Sunday, October 24, 2010

Movie Review: "The Social Network"


Really? A movie about Facebook? Sounds kind of lame, no?

NO!

This movie is excellent from top to bottom. The writing, the acting, the music, the direction... It's all so, so good.

Jessie Eisenberg plays Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. Normally Jesse plays loveable geeks. Mark is a hateable geek. There is quite a difference.

The story, in one graph:

Zuckerberg gets dumped because he's an asshole and he takes to the Internet to exact revenge. He ends up crashing Harvard's server thanks to his "Facemash.com," where people can compare the hotness of the women on campus. This catches the attention of the Winklevoss twins and their business partner, who want to create a legit site that has full profiles of the Harvard student body. "How is this different from MySpace?" Zuckerberg asks. "Exclusivity" is the answer. He's in... sort of. Instead of working on the project for the twins, he does his own thing (with the help of best friend Eduardo Saverin, who provides funding) and ends up with what is now Facebook. It takes off. Napster founder Sean Parker gets involved. It goes worldwide. Eduardo gets cut out of the company. Mark is the youngest billionaire there ever was. He gets sued by the twins, who we find out received $35 million, and by Eduardo, who received an undisclosed settlement.

Aaron Sorkin wrote this movie, and did a damn good job of it, too. In an interview I read in Entertainment Weekly, he was asked about the validity of the movie (Zuckerberg and the folks at Facebook were not involved). His reply: "People tend to get sued if they lie about other people. You'll see we haven't been sued."

So it's accurate. Zuckerberg, the man who made "friend" a verb, dicked over the only friend he ever had and stole some intellectual property to get where he is today. He paid for it, sure, but he never cared about the money (and probably doesn't care that there's a movie painting him in unfavorable light). It's all about Facebook.

Andrew Garfield plays Eduardo. Justin Timberlake plays Sean Parker. The twins are played by two guys made to look like only one of them, Armie Hammer. (That is confusing, but true. Two different guys played the twins and the filmmakers digitally changed the one who is not Armie Hammer to look and sound like Armie Hammer.) Everyone is fantastic.

Another interesting tidbit: Natalie Portman provided Sorkin with inside information about Harvard's elite final clubs. She went to Harvard when all this was going down and dated one of the clubs members (apparently they're a super huge deal) and gladly gave Sorkin the scoop. I didn't check to see if she was given special thanks in the credits.

A Facebook origin story doesn't seem like it would be that exciting. A bunch of super smart computer geeks playing with lines of code? Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. But it isn't about that. It's about a guy who stopped at nothing to get what he wanted. Normally we encourage that kind of spirit, but this time we're torn: Is Mark Zuckerberg an asshole for saying what he means, doing what he wants and not caring what people think of him? Or is Mark Zuckerberg to be pitied because he got what he wanted, and yet really only has that one thing?

$7 billion can get you pretty much anything... except friends.

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