I do want to point out though, the quantic and philosophical quandary I am in: I am about to bash a movie for being referential to the symptomatic narcissism of our generation embodied in Facebook.....ON A BLOG. Oh, the irony... if the internet bled, it would bleed black ichor and irony.
So we saw the Social Network and we were at a loss. I must point out: it is not a BAD movie. Not at all. It was very...entertaining. I felt the camera and photography was spot on. The soundtrack in my opinion was forgettable: not even having one of the Dead Kennedy's greatest hits made it stand out for me.
The acting was OK...it brings up what basically pisses me off about the movie: that it's about Facebook.
Ok, let's take a step back. Facebook, it's a social network which saw its beginnings as a sort of network for colleges to do e-meets and greets easier. In the movie, they blatantly point out that Facebook did NOT break any new ground. Does anyone remember MySpace? Friendster? Beta5? There was even one called OkCupid! I remember all of these. Do you know what Facebook did differently? Ask you what school you went to. And then it allowed you to do searches based on those peculiar networks. Apparently in the beginning it was all very Ivy League exclusive etc etc. As Cello pointed out, it wasn't until a few years after Facebook began that they allowed for teens to go on Facebook and not lie about their age.
Now, this movie is being considered Oscar-worthy, in all probability because Zuckerberg has been lauded as man of the year by some entity or another...for what!? Discovering that water could be used as ice to cool things!? And in that sentence, I just insulted the person that first threw an ice cube into a glass. ALL HE DID, was ask "What college do you go to?" ... a question loaded with pretense.
I'm not going to tackle what's wrong with Facebook, as tempted as I am, so, back to the movie.
Now, this movie, its been said, took quite a few liberties from the storytelling point of view... a statement I have to accept with a grain of salt, because in all earnest I've never been interested to cross reference the beginnings of Facebook, nor am I now. We have one character, Mark Zuckerberg, who gets dumped by this girlfriend after stating that 1. You should pay attention to me MORE because YOU go to a crappy college and you don't need to work as hard as I do who 2. Go to a REAL school...ahem, Harvard. So pay attention to me NAO.
Now, I don't know what this trend in Hollywood to have the spectator commiserate with total DOUCHEBAGS just because they are the underdog (case in point, Scott Pilgrim) but this movie just follows suit. To be fair, it's the douchebags and doucheholes that move the world around.
So he gets dumped and starts a website to basically flaunt how over her she is, oddly enough he wasn't listening to the cure or Radiohead (or was he listening to Radiohead?) while doing this. And he does this by creating a "match this pic" kind of website, which to my recollection already existed by 2004, but my memory serves me ill today...except that it was only for chicks in Harvard. He garners notoriety, and the attention of a pair of trust fund baby twins with an idea to do a social network but very exclusive.
Again, it is stated on the movie that this is not new.
He proceeds to take this idea and runs with it and it eventually BECOMES Facebook! Wow. Those twins really hit a home run...except uhh, there's really no argument in the movie that would go to show that Zuckerberg did not blatantly and openly LIED and STOLE from the Winkelvoss twins.
Now, with these characters in place, I can explain what annoyed me about the acting- now, if Zuckerberg was indeed a spastic antisocial toad as depicted in the movie, it is a FUCKING FEAT that no one has EVER taken a chair or a broken bottle to this guy's face. I would guess that staying within the confines of campus, it would have been easier. I mean, Eisenberg did well, I loved him in Zombieland...but if Zuckerberg is at all as depicted... I'm just amazed he even had any friends that would help him getting started on what became Facebook. Maybe he was exagerated? Maybe he plays the crazy down whenever he goes to Starbucks, but god damn....what an unlikeable little shit.
The actor that portrayed the Winkelvoss twins did very well also, although what I've seen him do in the past doesn't really stray far from playing, like I said, a silver-spoon in tongue trust fund baby. He was the son of Satan in TV series Reaper. (Irony?)
The rest of the acting was passable, I guess. Not BAD.
The main plot is annoying though, and I doubt what I took as the main story strayed far if at all from the reality of the matter: At the end of the day you have a movie about rich kids pursuing a less rich kid legally from cheating the first-mentioned rich kids from adding extra billions of dollars to the billions of dollars they already own or will inherit at any given point.
How the fuck am I to commiserate with any of that??? What kind of fucking struggle is this? You're telling me I'm supposed to lump this movie along with other great Oscar nominees as (just a random few from the last decade)
Milk, No Country for Old Men, Letters from Iwo Jima, Llittle Miss Sunshine, GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK?
I could go on and on, but I'm rambling by now. Bottom line: This movie is being touted as end all be all greatness, and being offered the courtesy of Oscar Nominations NOT because of its greatness, but because of the (dubious) greatness of the phenomenon it portrays.
As I told my father-in-law after seeing this movie: Had they made a movie about how Disney got started in the 60s, it would have had the same success as this piece of trash.
BTW- to all of you who haven't seen the movie : NO, this movie does NOT explain how Farmville came to being.
P.S- And I just realized: the reason why so many people are raving about this movie and about it being pitted against more traditionally oscar-worthy nominations such as the King's Speech at this year's Awards is...because it's about Facebook...and because THEY are IN Facebook...and because by some weird fucking extrapolation, they earnestly believe that they MADE this Oscar HAPPEN, and thus they are partly recipients of an Oscar! They truly believe this is the Oscar for the people, all those theoretical 500 Million users.
Same thing happens in sports: " X Team won! We won!"
Uhhh...tell me, how did you guzzling beer from your couch contribute to X team winning the series/championship?
It didn't.
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