•Aaron Sorkin & David Fincher
I really don’t understand this pairing. I’ve never really viewed much of Sorkin’s work except an episode or two of Sports Night and the series premiere of Studio 60. This is the 4th Fincher film I’ve seen (Seven & Zodiac being my favorites). I’m gonna go out a limb and say this pairing is pretty ridiculous. These two creative personalities never seemed to successfully meld their styles together in a cohesive manner. The film is well-executed from a directorial standpoint, but I find the dialogue to be overwrought. The vision with which these two personalities approached the subject matter couldn’t be farther apart stylistically.
•Convaluted Narrative Structure
It’s a straightforward story that starts at the origin of facebook - for at least the first 20 minutes. Then it’s a story that unfolds through a lawsuit taking place a year after Facebook’s inception. That is until it’s revealed there’s another lawsuit going on simultaneously that also keeps pushing the narrative forward. Apparently the producers thought that was as confusing as I did, and dropped the concept of two framing devices in favor of one halfway through the movie. Nothing would be wrong with this last approach, but nothing about it is praise-worthy either. It’s only remarkable because they hadn’t settled on this structure until an hour into the movie.
•Historical Accuracy & Creative License
It’s impressive the lengths the producers go to recreate Facebook’s website throughout the site’s evolution and numerous updates. It definitely felt like I was looking at the same pages that existed when I first joined the site in 2004 (am I dating myself?). The historical OCD doesn’t stop there. Let the movie remind you that Harvard’s president at the time was Larry Summers, a name you might remember when following news of the current administration’s response to the economy. Did they forget to mention a movie star was going to Harvard at the time (“Oh yeah, Natalie Portman went there!”)? Such easter eggs can be cute, but ultimately distracting. Sure, that’s how the site looked, but the scenes where characters describe the latest Facebook innovation (“Check out this new development. We don’t quite have a name for it but we’ve been referring to is as ‘the wall’”) are clear examples of creative license that takeaway from the aspects of the film that are near identical depictions of the real thing.
•Bizarro Citizen Kane
A lot of people criticized Avatar as having stolen its storyline from other movies (I distinctly remember Pocahantas coming up in discussions frequently). It got to the point where people couldn’t take the movie seriously, despite the fact that the same basic plot existed long before any movies were ever made. Which is why it seems needless to point out the similarities this movie has to others, like Citizen Kane. But what made a movie like Citizen Kane so powerful were the influence the attacker and attackee wielded in relation to the other (not too mention that Welles was a brilliant mind who crafted an extraordinary piece of work). A young filmmaker going after the most powerful media mogul in the country in William Randolph Hearst made for compelling cinema. This film is the opposite of that. Veteran media producers going after the morals of a twentysomething billionaire is shooting fish in a barrel.
I really don’t understand this pairing. I’ve never really viewed much of Sorkin’s work except an episode or two of Sports Night and the series premiere of Studio 60. This is the 4th Fincher film I’ve seen (Seven & Zodiac being my favorites). I’m gonna go out a limb and say this pairing is pretty ridiculous. These two creative personalities never seemed to successfully meld their styles together in a cohesive manner. The film is well-executed from a directorial standpoint, but I find the dialogue to be overwrought. The vision with which these two personalities approached the subject matter couldn’t be farther apart stylistically.
•Convaluted Narrative Structure
It’s a straightforward story that starts at the origin of facebook - for at least the first 20 minutes. Then it’s a story that unfolds through a lawsuit taking place a year after Facebook’s inception. That is until it’s revealed there’s another lawsuit going on simultaneously that also keeps pushing the narrative forward. Apparently the producers thought that was as confusing as I did, and dropped the concept of two framing devices in favor of one halfway through the movie. Nothing would be wrong with this last approach, but nothing about it is praise-worthy either. It’s only remarkable because they hadn’t settled on this structure until an hour into the movie.
•Historical Accuracy & Creative License
It’s impressive the lengths the producers go to recreate Facebook’s website throughout the site’s evolution and numerous updates. It definitely felt like I was looking at the same pages that existed when I first joined the site in 2004 (am I dating myself?). The historical OCD doesn’t stop there. Let the movie remind you that Harvard’s president at the time was Larry Summers, a name you might remember when following news of the current administration’s response to the economy. Did they forget to mention a movie star was going to Harvard at the time (“Oh yeah, Natalie Portman went there!”)? Such easter eggs can be cute, but ultimately distracting. Sure, that’s how the site looked, but the scenes where characters describe the latest Facebook innovation (“Check out this new development. We don’t quite have a name for it but we’ve been referring to is as ‘the wall’”) are clear examples of creative license that takeaway from the aspects of the film that are near identical depictions of the real thing.
•Bizarro Citizen Kane
A lot of people criticized Avatar as having stolen its storyline from other movies (I distinctly remember Pocahantas coming up in discussions frequently). It got to the point where people couldn’t take the movie seriously, despite the fact that the same basic plot existed long before any movies were ever made. Which is why it seems needless to point out the similarities this movie has to others, like Citizen Kane. But what made a movie like Citizen Kane so powerful were the influence the attacker and attackee wielded in relation to the other (not too mention that Welles was a brilliant mind who crafted an extraordinary piece of work). A young filmmaker going after the most powerful media mogul in the country in William Randolph Hearst made for compelling cinema. This film is the opposite of that. Veteran media producers going after the morals of a twentysomething billionaire is shooting fish in a barrel.
No comments:
Post a Comment