The Social Network

I think if your clients want to sit on my shoulders and call themselves tall, they have the right to give it a try - but there's no requirement that I enjoy sitting here listening to people lie. You have part of my attention - you have the minimum amount. The rest of my attention is back at the offices of Facebook, where my colleagues and I are doing things that no one in this room, including and especially your clients, are intellectually or creatively capable of doing.

Did I adequately answer your condescending question?

-Mark Zuckerberg-

Sometimes no matter how much you try, no matter how much you want to, you just can’t make it to a movie. It’s not like I wasn’t aware of The Social Network and it’s not as if the disquieting short film that was the trailer didn’t make me rabid to see it. It’s just for some reason the theater seat and I never got together.

Which I’m almost happy about now (though had I seen the film in time it certainly would have made my top ten) because it’s one thing to be in on the first wave of discovering something and another to see it absolutely live up to the hype.

Let’s get this out of the way. Everything you’ve heard about Aaron Sorkin’s script for The Social Network is true. It is as good as you’ve heard. No matter how much of a chip on your shoulder you go into it with, or inversely, no matter how high your fannish expectations are, the script will be better then you think it is. It is face meltingly good, like the God speech in Malice stretched to feature length.



And the cast absolutely nails it. At this point I feel as if I’m just dishing out the same praise that everyone else is. But the movie so manifestly deserves it. Eisenberg is revelatory here. Seen most of the time in a would be alpha male faux confidence, or in a resigned slouch, eyes caked in more shadow then Vito Corleone’s by Fincher’s camera, mouth forever drawn in a petulant frown. But while with Brando this effect suggested a mind forever working in untold depths, the effect on Eisenberg brings only to mind a kind of slack reflectiveness. That is until he gets plugged in and something kindles at the base of those eyes a kind of mania of inspiration. Timberlake too far exceeds expectations. As someone who enjoyed his supporting turns in the batshit crazy Southland Tales and Black Snake Moan I wasn’t completely surprised by the fact that he could be an enjoyable actor, but the fact that he’s a good one came as a pleasant surprise. He invests Sean Parker with rock star bravado, because well duh of course he can, but also with a sense of self aggrandizing cowardice which is just so true to form. Rounding off the trio is Andrew Garfield who has a deer in the headlights look that seems like he’s just begging for someone to come and screw him over. It’d be easy to imagine him in another movie played as a patsy, a bumbling impediment to Zuckerberg’s greatness, but Garfield has far too much soul to let that happen. After all his only mistake was thinking that his friend possessed stores of decency and loyalty that he doesn’t. We haven’t even talked about Rooney Mara yet, whose performance here gives me another reason to hate the Nightmare On Elm Street remake, or Arnie Hammer whose astounding duel performance takes what could have been, in hands less sure then Sorkin’s, a walking villainous cliché and gives it real soul.

Over five hundred words in and I haven’t even said anything about David Fincher, who once again proves to be one of the most fascinating filmmakers working today. Much has been made of his and Sorkin’s peanut butter and chocolate like sensibilities, though I think the reputation of Fincher as a chilly stylist has always been overblown, he’s always known how to make a human moment hurt (“If you do decide to keep it- Spoil that kid every chance you get.”) What I do think he brings is a certain crucial sense of remove. He’s the coolant that keeps Sorkin’s demon hotrod of a script from overheating and bursting into flames.

Everyone talks about the “Hall Of The Mountain King” sequence, and as impressive as it is I think the sequence where Fincher really proves his value is in an early sequence in which Fincher intercuts Zuckerberg writing the program for “Facesmash” in his dorm room with a party set in one of the Final Clubs, to which, Zuckerberg so desperately craves admission., The film was originally supposed to be directed Sorkin and it’s easy enough to imagine what he would have done with the sequence. The party is a bit of a bacchanalia and Sorkin would have gotten right up in the excess done a line off it and then motor boated it. Fincher on the other hand keeps a very definite remove. It’s not even a condemnation, just an observation that no matter how good he is, this world of privilege and old money will never be open to Zuckerberg with his Asperger’s posture and wrong last name. They may recognize his genius, they may want to use him, they may even have some affection for him, but he will never come past the bicycle room.

In short a sharper more well observed movie about people was not made last year. The Social Network is the kind of movie that makes you feel as if the seventies never died.

Top Ten Films Of The Decade: Number 3: Zodiac

“He offed a few citizens and faded into a footnote“

Zodiac is many things. A startling meditation about the nature of memory, time and evil. The way the first fades thanks to the second washing the third away, leaving only the scars. This is the movie that proved David Fincher a stylist par excellence by focusing him, after the empty flailing of Panic Room. This is a movie that turned the dumbest hippy song ever written into a bone chilling reminder of mortality and harbinger of evil. As a cinematic achievement (if not capturer of the cultural zeitgeist) it’s superior to Fight Club.

The film plays like nothing you would expect, particularly when you consider Se7en, which I think is just about as good of a serial killer movie as you can make (a dubious honor to be sure but I do consider it superior even to Silence Of The Lambs). The thing about Zodiac is its not a serial killer movie. Oh there’s a serial killer in it, and he certainly murder’s people. But its not his presence that’s frightening but his absense. He’s like a little tear in the fabric of the universe that every once in awhile opens up and swallows people whole.

