First Impressions: “The Social Network”

A movie can be like an acquaintance, you first impressions might be right, they might be wrong. But most importantly they change over time. In these post I publish my unfiltered first impressions of an in cinema movie.

Biopics are a very tricky genre. I once joked that the only succesful biopic that was ever pulled off was “Superman: The Movie”, simply because anyone who argued about inaccuracies between the movie and the accepted facts, were exposing themselves as nitpicking comic book geeks.

Though of course the point still remains that many of the facts that differed the movie from the established facts (mythology perhaps being a more accurate term – but lets look at it through the prism of the biopic, not the comic book movie.) were later adapted as established facts in the comic books. The biopic usurped the “truth” in a way.

Of course writing an accurate biography of the character of Superman is not really comparable to writing an accurate biography of a man like Mark Zuckerberg, mostly because of the ever-shifting nature of comic book canon. But what is a biopic about Mark Zuckerberg really supposed to teach us?

Zuckerberg himself said that he wished noone would make a movie about him as long as he was still alive, and I think this is a very fitting comment, espescially in the case of this movie.

This is a movie about a phenomenon as much as it is about a character. And that phenomenon, Facebook, is potentially in its infancy, as many characters in the film point out. There is the speed of new media and services against old media (like, oh, cinema) to consider of course, but the movie only occasionally attempts to say anything about how Facebook has changed the world.

Instead it dramatizes the innvator myth surrounding Mark Zuckerberg, and it does it damn effectively. As many have pointed out the synopsis of the film sounds as exciting as oat meal and milk, but Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher turn it into a movie that stylistically and formally works like a dream.

But in the process it falls into at least two major pits. Firstlyl it bookends the story with two scenes that heavily suggest that Zuckerbergs creativity is spawned by his desire to get back at, and ultimately reconcile with, his ex-girlfriend. It comes of too neatly wrapped, considering that this is a real person we are dealing with.

The second pit is the slightly heavy-handed irony of the programmer behind the worlds foremost social netowrk loses his “only friend” in the legal battle. This too is one of those places where dramatic conventions take priority over facts, I would imagine.

Oh, and Zuckerberg himself comes off as a slightly more bearable, though less hilarious, version of Sheldon Cooper of “The Big Bang Theory”. But I guess some conventions must be observed when writing nerds on screen.

Biopics are indeed very tricky, and not very easy to review either, especially when they circle around a living contemporary. And especially when it is about a phenomenon at it’s height.

Maybe a documentary is, on occasion, preferable.   

Twitter – The Movie

Would you like to see a movie about Twitter?

If so, I think you’re the only one of about 12 and a half people on the surface of this planet. But the idea is ripe for parody.

This post is a quick follow-up of my previous blog about David Finchers Facebook movie (“The Social Network”) and it's parodies. It seems another one has surfaced on the web, or maybe it was there all along and I just missed it for my previous post. Who knows. Anyway here is the trailer:

And just for clarification – no there is no actual movie about the making of Twitter in the works, as far as I’ve been able to tell.

“Inception” – the Further Adventures of Scrooge McDuck?

As of this writing Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” has grossed over 370 million dollars at the US Box Office, and is being adored by the public and hailed by the critics, with a rating of 87% percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Of course whenever a succes soars high, accusations of plagiarism appear, as an alternative to the more traditional (and/ or legitimate) criticisms of a work.

In this particular instance, an uncanny number og similarities have been found between a story from a 2002 issue of “The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck” and the plot of “Inception”.

A lot of elements a similar. The device used for dream invasion, the idea of information extraction itself (in the comic it’s the combination for McDuck’s Money Bin, to absolutely noones surprise), the idea that a fall kicks you out of a dream, noises in the waking world being implemented into the dream and finally the shifting landscapes where a dreamer has no real consistency.

Yes, all these things appear as important points in Inception. But what I think people are forgetting here, or are perhaps unaware of in the first place, is that these ideas are paramount to dream psychology in the first place. How many times have you implemented the sound of your alarm clock, or some other noise into the dream because you just didn’t want to wake up? Have you never woken up just after dreaming that you fell?

Does this mean that I think the similarities are coincidental? I really can’t tell, but I think they are. I do however, think that it is worth mentioning that at least one iconic film scene was taken from a Scrooge McDuck comic. The scene in question is from “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, in particular the one where Indiana Jones flees from a rolling boulder.

All this however, does nothing to ease the fact that Nolan was previously accused of ripping of the French New Wave Classic “Last year at Marienbad”. I find myself unable to comment on these similarities however, seeing as how I’ve not seen the latter movie. Perhaps a blank that needs to be filled in later?

Source: The Geeks of Doom

And if you wish to view the comic with your own eyes: It can be done right here.

Facebook, MySpace, Youtube – The Movie

Only one of the above is going to theaters … for now.

In case you haven’t heard David Fincher (Who made thousands of people think it was cool to be a neo-luddite with “Fight Club”) has just directed a movie about the creation of Facebook, aptly titled “The Social Network”. What’s wrong with “FaceMovie”?

Most of you probably have a Facebook profile, but few are probably aware that it started out humbly, as many Internet Billion Dollar Babies do, with the young Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, and that the network was initially a literal Harvard Facebook. A student who’s-who really.

I’ll admit that the idea of a biopic based on this subjects isn’t excatly thrilling me, but I am actually very interested to see what Fincher will bring to the table.

