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Mad men: (l-r) Timberlake and Eisenberg
in The Social Network.
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The
Web They Wove
By
Shawn Stone
The
Social Network
Directed
by David Fincher
It’s perfect timing. Facebook, at this brief moment in the
turbulent history of the Web, is supreme, and two of the preeminent
filmmakers of the day, director David Fincher and screenwriter
Aaron Sorkin, have turned their considerable talents to chronicling—mythologizing—the
creation of Facebook. The subject is worth their time.
Or, to put it another way, there’s a reason we never got Jonathan
Demme’s AOL: The Movie, and instead got the appalling
You’ve Got Mail (which managed to not understand the
Internet at all). AOL and its ilk were closed systems, dedicated
to leading users around by the nose within a claustrophobic
simulated Web. (Remember, hilariously, how “World Wide Web”
was just another link on the AOL home page?) As a subject,
Facebook is more seductive and entertaining; its design caters
to the most personal interests of users, allowing them
to fashion the parameters of their own little Internet world.
To borrow a line from a popular dingbat politician, “Facebook
is you.”
Here’s The Social Network in a nutshell: The all-conquering
social media service of the age is conceived as a result of
its founder getting dumped, getting drunk, and acting like
an asshole on the Internet. In other words, it’s an archetypical
Internet experience when Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg)
takes revenge on his ex-girlfriend and then (with the help
of his pal’s algorithm) all Harvard women, in a petty yet
technologically advanced way.
Of course, in the end, he wants to atone. Boo-hoo.
As written by Sorkin and portrayed by Eisenberg, Zuckerberg
is a stunted yet likable jerk whose real genius is to identify
great ideas and, more important, have the patience to let
these ideas develop. Facebook’s disturbingly fast growth freaks
out everyone but him. He’s canny at identifying people who
can help, from his best pal, amateur commodities trader Eduardo
Severin (Andrew Garfield), to the seductive-as-the-devil founder
of Napster, Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake); and, less admirably,
able to pick the people to “borrow” from and ignore, like
the Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer), likable but douchey scions
of the ruling class (and actual Olympians) who condescend
to “let” Zuckerberg develop their Facebook-like concept.
If you’re looking for villains, the filmmakers aren’t going
to point them out to you. Zukerberg is flawed, but ultimately
correct; Severin is a sympathetic figure, but way out of his
depth (the always-near-tears Garfield will make the most emo
Spider-Man ever); and Parker is a paranoid megalomaniac, but
he understands how big Zuckerberg’s idea is. (Timberlake steals
every scene he’s in, too.) The portraits are worthy of Jean
Renoir’s phrase, “Everyone has their reasons.”
The film has a tricky-but-rewarding flashback structure built
around the multiple legal depositions that resulted from the
lawsuits Facebook’s wild success inevitably led to. But it
never trips up the viewer, thanks to Fincher’s masterful control
of pace and tone. (The opening bar scene reportedly took more
than 90 takes to satisfy the notoriously picky director.)
Sorkin is known for his intricate dialogue, and it’s one of
the film’s many pleasures to hear ultra-literate people parry
words with rapid-fire skill. But the other side of Sorkin’s
talent is taking oversized, unwieldy subjects (like the executive
branch of the U.S. government) and making the inner workings
both transparent and compelling. That’s what really engages
him in The Social Network. Harvard and Harvard’s Ivy
League brethren still run the world. And at Harvard there
are circles within circles of power, class and privilege that
the various characters must work within—or against. It’s the
kind of gamesmanship Sorkin adores.
And it all adds up to the most entertaining film I’ve seen
all year. Which is funny, because I’m not, and never will
be, on the Facebook.
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Hungry
girl: Moretz in Let Me In.
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Little
Boy Found
Let
Me In
Directed
by Matt Reeves
More
people have heard about Let the Right One In, the supremely
eerie Swedish vampire movie, than have seen it, and so its
American remake, Let Me In, is riding on a double buzz:
from the original, and from pop-culture vampire-mania. Even
so, Let Me In works on its own, especially for audiences
who don’t like subtitles. Astutely directed by Matt Reeves
(Cloverfield), who adapted the screenplay adapted by
John Lindqvist from his best-selling novel, Let Me In
is more horrifying than disturbing, and so is less memorable
than the nightmarish interpretation of Swedish director Tomas
Alfredson. The remake loses a little from its relocation:
Though a dismal suburb in New Mexico, 1983, is as good a choice
as any in the United States, it doesn’t compare to the claustrophobic
bleakness and poverty of the Stockholm cinderblock housing
project where audiences first met Eli, a 12-year-old night
stalker with the large dark eyes of a ravenous animal, and
Oskar, a preternaturally gentle schoolboy with an angelic
face and girlish blond hair.