The genius of the film is the way it doesn’t allow you to be sure of the validity of anything. The Zodiac basically disapear’s a half hour into the movie. And the one time he does maybe show up again “for sure” (And there’s no film in which those two words have less meaning) the movie goes out of its way to cast doubt on the validity of his appearance. It doesn’t matter if you objectively see him threaten to throw a baby out the window. We can be sure of nothing, least of all what we see.
What Zodiac really does though is capture the merciless passing of time. The way today’s tragedy becomes tomorrow’s curiosity for nutty obsessives and the next day’s blockbuster. Odd that a movie in which several brutal murders are shown in graphic detail, the most disturbing shot is a time lapse view of a skyscraper being built.

Fincher’s style really is at a career best here. By laying off the “fancy shots” that he’s built his career on (aside for some highly appropriate God’s Eye View bits that can induce vertigo), he emerges as an unlikely formalist master with beautifully composed shots that manage to not be about themselves.

With mesmerizing performances by Jake Gyllenhall, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey Jr. (In a role that coupled with his performances in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Scanner Darkly really brought him back) As Men who are murdered by the Zodiac Killer to one degree or another, even if they aren’t killed (Also of note Brian Cox in a note perfect cameo, Dan Heyeda, and Chloe Sevingy in a rare role that doesn’t make me want to take out my eyes with knitting needles).

The discussion with Clea Duvall, providing so many answers while obscuring so many others proves the heart of the movie. Showing the very human wreckage Paired with the sequence where the we catch up with the victim from the first sequence of the film. Old worn, with dark circles around his eyes. The film’s message becomes clear. By vaguely hinting at it, Fincher showcases the damage the Zodiac left behind much more thoroughly then he ever could with a case by case basis. We realize that even with how thorough the movie was (and at this point Fincher is down right Kubrickian in his compulsion to Catch. Every. Detail.) the film can never can never even begin to encompass the damage the man has done. The murders where the least of it, it’s the way, to quote Joe Hill, “that the dead drag the living down.” Miring the rest of their lives in tragedy, doomed with the knowledge that a safe and happy life is a fragile thing, and with the knowledge that its all too easy for others to move past it.

Oh and sweet Jesus those where some terrifying squirrels.

Fight Club 10 Year On

Though Fight Club’s actual Tenth anniversary was a couple months ago, all the cool kids are writing about it now. And what kind of blogger would I be if I didn’t write about what’s arguably the film of my generation.

Because make no mistake Fight Club is probably the closet thing to a cultural touchstone my generation has. The one piece of art that everyone has seen and has an opinion about. It’s ten years old this week, which quite frankly makes me feel like The Crypt Keeper, and people are still debating whether it’s a fascist piece of crap of a true masterpiece.

However, just because a film captures the cultural zeitgeist, doesn’t mean it’s any good. Just look at Easy Rider (Digression!!! Its worth noting that Fight Club takes the exact opposite trajectory of Rider. While Easy Rider spent its run time in a cloud of Hippie idealism to crash into nihilism at the end. Fight Club spends the majority of its run time in a venerable swan dive of nihlism only to pull out at the last second boosted by a wave of, I think exhilarating, romantism.) Fight Club, I’m happy to report, holds up. Its still the same incendiary power that it always had. In case you have literally been a space monkey for the past ten years, Fight Club tells the story of “Jack” a white collar wage slave whose quietly gone insane. He meets Tyler Durden, a soap salesman, and without either really meaning too they start Fight Club, an organization that allows similarly soul dead corporate drones to beat the ever living crap out of each other. The project becomes all too successful, gaining a life of it’s own and morphing into Project Mayhem, dedicated to destroying society, with an idea that might actually do the trick.

The main criticism about Fight Club is that it glamorizes thuggish nihilistic violence. And to a certain extent, of course it does. Brad Pitt is a fucking rock star in this thing, he’s fully convincing as a man who as he puts it, “ Looks like you wanna look, fucks like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not.” It helps that he’s shot by David Fincher. The film still is stylistically on the bleeding edge ten years on. Particularly the manic first act which puts you so thoroughly in Fincher’s universe, bolstered by Norton’s droning monologue that its still disorienting on the umpteenth rewatching. The stuff Fincher pulls off here still seems genuinely next level, though whether that’s due to Fincher’s genius or the paucity in American cinema is up for debate.

But Fight Club was always deeper then it’s critics, hell it’s fans too, ever gave it credit for. As attractive as Pitt and Fincher make the surface look it is just that, the surface. Fight Club at it’s core is about the danger of giving yourself over to ANY school of thought, any ism. Whether it’s the white collar hell it’s principles inhabit in the beginning, or the counter culture they create, and are almost destroyed by. Any organization that you allow to view you as a cog in a greater whole will invariably treat you as such. And Cogs are very replaceable. Still those who talk about the film's supposed misogyny and machoism should remember that the ending can only come when Norton grows the fuck up enough to be able to reach out to a woman.

While other films that shocked at the time, such as Clockwork Orange, or Easy Rider, have grandfathered their way into the canon, Fight Club still maintains it’s edgy outsider status. I don't even think its Fincher's greatest film (but we'll get to that in my massive decade ender) but for sheer cinematic exhilaration its tough to beat. It still feels genuinely dangerous, like a hand grenade thrown into a bassinet.

When those buildings came down to The Pixie's coo it felt as though we where living in a new world. Two years later would confirm how right we where. The past eight years have been a "very strange time" in everyones life. And for the kids who came of age in its shadow, it'll always loom.