Late getting back to this --apologies.
Nothing in there that really sways my OP conviction, but some interesting takes on what the film was actually about --or should have been about. My knee-jerk reaction to statements like
The movie “is not interested in the concept of social networking or the actual usage of Facebook,” wrote Huffington Post contributing editor Jose Antonio Vargas.
...A movie that focused on the actual workings of Facebook? Righteous! Pay twelve bucks and watch on the big screen in digital surround sound, as some unknown asshole continually updates their page and statuszzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
And yet, they’ve got a point: how does a 2-hour movie
show what goes through the facebook user's head as they experience…whatever the hell it is they experience, that keeps bringing them back and spreading the word? Just how
do you make a film about an Internet phenomenon?
Then there’s this one, which caught my eye yesterday on the Google News page:
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/78081/sorkin-zuckerberg-the-social-network
Brings up an interesting point (that the story should have focused more on the freedoms currently in place on the Internet, which allowed a 19-year-old genius to shepherd an idea from inception to near-global cultural saturation in six years,) one which I largely agree with. But goddamn, this article is so constipated, so peppered with verbal turds like "architected" and "worked ferociously hard" (those two in the first paragraph alone,) and patently idiotic statements like "It’s not that he’s a socially clumsy (relative to the Harvard elite) boy genius. Every one of them is." that finding said point feels like a sprint through a kennel pen littered with fresh steamers. Coming from The New Republic, and written by
Lawrence Lessig --someone for whom I would normally have a ton of admiration for-- this is especially disenheartening.
Irony Sidebar:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig#Media_references
Many point out that Sorkin/Fincher missed the whole boat on the virtual world and thus, failed to translate the "secret ingredient” of Facebook to the screen –fair cop, possibly. I’m never on Facebook so I don’t really see what’s missing. But I can at least see the inherent difficulties –maybe even impossibilities— of one medium trying to successfully translate the magic of another. How many film versions of great novels truly
work, for instance? What was that famous quote, that ‘writing about art (or music) is like dancing about architecture’?
Doesn’t bode well for any future cinematic blockbuster about TK, does it? But you never know. Some modern-day-D.W. Griffith might come along and do for cyberspace what the original did for telling stories on the big screen.
Here’s one of the more sober positive reviews:
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/screen/reviews/The-Social-Network.html
I hadn’t considered the Citizen Kane angle –major differences abound, of course, but interesting all the same.