Streaming platforms / Tycoons, rebels and muses

A banking drama of corruption and opacity with Jeff Daniels, a strange story of how Hollywood favored one of the founding members of the Black Panthers in the 70s, and a documentary about a misunderstood and enigmatic form of rock when the Rolling Stones moderated

A man in full

Available from Netflix

A mini-series based on the novel by the late Tom Wolfe, known for his insight into the passions, vanity and destructive practices of the financial elite in ‘The bonfire of the vanities’. This series is about an Atlanta real estate tycoon who faces a sudden bankruptcy that drags a lot of people down its path. The adaptation is by veteran TV writer David E. Kelly (recent credits include Netflix’s The Lincoln Lawyer and HBO’s Big Little Lies). Adopting a heavy country accent, Jeff Daniels plays Charlie Crocker, who is introduced to us at a lavish birthday party in his honor. The unscrupulous businessman is soon confronted by a cruel and openly hostile banker (Bill Camp), who will find an unlikely ally in an old partner whose world was shattered when he was fired. Crocker is informed that he must repay his loans immediately, which sends him to the brink of financial ruin as his companies’ total debt exceeds $1 billion. Although the details are different and Wolff apparently had Atlanta businessmen in mind as models, the viewer’s thoughts easily turn to Donald Trump given the profession, the tower, and the mindless debts. But basically because of narcissism. The bank’s claims will trigger intertwined political and business interests as well as friction with people like his ex-wife (Diane Lane) and a close friend of hers (Lucy Liu). “A man in full” certainly doesn’t suffer from a lack of drama, but the six-episode first season feels overly careful and hesitant to denounce the social injustices and immorality of the world it examines. And if we want to express ourselves in the banking language of the characters, the series does not work. But it has nerve in several places and the performance of Jeff Daniels compensates for many audacity.

The big cigar

Available from Apple TV+

The story of Huey Newton, one of the founding members of the Black Panthers, is told through a mini-series that focuses on his attempt to flee to Cuba in 1974, in order to escape the charge of murder, with the help of a producer of Hollywood, son of a former head of Columbia, who, fresh from the success of “Easy rider” and intoxicated by the counterculture of 1969, wants to associate himself with a righteous cause and is supposed to make a fake movie codenamed “The big cigar”. If the plot reminds you of the Oscar-winning movie “Argo,” you’d be right, as both scripts are drawn from magazine articles penned by the same journalist, Joshua Bearman. The show’s appeal is obvious: a frontier shooting hoax set against the backdrop of photogenic “radicalism” in the 1970s. So relentless was the FBI’s hunt against 20th-century African-American revolutionaries that it remains nearly impossible to separate the truth from the the deliberate distortions or to sort out the historical events and produce fictional films based on true history. Was Newton guilty of the serious crimes for which he was accused – but not convicted – in ’74, including the murder of a 17-year-old girl? Don’t expect this drama to answer bold questions and take a political stand, as ‘Big Cigar’ lacks a sense of historical stakes, but it does interestingly stand up to the role of the entertainment industry, with some well-crafted flashbacks to the making of Black Panthers and their transformation into a political force in the late 60s.

Catching fire: The story of Anita Pallenberg

Available from Apple TV+

While Marian Faithful has earned some of her due appreciation, the Rolling Stones’ other muse, the darker and more enigmatic, Anita Pallenberg, remains a misunderstood mystery. So a new documentary is coming to shed light on that obscure girl who was networked with London’s most charismatic figures in the 60s, when pop culture was working overtime. The German-born beauty was a famous model and sought-after girl, who was madly in love with the blessed Brian Jones (founder of the group, who died in 1969 at the age of 27) and later became for some years the official partner of Keith Richards, with whom fathered three children, until drugs and the band’s extreme lifestyle while recording Exile on Main Street led to the dissolution of their troubled relationship. Scarlett Johansson narrates what the enigmatic Pahlberg wrote in the handwritten notes found in her home shortly after her death in 2017, aged 75. The documentary, after a run at international festivals (it was also played at the Thessaloniki Festival) is available and narrates a journey from the sets of Fellini’s “Dolce vita” to Andy Warhol’s “Factory” and the film “Performance” alongside Mick Jagger, with whom Pahlberg also had a brief but tempestuous love affair, until the decline that followed the rock epic years and the dust left by the Stones.