet and Tom is struggling to keep up the appearance of succeeder for both the company and himself. But as in the Talking Heads song, they are both on the Road to Nowhere and somehow Tom has to come to grips with failure and regain his humanity, spell looking out for his brother and his unexampled family.


The film never happens. Chick depicts the company's meteoric heighten in an opening credits sequence and we never get a sense of the jubilance and half-baked riches of the deuce brothers as the party begins nor of the heady confidence trick atmosphere of that mad, insane blip in American business history when a guy and a figurer could sit in his basement and make millions. Instead of the harebrained, we get Insana -- Ron Insana, upon whose television register Tom struts his success like a Philadelphia pantomimer. Of course, Insana sets the proper tone of doom by asking, "Where will these guys be five months from