The Social Network is new on DVD. It topped Ace’s favorites list for 2010.
Read Raj’s review here.
Click here to purchase the DVD: The Social Network [Blu-ray]
Here’s what we wrote after attending the Ace preview:
The Facebook Movie: the Me Generation vs. the iGeneration
Tonight’s preview of The Social Network wasn’t a sell-out, but it was a good crowd — filled with exactly the 20-somethings director David Fincher aimed for — all batting their eyes a little at the late afternoon September light, still recovering from the afternoon when facebook crashed. [It was down for three to six hours.]
Sadly, the news had to break on Twitter that facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had just given the New Jersey public school system $100 million bucks. (PC Magazine — and the ultimate Twitter Transparency Mayor Cory Booker — suggests that Zuckerberg nearly made the donation anonymously. But it’s hard to imagine Oprah standing for that. “YOU get an education! YOU get an education!” A commenter notes that it’s like the “episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Ted Danson gets lots of praise for donating an art gallery wing ‘anonymously’ while Larry David is scorned because his donated wing had his name on it.”)
With all smartphones confiscated at the door, it seemed cruel to deprive the audience of such a self-referential, self-aware movie an opportunity to discuss it while it played out in front of them. (If a tree fell…)
But this is a movie made entirely, and expertly, by grownups, Fincher (Seven, Fight Club) and Sorkin (A Few Good Men, West Wing) and to a great degree: for grownups. The hippest thing about it is Trent Reznor’s score and Trent Reznor is what…46 now? The dialogue is smart, sharp, and sparkly — and bears no resemblance to how Zuckerberg speaks in interviews — you can’t handle the truth? On paper (if such a thing still existed), it might be hard to imagine how a movie with long sequences devoted to coding — and explaining coding — could be riveting, but it is.
This movie is big and expensive and almost 80s-like. It’s the Me Generation vs. the iGeneration.
It is all Wall Street (the original), not the handheld verite of the new indie facebook-preoccupied Catfish.
The grownups seem a little angry. Much like the 80s. Even cocaine makes a comeback (at least for the Justin Timberlake Napster character, Sean Parker) …just like the 80s.
Fincher, Sorkin, and Jesse Eisenberg (the Squid and the Whale), who plays Zuckerberg, go out of their way to “disclose” that they don’t personally use facebook, and that it’s immaterial to The Story (which is played out as half Shakespearean, and half courtroom drama, which has now been replaced by the new procedural: the deposition drama, where nothing ever actually gets to court).
Newsweek (“Friends Without Benefits”) is pissed off because Facebook — unlike the old HP/Intel/Apple days of Silicon Valley — doesn’t actually make anything. (In related news: GET OFF MY LAWN.) Plastics. Plastics. Their argument is, facebook isn’t science and it doesn’t solve problems. Elsewhere though, they turn in an elegiac rave review, quoting Thornton Wilder and the “typical American battle of trying to convert a loneliness into an enriched and fruitful solitude.”
But facebook has made something — and it isn’t inherently good or bad — it’s a platform, a tool, a means for connecting, or not connecting. The typewriter wasn’t evil when it replaced the pen. The phone wasn’t evil when it replaced door-to-door communication. In the early days, nobody wanted to be the douche who stood around Starbucks talking on his cellphone, but that has a universal social network applications as well. (Everybody still shuns the guy on Twitter or Facebook who always tries to sell you a house.)
As the New York Times review put it, “Mark builds a database, turning his life — and ours — into zeroes and ones, which is what makes it also a story about the human soul.”
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