Popular reviews

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  Review by 🐱Andrew Chrzanowski🐱 ★★ 4

  ☆"It's a new way to reach just about anyone, anywhere, anytime."☆

  "The most important dead company in Silicon Valley" is how Forbes described General Magic, and the eponymous documentary is essentially "How You Got a Smartphone" by the company you've never heard of.

  In the years of the late 1980s decline of Apple, a new startup led by Mark Porat and his charismatic and brilliant ideas which included the first prototypes that would later become a smartphone came out of nowhere, ultimately to fizzle out just as quickly as it came into being. With inventive and groundbreaking conceptual models and initial designs, years and years before their time, a personal device (or "tiny computer" as most called the basic form…

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  Review by zoe black ★½

  totally forgot I’d watched this. a truly trash film - pure propaganda for all the silicon valley millionaires & billionaires who still seem to see themselves as altruistic hippies. so much of this film is spent by the key players lamenting the trauma of having been involved in a company that failed - but as tony fadell (designer of the ipod) says, this was just one of many failed startups from that era. virtually none of these people made it without some missteps. I was so confused as to why the message of the film was ‘failure is terrifying never try anything’. incidentally fadell is so self-congratulatory and is in this film so much that I’m convinced he must have partly…

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  Review by Benjamin Leonard ★★ 2

  Interesting subject matter but the documentary itself is pretty poorly crafted, especially the audio mixing.  The music is mixed so high that it often drowns out dialog. While important to the story, the various emotional arcs are overplayed. The camera work is aggravating with ham-fisted zooms when the filmmakers are attempting accentuate moments during the interviews.

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  Review by russman ★★★ 1

  When is the Letterboxd Magic Cap app coming out?

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  Review by webbarr ★★★★½

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  General Magic 

  “Failure isn’t the end it’s the beginning”

  “The idea of mobile computing started at General Magic”

  Tony Fadell is incredible in the doc. Young naive and 4 years later he’s a leader. 

  No internet in 1990. They began by building a device for a world pre-Internet. By 1994, distracted via tunnel vision they missed the Internet. In 94/95 interns explained the internet and they missed the reach via ATT’s private cloud. 

  Charged all partners for $6m each
  Hard to work with them bc they were all enemies with each other.

  First Silicon Valley “concept” IPO pre-revenue because the partners hated each other (example: Sony + Panasonic). IPO raised $90m 

  Engineers didn’t want managers when asked. 

  No deadlines =…

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  Review by thephilpott ★★★★

  It’s hard to imagine a world where so many brilliant ideas come together to create something, yet nothing. The brilliant minds at General Magic would go on to be leaders in Silicon Valley and beyond. But before they got there, they had to fail.

  This film is an amazing story of that dream job many of us wish we had. Where everyone has great ideas and they build off of them constantly. It also shows what happens when brilliant minds fall behind on their ideas, when it takes too long to concept, and when management just can’t get something to market fast enough.

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  Review by Chris Campbell ★★★½ 1

  A look at the Silicon Valley startup that had the vision for the modern smart phone, but the infrastructure and technology just wasn't there. A story of hubris and one of the first of the speculative launches of companies that are built upon potential. Some great anecdotes about the whole process of developing technology. It also shows how the success of the Macintosh gave many of the team members the feeling that they just had to work hard and it would all come together. Fascinating to see how so many different things need to line up for something to work and how success is a combination of vision, execution, and luck.

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  Review by Robin Willis ★★★½

  I remember writing General Magic telling them that they were cool and that I wanted one of their gadgets.

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  Review by Brad Siefert ★★★★

  I sorta knew some of the names in this, but I had no idea about this story as a whole. It’s incredible what the folks went on to do with their careers. Very inspiring to make you want to go make something.

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  Review by Kelly Konda ★★½

  A mildly interesting Wikipedia page or magazine article posing as a documentary.

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  Review by ctcher ★★★★

  I'll state this now, my review is biased. I grew up an Apple fanboy back when it genuinely wasn't cool to like Apple stuff. Steve Jobs was more myth than man. I would consume anything I could find about the company. Magazine articles, history books, old interviews. I was obsessed. Seeing "Snow White" Prototypes from Frog make my mouth water. So, to randomly find a documentary about a company, born from Apple's rib, that saw the future as interestingly and as innovatively as General Magic did is fulfilling and exhilarating and just the kind of documentary I've been looking for.

  I seriously can't believe I've never heard of General Magic before now. What a gift.

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  Review by monirom ★½

  I’m a sucker for real stories about tech and tech companies. But maybe it's the fact that there was so much hype wrapped around this documentary as it moved through the festival circuit that when it was made accessible as a download or streaming option — it could never live up to the hype.

  The documentary is so poorly crafted that salient points get lost. The audio mixing is horrendous. The music levels are so high that it's nearly impossible to hear much less understand the dialogue being spoken. 

  Also it's as if the camera operator, the sound editor/sound designer and the editor of the film were in a competition to see who could cram the most bells and whistles…