Well, that may be a stretch, even though every hare-brained genius back in 2003 portrayed in "Fight Club" director David Fincher's new movie couldn't care less about what's going on with their nation (America) in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, it's only cocaine they're worried about, but more so, how to promulgate the really hot chicks at Harvard on a freshly-devised social cyber network dubbed "Facemash." The guys are logging on and loving it while the gals are enraged, especially the ones who come in second in the visual heat races the women are put up for comparison online. Meet a real person: Mark Zuckerberg, the brilliant young dude who breathed life into your very own Facebook page. Jesse Eisenberg ("Zombieland") plays Zuckerberg. To say that: how Eisenberg plays Zuckerberg in "The Social Network" approaches his being the world's smartest, young asshole would come close to an accurate impression. Zuckerberg is also identified at the close of the film as the youngest billionaire in the world, today. Zuckerberg's conversation runs at the speed of an IQ of, at least, two-hundred-fifty, with wry, acidic retorts to the many people on his case shown in two parallel deposition scenes strung across a well-structured arc that are exquisitely edited among the "actual" progress and perpetration that was the genesis of the super fad: Facebook. Sorkin takes his script, mostly, from a novel by Ben Mezrich with a very neat title, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook – A tale of sex, money, genius and betrayal. It's a good script: tight, succinct, always on-the-move, somewhat talky, but with dialogue so good that no one could ever think it up, ad lib, even young people who are this smart... uh... in the ways they are smart. Wisdom runs in short supply among these loopy brains who are so technically savvy and quick with numbers and facts that, if you're over 26, you might be intimidated, old-timer. But hey, this is entrepreneurial America in the computer age, right? A relatively small piece of the U.S. population pie has been able to technologically rake it in, even though a majority of America now hovers over or is already up to its mouse pad in soft poverty and foreclosure.
"The Facebook" was the original name used for the Zuckerberg creation. Parker advises Zuckerberg and his colleagues to lose the "The"...and just call it Facebook. Two other characters in the film need a mention: the first is the role of Cameron Winklevoss, another Harvard student, who, with his brother, takes great issue with Zuckerberg's fast movements developing Facebook. Cameron is played by a striking and well-voiced actor named, Armie Hammer. You'll never guess who young Hammer's great-grandfather* was. Really. President Obama's recently announced outgoing Director of the Economic Council, Lawrence Summers (as played by Dennis Urbanski) appears when he was president of Harvard. It's a bitingly humorous scene when the Winklevoss brothers lobby Harvard's headman about Zuckerberg's cyber slight of hand. Female characters in "Social Network" are marginal, although they, as a gender, certainly put motivation into the skulls of the Harvard smartasses who are so adept at finding the right algorithm. Rooney Mara ("Youth in Revolt"), as Erica, is seen seldom as Mark's love interest. She's well fed-up with his bad bloggings of her. "Social Network" would have you believe that all women on the Harvard campus are beautiful and know how to party with only some showing smartz. Hmmmm.
"The Social Network" is so well-done, and, let me say: slick, that it could slip by some in attendance that this "taken-from-real-life" story is proffered as a criticism; sort of a put down, as it were. Since Kevin Spacey is one of the executive producers and known for a keen social perspective, "Social Network" is surely meant to be critical of these young attitudes even though they lie within a totally in-vogue technological phenomenon considered cool and awesome. This past weekend "The Social Network" lambasted "Let Me In" at the box office. Golly, a creepy vampire movie following in the snowy footprints of the original Swedish version (from 2007) titled, "Let the Right One In." Both vampire movies are stunning. "The Social Network" is a good film, but it's not stunning. I don't know if the Oscar buzz now surfacing about "Social Network" is for real or PR-inspired, but give me a break... it's not that good. Although, its popularity, due to subject matter, might give the film a ticket-sales boost Academy people like to see in their nominated films. "The Social Network" is already herding them into the cineplex, but I wonder if it would've been better titled without the "The."
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Gary Chew can be reached
at garychew@comcast.net, |
