No, he’s not. He’s just trying so hard to be.
Speaking of the Winklevii, and I agree with you, how amazing is Armie Hammer, who played the twins? I still can"t tell them apart by name but he did a great job of making them seem different. One of the best scenes is their meeting with Larry Summers (“Ann, punch me in the face”). I also laughed at his line “I’m six-five, 220 pounds, and there are two of me.”
I’m sorry to hear about your friend LavenderBlue.
I kept looking through the credits to see if I could spot twins. He was excellent.
What happened to my friend is a terrible tragedy. Her OB told her the lump she felt in her breast was probably a cyst for over a year. Her GP told her the pain she felt in her back was nothing more than an old back injury and again sent her on her way with some pain pills again for more than a year. She finally got the stage 4 diagnosis last April. She’s a good person, a hard worker, a fierce lover of historical fiction, good chocolate, and a very loving mother. I have known her since our children were small. She’s going through hell over something that should have been caught and cured early. She looked horrible yesterday, ashen, drawn and moving in great pain. Her son and daughter kept looking at her in long furtive glances as if they were trying to sear the memory of their mother in their heads for the next few decades.
I dread the day the announcement she’s gone filters through our community.
I just watched this film and it left me feeling really depressed.
Mark (fictional Mark - I have no idea how accurate the film is and I realize it’s not a documentary) isn’t just an asshole. He’s a bad person. My favorite films are bromances and in this one he bends his bro over and fucks him with a broom handle.
Don’t get me wrong, it was a really good movie and I found the dialog in particular to be amazing. But it still left me feeling depressed.
Most of the best picture nomineees this year are downers.
The Social Network absolutely deserved its nomination, even if the field were only five instead of ten. (In that case I’d go with, in no particular order, King’s Speech, Social Network, True Grit, Winter’s Bone and Inception. My vote would be True Grit, with Winter’s Bone a close second.)
It didn’t come out of the blue though. Saverin fucked over Zuckerberg first (in the movie, because like you, I don’t know the real-life circumstances) by closing the bank account and putting a stop on checks written, and why? Because he didn’t like the fact that Shawn Parker was hanging around and had opinions and influence over Mark, even though Parker wasn’t hurting Mark or the site at all. No other reason. Saverin’s money was keeping the site up and running by paying the server bills.
Like Mark says in the movie, one of the most important aspects of the site is that they never go down, ever, meaning that if the servers are shut down due to non-payment, and people can’t log on and talk to their friends, they go elsewhere. Saverin really did endanger the site’s credibility and reliability out of pure spite, to get Mark’s attention. So while I’m not supporting Mark’s actions, the stock reduction was an asshole thing to do, Saverin had shown that he wasn’t as committed to the site as the others involved. They both behaved like dicks. At that time, in the movie.
Oh and also, it’s not as if Mark tried to secretly screw Saverin. Everything was all right there in the open, in the contract. If Saverin had read the contract before signing, he would have seen that his stock would be reduced if they took on partners, and could have had it out with Mark before signing. Yeah, he trusted Mark but come on. It’s a financial contract, and he’s a super-smart guy, a mathematics and economics major. He should have read it. It’s his own fault.
Even before revealing that they’d found a half-million dollar investor Eduardo had acquiesced, admitted it was a stupid thing to do, and claimed to have only done it to get his attention. And I believe he was sincere (again, Eduardo the fictional character). The site never actually went down.
So yeah, I agree that Eddy’s move was immature. But personally I think it pales in comparison to the trap he set for the person that was supposed to be his best friend. And then the only justification he gives when confronted is “oh the big business man, huh? Well you signed the business contract so fuck you”, as if legal=right.
Edit:
Yes, he should have had a lawyer go over it. But that doesn’t mean he deserved to be fucked over by his best friend.
I’m consoled by the fact that fictional Ed got a settlement in the end. If we assume that at least the percent he got in the movie matches real life we can assume that he got 2.5% of the company - or $2.5 billion worth of stock - just like the real Ed.
I could imagine Sean Parker whispering in his ear: “He tried to get you shut down by pulling the financing. He doesn’t give a shit about this company. He won’t even deign to read the contract; he’s just here for the easy payout. Let this contract be the test of whether or not he truly cares. If he signs it, cut him lose.”
EDIT: Also, Mark and Eduardo didn’t have a single social skill between them, much less social skills. Both of them dialed up their petulant, childish tantrums to 11. Well, Zuckerberg’s revenge was dialed up to 11,000, but you get what I mean.