In Let Me In, androgyny is replaced with subtle (and
slightly distracting) sexual overtones. Owen (Kodi Smith-McPhee)
has short hair and bee-stung lips, and despite his watchful
timidity (Smith-McPhee was the near-silent Boy in The Road),
he radiates more intelligence than innocence—in fact, it seems
curious that he’s not able to outmaneuver the bullies at school
who have pushed him into reclusion and revenge fantasies (a
nice touch is the snippet of President Reagan on a hospital
TV intoning his “There is evil in this world” speech). On
a wintry night, Owen meets Abby (Chloe Moretz), a sandy-haired
beauty who doesn’t go out during the day, is impervious to
cold, and “smells funny.” Owen is delighted to meet this melancholy
loner, even after she tells him, “I can’t be your friend.”
But that meeting occurs before the opening sequence, in which
an unidentified man (Richard Jenkins) is hospitalized with
self-inflicted acid burns, an incident that followed the gruesome
murder of a young man found hanging upside down and drained
of blood. The inclusion of Reeves’ Hitchcock influences on
the filming of several murders is more gruesome and yet less
powerful than in the original, in which the girl’s “father”
was an unnerving enigma until almost the end. And unlike Eli,
Abby, apparently, needed a CGI boost to be convincing as an
undead predator.
Yet Reeves does create an enveloping atmosphere of dread,
under the sickly glow of neon lights, or in the labyrinth-like
boy’s locker room, and he also gets the mythic vampire details
just right (amplified by the strangely poignant score), while
Abby’s appearances as a damaged, beseeching waif (at which
Moretz is mesmerizing) are both heart-rending and repulsive.
Unlike the mystery of Eli’s origin, with its cryptic hints
of her having been brutalized, perhaps in Czarist Russia,
Abby’s past is revealed with a single, singularly creepy artifact:
an old photo-booth portrait strip. And the growing friendship
between persecuted Owen and his bestial yet protective friend
is sensitively rendered, allowing Owen to accept Abby’s monstrosity
even as he questions whether there is such a thing as evil—an
answer that’s left up to the audience in the blood- (and heart-)
chilling conclusion.
—Ann
Morrow
The
Evil Eye
A
Film Unfinished
Directed
by Yael Hersonski
Of the many 20th-century evils, Nazism stands out. Other movements
killed more people; other regimes were crazier in their pursuit
of genocide. But the Nazis enjoyed their ideology and its
accouterments, and they were their own best self-glorifying
promoters. They reveled in shit.
Thus, there are few more repugnant 20th-century artifacts
than Nazi propaganda films. Above all, they are smug and righteous
and well-made. The Eternal Jew is one of the worst.
It’s a revolting documentary that “clinically” lays out why
the Jews are no better than rats, but its crude use of found
footage makes it slightly less effective that the truly vile
Jew Suss. This 1940 fiction film is deftly made commercial
entertainment, and thus more dangerous. Jew Suss’ hideously
racist portrayal of Jews as greedy thieves and rapists was
widely shown throughout occupied Europe as the Nazis ramped-up
the arrest and deportation of European Jewry.
That’s why we can be thankful that the Nazi propaganda film
exhumed in the riveting documentary A Film Unfinished remained,
well, unfinished. Because it may have proved more hideous
than Jew Suss and Eternal Jew combined. The
history of the footage is mysterious: It turned up in an archive,
in a few cans simply labeled “Ghetto,” long after the war.
It preserved ghastly images of starving, mistreated Jews in
the Warsaw ghetto circa 1942. At first, filmmakers used clips
from it as if it were “real” documentary footage. But subsequent
discoveries revealed that all the footage was staged by a
Nazi film crew, and postwar investigators were able to track
down one of the cameramen.
Israeli filmmaker Yael Hersonski went investigators one better:
She tracked down elderly survivors of the ghetto who remembered
the filming and some of the people who were filmed. And, gradually,
the true nature of the project emerges: It was to be a propaganda
film of shameless deceit, portraying Jews as vile sub-humans
who deserved their fate. It seems to have been designed to
be one of the Nazi’s “last words” on European Jews.
It’s terrible footage to watch. Hersonski takes some comfort
in the defiance of the “gaze” of those being filmed, and in
the survival of those she interviews, but there are moments
too awful for even that small comfort. A Film Unfinished
is an unvarnished look into the debased mind of Nazism, and
thus essential, and awful, viewing.
—Shawn
Stone
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