The first trailer for “The Social Network” is right here:

But of course, as we all know in these internet days no deed goes unspoofed. So it’s wasn’t long before a parody of the trailer, alledgedly advertising a movie about MySpace (remember MySpace? Chances are you were on there more than once).

Here is the trailer for “The Other Social Network”

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And finally, here is the parody trailer about the only other website that eats up more teenage and adolescent waking hours than any other.

The trailer for “The Video Website” (where strangely I couldn’t find any of the other trailers)

The Social Network will open the New York Film Festival on September 24 and then appear in US theaters on October 1.

The Never-Ending Story: “Dexter” – Dark Passengers All Around

Dexter Morgan is a geeky lab worker for the Miami Metro Police Department, he is the lover of Rita, and a surrogate father to her kids Astor and Cody, other than that he is the chewtoy of his foster sister Debrah, and is the guy that brings the entire precints donuts.

And he is a serial killer, who has killed at least twenty people by the start of season one.

But don’t worry, they were all killers themselves. All is well and good in the jungle. The women and children and cuban immigrants have a dark protector watching over them.

At it’s heart Dexter is a show about what it means to be human, as opposed to being a monster. Dexter uses his narration very frequently to remind us that he has no real emotions only emptiness. But it takes no shrink to see that Dexter is obviously mistaken, almost self-deceptive.

Dexters constant musing inner monologue serve two purposes. First of all they allow us a glimpse of the mind of this killer, and allows the audience to sympathize with him. Though the fact that he is played by Michael C. Hall (pulling of cute and creepy with equal amounts of ease) doesn’t excatly hurt either.

And then I propose this to you:

The second purpose of the narrative is in fact a far more sinister one, which only comes to mind if one allows oneself a great enough distance to the narrative device. Dexter narrates as if to a specific person, and it is clearly obvious that this person can not be any other character within the diegesis of the show itself.

We are the Dark Passenger that Dexter speaks of. We are the ones that compel him to perform these task, that are in any categorical sense of justice just plain wrong.

I find that thinking about “Dexter” in this way opens many new and interesting interpretations. Try it. 

Dexters returns for his fifht season on America’s Showtime on September 26th 2010.

First Impressions: “Inception”

Hi there. “First Impressions” is where I give my first Impressions of a movie that is likely fresh in the cinemas.

Like meeting a person, sometimes you get a lot of things right by the first impressions, sometimes you find out subsequently that you were wrong. But more often you just learn that the things you judged by didn’t really matter in the long run.

The first trailers of Inception reminded me in no small part of “The Matrix”. And why not, “Matrix” was a defining movie for my generation, some of the aesthetics sure seemed similar enough, and even the first details of the plot of “Inception” seemed to call that film to mind.

But after having seen the movie I find that comparing the two yields no really interesting conclusions aside from that if “The Matrix” was comic book action approach to a layered world, “Inception” is its heist movie cousin with the urban action tendencies.

It deals, like Nolan’s previous favorite “Memento” and indeed DiCaprio’s previous endeavour “Shutter Island” with a conflict born of coping with the loss of a woman, and like Nolan’s “Batman Begins” it is also about stepping out of your father’s shadow, one way or another.

While these are things that are pregnant with potential of freudian spiders and woods, everything is treated with a slightly twisted action movie mindset. After all, a dream doesn’t need to contain any monsters, spiders or even basements to be frightening. They are, in and of themselves, terrifying constructs.

The surreal backdrop never becomes Terry Gilliamesque or technologically indulging like something out of Phillip K. Dick. Plot and theme are front and center here, all the exploitation of the dreamscape for it’s own sake pretty much peaks in the second act, after that it’s tightly scripted.

Characters are second fiddle, but they are quite enjoyable nonetheless, and there a few of Nolans humorous quips in their mouths, though this is a very serious affair. You’ll probably find yourself laughing fewer times than during “The Dark Knight”.

But though few moments are lost on laughter, not one is wasted. We move in and out of dreams, through car chases that bring to mind “Heat” and its like, mid-air brawls that reminds one of Hitchcock, and a final action set piece that seems taken straight out of cold war James Bond, yet fits like a glove. Nothing is a sore thumb. Yet then again nothing is weird about the dream while we’re dreaming. Like they say in the film, it’s only when we wake up that we notice something is wrong. 

A little bit like picking apart a movie.

For those of you that have already seen the movie. Screen Rant has some quite in-depth analysis of it which can be found here.

Criticism on TV? – Goodbye!

America’s Longest running Movie show (called among other things “At The Movies”, but perhaps better known as “Siskel and Ebert” or “Ebert and Roeper”) was recently cancelled.

Internet outrage was quite wide, but here, for the first time, one of it’s last hosts, A.O. Scott of the New York Times writes it’s eulogy and comments on the current situation of professional criticism.

It should perhaps be said that while I think the show’s hosts (at least the late Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert themselves) were gifted and knowing, but that the program was, in the end, a consumer guide, I never really felt it rise up to the level of criticism that these two minds might have been able to provide.

But then again, if it had, it probably would have been canceled much sooner.

One thing that it did right, which I think our own Danish TV-reviws (which is, in effect “DR2 Premiere”) lacks is the prescense of two charismatic individuals of equal knowledge and opposing views.

Ironically, this space is filled in by Political Analysis these days, in the shape of TV2 News’ “Mogensen and Kristiansen”. Who would have thought the day would come when politics drew more attention that movies? 

You can read A. O. Scotts own words on the show and the state of criticism right here: The New York Times