By Jason Apuzzo. • Reviews are starting to come out for The Social Network (see The New York Times, Variety, Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter). I’m actually trying to avoid them, because I feel I already know a bit too much about this project.
Suffice it to say that the film is getting a very favorable response thus far. Aside from Fincher’s skill as a director, I think that what intrigues people here the most is not so much Mark Zuckerberg himself, as much as the phenomenon which he’s assumed to represent – i.e., a socially alienated America, and the new, anonymous social networking technologies that give people a simulacrum of community/intimacy in their lives. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never felt especially alienated, nor lacking in intimacy, that these technologies have meant very little to me over the years. Nonetheless, I think people do find uses for the internet that are valid and legitimate in terms of creating communities based on shared interest – Libertas is obviously one example among many of that – and also in terms of sharing aspects of their lives with others.
A friend of mine here in LA recently sent me a link to an interesting blog called the Talk to Strangers Blog. The basic purpose of the blog is spelled out in this post; essentially, it’s written by an amusing, ironic guy here in LA in his late 20s who decided at some point to stop feeling alienated and angry all the time and start interacting with strangers – to actually get to know people, start placing names with faces, learn about people’s lives around him in a programmatic way. The idea driving the blog appears to be social networking based on actual social contact, rather than the ersatz form of the internet – and the guy doing it takes his whole enterprise as an experiment, one that does not yet have any clear outcome. I only mention this site because I think that the impulse behind it is more or less similar to what drives millions of people to Facebook and Twitter each day – a desire, in effect, to connect … when our lives might not otherwise feel very ‘connected.’ I’ll have more to say about all this down the line. Right now I have to get back to my usual subjects of alien invaders and supermodels.
• Wall Street 2 just had its big, swanky premiere party in New York. You can see pictures of this event here and here, and I wonder if it occurred to anyone present that the party looks just like the sort of ritzy gala thrown by filthy capitalist pigs. Ironies abound.
• Hawaii Five-O beat out The Event in the ratings, albeit only by a nose. Hooray hot Hawaiian chicks fighting terrorists on The Big Island! Boo pro-Obama/anti-CIA propaganda! I was too busy to watch either show in progress, actually, because I was trying to find out what happened to Reggie Bush’s leg.
• Inception has crossed the $750 million mark worldwide, and Christopher Nolan apparently has plans underway for an Inception video game spinoff. I thought such vulgarities were beneath a tony director like Nolan; apparently not.
• I’ve been thinking of doing totally separate ‘alien invasion’ updates. I never quite pull the trigger, though, because each day I keep thinking that surely this trend must end, right? Wrong. Today we learn that Orson Scott Card’s pseudo-alien invasion novel Ender’s Game (a somewhat liberal take on Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers) may finally be getting a big-screen adaptation. Also: Steven Spielberg has always been serious about alien invasion, but now he’s apparently getting serious about a robot invasion; we learn today that rumors of Spielberg’s interest in bringing Daniel H. Wilson’s forthcoming Robopocalypse novel to the big screen are true. And finally, the people responsible for the forthcoming Godzilla reboot talk today about the project and its current status at Legendary Pictures.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … in the spirit of Godzilla, alien invaders and the like, we thought we’d take a look today at actress Odette Yustman, who starred in Cloverfield and will be appearing this Friday in the comedy-drama You Again.
And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.
Posted on September 21st, 2010 at 6:48pm.
