INVENTING ANNA (NETFLIX) & THE DROPOUT (HULU)

Two young women of extraordinary intelligence, drive, vision, whose hubris is of such magnitude that it transcends their mission, blinding them to the reality of their divergent decisions, comprising their journey to greatness, worthy of approbation. Theirs’ is a contemporary Shakespearian tragedy of overwhelming proportions. 

Anna Sorokin (1991-) aka “Anna Delvey” the daughter of middle-class Russian parents, created a fictional past: a wealthy German heiress with a trust fund of 60 plus million dollars, an art scholar with refined, inimitable taste, a “gift of tongues”; she was well-versed in the lifestyles of the rich and famous and she craved the identical adulation; more than anything she wanted to be a “player” and for a tiny minute she wallowed luxuriously in a world of superficiality. With cunning, guile and style she conned the most seasoned of the financial milieu to support the Anna Delvey Foundation; a Soho type institution that catered to the most promising and entitled. Based on journalist Jessica Pressler’s (Anna Chlumsky, as “Vivian” Pressler’s sobriquet) interviews with Anna (remarkably prescient actor Julia Garner); with unmatched chutzpah here is a woman, that even now at 31, should not be counted out. 

THREE 1/2 STARS!!!! 

THE DROPOUT’S protagonist Elizabeth Holmes’s (1984-) complexities far outweigh Anna Sorokin’s; an American with a keen, analytical, scientific mind, accepted at Stanford with boundless ambition, leaves school, (aka Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates) using her tuition fund to found Theranos, supporting her dream that a single drop of blood, processed by a desktop machine, could determine organ analysis, immune disorders, diabetes,  cancer; a brilliant concept that in time, might be rendered feasible; with Herculean charm she and her partner Sunny Balwani fraudulently bilk investors of over 700 million dollars, exponentially launching her star as “the youngest self-made female billionaire”. Actors Amanda Seyfried and Naveen Andrews are stellar as the prodigious, grotesque, perpetually doomed con artists; lying, greed eclipse truth; their mischief is unexplainable, daunting in its abuse; idiosyncratic talent squandered on an altar of rapacious materialism. 

FOUR STARS!!!! 

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