"For a long time before The Social Network was released, people just called it ‘The Facebook Movie’ -- even after the inspired trailer (the one that combined footage from the movie with Facebook screenshots and a choir singing Radiohead's ‘Creep’) made it clearer that it dealt with the human stories behind how the social networking site was created.
“I joked that the studio should adopt the approach used in the famous trailer for Stanley Kubrick's Lolita in 1962: ‘How did they ever make a movie of Facebook?’ That turns out to be the title of the ‘making o’" documentary on the extras DVD (the people who made this movie have an exceptionally sharp sense of humor). Since it opened the New York Film Festival in October, it's been described as a ruthless ladder-to-success story, a thwarted romance (with Erica or Eduardo?), a courtroom drama, a fast-moving portrait of a generation and The Way We Live Now -- and ‘a movie about 2.0 people made by 1.0 people’ (that last comment written by a person still in beta, apparently).
“Is it any of those things -- or all of those things? I don't think we know yet. As the movie's Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) says of the newly launched Facebook to his friend and CFO Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield): ‘We don't even know what it is yet. We don't know what it is, what it can be, what it will be.’ That may be the smartest thing Mark says in the movie, and I think it may apply to The Social Network itself -- a deceptively conventional film that races by at such high-bandwidth speeds that even after you've seen it, you may not be sure you know what you've seen. I've seen it only twice (though I've gone over individual scenes in shot-by-shot detail), but I feel like it's been downloaded into my brain and I'm still trying to process it. What I know for sure is that it's exquisitely designed and thrilling to engage with. (John Paylus was absolutely right to compare Fincher's direction with Jonathan Ive's designs of Apple products.)
“Actually, there's a kernel of truth to that ‘1.0 vs. 2.0’ comment: the visual grammar of The Social Network is fairly traditional. Establishing shots, two-shots, reverse angles, limited use of steady dollies and cranes rather than shakycams and extended takes. (Though, as I learned from the DVD supplements, the shot over which the title appears is really several shots stitched together.) The difference is the rapid speed at which they are deployed, and the effortlessness with which the movie delivers multiple streams of information.
“Unlike that other 2010 movie that made such a big deal of explaining arbitrary rules for getting from one level of storytelling to another, The Social Network just does it. And you get it -- without the actors reading you instruction manuals encoded into dialog. It shifts backward, forward, sideways in time and space (with no ‘present tense’ defined), through depositions, memories, e-mails, affidavits... and you may get temporarily/temporally thrown now and again, but it's not hard to follow. Again, unlike the science-fiction movie that preceded it into theaters in 2010, The Social Network is complex without trying to appear complicated. Indeed, its design and direction, the tools of its tale-spinning, are far more sophisticated, but less ostentatious. And more fun. And lead to a better life." ~ Jim Emerson (originally posted March 6, 2011)
Note: The Social Network ranked #1 in the 2010 Muriel Awards.
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