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The Social Network
Facebook isn't nearly as interesting as its backstory
If I'm being honest, I was never really that big of a fan of Facebook when I first started using it. I was still very much into MySpace at the time and didn't understand why all my friends were suddenly addicted to this other social networking site. Gradually, I started to see why. It's easy to connect with old and new friends through Facebook. It's much more accessible than MySpace. Surely enough, I soon started mainly using Facebook. I now use it every day and hardly ever log into my MySpace account, which I still have.
And now's there's a movie about it. It's called The Social Network and it's an era-defining masterpiece. I might be jumping on the bandwagon here, but oh well. When I first saw the trailer for it before Inception, I thought, Oh gosh, a Facebook movie, and rolled my eyes. It seemed like a ridiculous idea initially. I will now humbly admit that I was mistaken. David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Zodiac) has done it again.
However, the most credit goes to Mr. Aaron Sorkin for his screenplay. He will be nominated for and probably win an Academy Award. This is his best work in my opinion and I'm saying that after having seen his A Few Good Men and The American President. The former was never really a great film in the first place and is highly overrated to me and the latter is pretty good but also slightly mindless. The writing in The Social Network is focused and thoughtful. It is humorous while at the same time being sad. It crackles with intelligence.
Give the actors some props for making it do all that. Jesse Eisenberg is great, great, great as Mark Zuckerberg. If he is not nominated for an Academy Award, it's because The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences either did not see The Social Network (which is near-improbable) or they're idiots (which is more likely). Andrew Garfield is good as Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerberg's best friend. Brenda Song from the Disney channel's That's So Raven gets her biggest role to date here and she's not particularly noticeable but she has her moments. Rooney Mara (A Nightmare on Elm Street) gives her best performance to date as Erica Albright, the girl who breaks up with Zuckerberg, thus driving him to create Facebook. And what a change Justin Timberlake has gone through. He is fantastic (and I mean that) as Sean Parker. Forget about music, Justin. You were born for acting. I also can't forget to mention Armie Hammer as both of the Winklevoss twins. Playing a twin, especially one with a syrupy voice, is hard, and he pulls it off.
The movie does get things wrong as so many movies tend to do, but many of the problems with The Social Network are fact-based. Slate's Nathan Heller, who lived a few rooms down from Zuckerberg while they were attending Harvard, claims that the real Zuckerberg was not shy or introverted as the movie made him out to be. Here are his words: "The Zuckerberg I knew-not especially well; we occasionally used to have lunch together in the dining hall before losing touch sometime in 2003 or 2004-was outwardly friendly, often smiling, confident, inclined, if anything, to talk at outdoor volume. He was something of a geek, I guess, but at Harvard in 2002, this was not exactly a minority position. His room was on the first floor of our dormitory, where outgoing freshman seemed to be placed, and he had his desk positioned such that if the door was open to the hallway, as it sometimes was, he'd face the other kids coming and going on their way to class."
And the real Zuckerberg was not entirely pleased with the way he was portrayed in the film, which is understandable because the movie makes him out to be an asshole in some instances. Zuckerberg, while on Oprah, told Oprah Winfrey that the film was fiction because it was about him and his real life was not as dramatic as people might expect after seeing the movie. He said this in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle when questioned about the difference between the movie and real life: "[Movie-makers] can't wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things." He said the movie got his outfits right, though. All-in-all, it seems that Zuckerberg liked the movie itself but not his character in the movie.
I certainly get where Zuckerberg is coming from but that doesn't mean that I can call the movie "bad" because it is not. It's the perfect example of extraordinary filmmaking. Most of the scenes are packed to the brim with greatness. The movie didn't make me dislike the real Mark Zuckerberg; as matter of fact, if anything, it made me respect him even more. He worked very hard to get to where he is today and anyone who doesn't believe that is a dumbass. I never believed for two seconds that the movie got everything right but I never expected it to, either. No movie ever has accomplished or ever will accomplish that.
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