By Jason Apuzzo. I saw The Social Network yesterday – and found it for the most part uninteresting. Despite some stand-out performances by Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake and Andrew Garfield the film failed to really grab me emotionally in any way. Part of the problem is that there doesn’t seem to have been anything particularly dramatic behind the rise of Facebook as a corporation. You could basically make the same movie about the rise of, say, Dunkin’ Donuts, to about the same effect.
[I hear Dunkin’ Donuts does over $5 billion in business per year, by the way. So don’t laugh.]
And so in lieu of spending hours writing a review about a film that didn’t grab me, on any level, I thought I’d post this video above that illustrates how David Fincher’s directorial style could quickly and efficiently be brought to bear in depicting the rise of other famous Silicon Valley ventures. Judge for yourself.
By the way, my understanding is that Mark Zuckerberg won’t be suing Sony, or any of the other people behind the making of The Social Network. They’re lucky, frankly. The people making the Google movie might not have the same good fortune.
Posted on October 2nd, 2010 at 10:53am.
Actually, that wasn’t half bad. Just shows you how easy these new media guys are to satirize.
I liked it a lot more than you did, though that may be because I’ve been through a few startups. I wasn’t sure if Sorkin thought write sober, he got in some pretty good dialogue and very some funny lines. One problem may be the difficulty of a main character who’s main personality trait is “lack of affect”. I’ve seen a few Zuckerberg interviews and Jesse Eisenberg (who I used to think of as the poor man’s Michael Cera) did a phenomonal job. And remember, this is a $25B company founded 7 years ago that is only doing $1B gross – their P/E ratio is probably about 250:1.
I thought Eisenberg was quite good – his ‘affectless’ performance added a nicely ironic, amusing touch to the character, because he obviously wanted to portray Zuckerberg as an intensely emotional, sentimental guy who keeps his emotions locked away. Oddly enough, it’s the movie I found to be ‘affectless.’ It just had no emotional impact on me at all – good or bad.