Missed edit window: In my last post I meant 5% of the company.
Well… it’s topical.
Seriously though, I haven’t seen the film, but all the various nominations have made me wonder if I should.
OTOH even without having seen the movie, but having seen the trailer, I think I’m safe in wondering about Jesse Eisenberg’s nominations. I mean, I love him to death, but, he always plays the same person. I don’t mind paying to see that several times over, but I question whether it’s award worthy. He’s, let’s face it, a slightly richer man’s Michael Cera.
Good theory, but it seems like it was nominated for other awards that don’t have ten nominees.
Right? Up until The Social Network, Eisenberg was always the “poor man’s Michael Cera.” I can’t count how many times I read that line during Zombieland promotions. Once Eisenberg got this role, though, they switched places in a major way. Now Cera seems like a pale, almost embarassing parody of Eisenberg.
For me, that’s one thing that makes the movie so brilliant. Sure, the dialogue is great in that Sorkinesque style, but you have a movie that turns all these conventions on their heads. Unlikeable protagonists; pretty likeable foils (who are rich, handsome, athletic Ivy-league frat boys!) and a plot centered around some millionaires suing a billionaire. It was a difficult story to tell, and Sorkin/Fichner made a hell of a great movie out of it. Not the best movie of the year IMO, but easily one of my top five.*
*Skammer’s top five in no particular order: Social Network, True Grit, King’s Speech, Toy Story 3, Inception.
However, I’d be interested in a thread where someone defends The Kids Are All Right. I thought that was horribly over-rated.
I think there grounds for a lawsuit wasn’t so much that Zuckerburg stole their idea as that he tricked them into not doing anything with it for several weeks while he got Facebook off the ground. At least in the film the reason they didn’t create their own site wasn’t that they were busy rowing, but because they took Zukerburg at his word that he was working on their site.
I’m not really a fan of Sorkin, but I liked the movie. My question is – should the Academy care that the source material and the resulting movie completely missed the mark when it came to Mark Zuckerberg’s character?
After I saw the movie I read some things about it, and also read interviews that Zuckerberg has done. The source material for the movie was in large part the testimonies of the Winklevossen and Saverin, which is why the movie focuses so much on them. Absent, of course, is any input from The Man himself. And, while I was watching the movie, I thought to myself, “This doesn’t feel right… his motivations are all wrong for someone in that position.” Money? Revenge? Nope.
Ends up from the interviews I’ve read that he has a lot in common with some of the brilliant silicon valley types I grew up with. In fact, he’s a bit of a mashup of several of my good friends. I know what motivates them, and it makes perfect sense that Zuckerberg wouldn’t sell FB. He’s in it for the technical challenge, to create and control something on a scale that nobody else can.
On top of that, the entire opening scene (the breakup) and any resulting impact on his motivations was fabricated out of thin air.
Take away the character study and it was just an OK movie. Acceptable fiction, if you will. And yet the Oscar buzz seems to center around how great the movie explored the motivations of Mark Zuckerberg. Can it still be Oscar-worthy if it got that part completely wrong?
That quote, which unfortunately is missing because nested quotes aren’t available, reminds me of something Roger Ebert has said many times, which I think is very profound. In fact he called it Ebert’s Law:
“A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it.”
In other words, the importance or quality of a movie has nothing to do with its subject.
That’s true of just about any “based on a true story” movie. Characters are modified, events are invented, history is adjusted to make a better movie. I don’t understand what you mean by “take away the character study.” The main character may not have been identical to the real Mark Zuckerberg, but it frankly doesn’t matter at all how closely, or not at all, the movie reflects real life. The movie is judged by what’s in the movie, and by that measure it was a fascinating film.
Whether the real Zuckerberg is exactly like that, or nothing like that, or a complete fabrication is irrelevent.
I guess I am in the minority here. Sorkin took a torn-from-the-pages story and, through his structure, plot and dialogue, and characterizations, made it into a modern-day fable that speaks to the larger forces at work in our ever-more-into-social-networking-and-capitalism society.
I am NOT a Fincher fan normally, but the fact that he took Sorkin’s modern-day fable and made it feel both “normal” while reinforcing the bigger issues Sorkin is trying to frame was a very impressive piece of work.
Work movies are typically boring. Folks typing on keyboards usually doesn’t make for great cinema. The fact that TSN featured both and was very engaging and got a lot of folks thinking and talking through the POV’s and big trends represented says a lot, to me, about what the film’s creators accomplished.