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Monday, November 25, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Nothing like Netflix when it comes to a scandal

The Beatles…. remastered in Let It Be.

Streaming columnist NICK OVERALL takes a peek at the naughty story that is Ashley Madison.

There’s perhaps no other streaming platform that knows how to tap into a scandal quite like Netflix.

Nick Overall.

Their slick documentary-making is now almost formulaic and yet they always manage to turn heads and put eyes on screens.

Their latest three-part series that’s topped the trending charts once again is Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies and Scandal.

This doco is about the real-life “dating” website designed for people who are looking for an affair, one that’s been described as “a business built on the back of broken hearts.”

In other words, consider it eHarmony for eNormous schmucks.

Netflix’s documentary includes interviews with real-life couples who were impacted by the website and the infamous data leak that spilled its user’s details.

In 2015 hackers got into the personal information of people who had accounts and threatened to publicly release it if the bosses didn’t shut the website down.

Of course, those bosses didn’t comply and out came the information of thousands of adulterers including some high-profile users such as Hunter Biden, who has previously denied he had an account.

Another to get done by the leak was Josh Taekman, the husband of Kristen Taekman who stars in The Real Housewives of New York. Like an episode that came to life. Stranger than fiction, eh?

The whole data leak sparked a $576 million class action lawsuit filed against the company, on top of another from a former employee who claimed she was made to create thousands of fake profiles to lure users.

But even today, after everything the website has endured, it still sports almost 70 million users across more than 50 countries.

The doco tries to tap into why, which doesn’t make for the cheeriest bit of streaming going around but it’s managed to scratch a scandalous itch for many viewers.

IT’S a great time to be a Beatles fan.

Late last year the band dropped what they described as their “final song” with the help of artificial intelligence.

That song called Now and Then, acted as a reflection on the life and musical times of the Fab Four, using groundbreaking technology to bring back John Lennon’s vocals almost half a century after he died.

It was a sentimental, if somewhat eerie swansong that had 51 million views on YouTube and reached number 1 on the UK and US charts.

Now on the back of that swinging success, Disney Plus has just released Let it Be, a 1970 documentary that has not been available to the general public for more than 40 years.

The last time it was in circulation was via VHS in the ’80s.

Now Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson has dusted it off and given it to Disney.

Much like Now and Then, it’s thanks to new technology that it can now be remastered and cross generations.

Let It Be is no romanticised recount of the biggest band of all time though.

It instead dives deep into the recording of their final album and how creative differences eventually lead to the band’s demise. This raw and candid portrayal of the band is a big part of why the doco was originally stripped from shelves.

Three years back Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson got a hold of all the footage shot for the documentary and released a whopping eight-hour cut on Disney Plus called Get Back, an experience for only the most die-hard devotees of the Lads from Liverpool.

This one has also been remastered under Jackson’s watchful eye, who clearly has something of Beatlemania himself.

It’s a fascinating time capsule, one that serves as a small but important slice of Beatles lore which is worth checking out for any music fan.

Amazing indeed that even in our digital age, a band formed in the 1960s still manages to be here, there and everywhere.

 

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Nick Overall

Nick Overall

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