Late last summer a DVD of the movie August, which features David Bowie in a cameo, showed up at the office where I used to work. If you haven’t heard of it, you’re not alone: it was released in one theater in New York City last July before making a quick exit to video the following month. If it hadn’t been for that promo DVD, I doubt I would’ve heard of it either.
Directed by Austin Chick, August isn’t a terribly compelling film, due in large part to Josh Hartnett’s emotionally distant yet gratuitously beefcakey lead performance, i.e. “Don’t look at me! I mean, check out the six-pack, of course, but don’t look look at me.” (Is it just me, or do you get the feeling Hartnett tortured small woodland creatures as a child? Somebody needs to cast this brooding hunk as a serial killer — or at least a young Tommy Lee Jones — ASAP.) Howard A. Rodman’s script has some clever touches, though, like how it never explains what dot-com guru wannabe Tom Sterling’s (Hartnett) company actually does. I worked for a start-up for just three months in 2000 before being laid off, and during that brief time I had trouble justifying the company’s existence to my friends and family.
The press release that came with the August DVD said that the film “follows Josh Hartnett as a young dot-com entrepreneur who fights to regain control of his company from Ogilvie (David Bowie).” Based on that description you’d think Ogilvie is a major character in the movie, but as I said, the part-time actor only has a cameo. His single scene — at the film’s climax — is an important one, but he’s in and out of August in less than six minutes.
At times, the world runs on our differences more than our similarities. Everyone has their favorite directors, and of course there are those who dispute their choices. For every lover of Spielberg, Lucas, Aronofsky or Coppola, there’s someone who can’t stand anything from their bodies of work. The arguments which ensue are part of what keeps life interesting.