Well, I went and saw The Social Network this weekend, or as most people describe it..."the facebook movie..." Seriously...why didn't they just name it "The Facebook Movie? Was it because of copyrights? I don't think so because they had that logo all up in the film every time you turned around! I really thought the title was stupid, but that's just me. With that err in judgement aside, I have to say I really enjoyed the movie. Remember when you first heard that there was going to be a facebook movie? I do. I laughed out loud. Then I thought to myself, man, Hollywood is even more willing to make a piece of crap movie, use the term "facebook" to get attention, and thus make a gazillion dollars. I never in my wildest dreams imagined this movie would be remotely good. Who knew?

Let's talk about what I liked first. I have to say my BIGGEST pet peeve with most films is pacing. It's unfortunate, but there are many more films that are slow and poorly paced than those that move along really well. The Social Network flowed wonderfully and I never once checked my watch to see how much longer we had until it was over. So props to you, Aaron Sorkin! (For those of you who don't know, he was the screen writer who also wrote West Wing, A Few Good Men (one of my all time faves!) and Charlie Wilson's War (it was aiiight...)) Speaking of Sorkin, I loved his narrative form here. The film is narrated by two different present-day hearings where various people are suing Zuckerberg.
The plaintiff's depositions are interrupted by flashbacks that tell the complete story from the discovery of facebook all the way until he was sued by his best friend and former business associates. It definitely kept the story moving along. Further, story line-wise, the opening was brilliant. We get a perfect portrayal of Zuckerberg's character right off the get go. We understand he is socially awkward, wants to be in the cool clubs, gets broken up with by his girlfriend for being a complete jerk, and so on. We enter into the meat of the story from here.The cinematography was also really well done. We had a unified color theme that translated throughout the entire film. For example, if you are flipping through channels on cable one day and you don't immediately recognize the movie, you always will know that that scene came from the The Social Network because of the consistent look and feel. I also loved the rowing scene where the Winklevoss boys were racing and their faces were going in and out of focus as they rowed. I thought it was a good symbolization of their frustration with losing the race paralleled with their lawsuit of Zuckerberg.

Let's move on to a few things I wasn't so crazy about First of all, casting. I'm still on the fence here. I liked Andrew Garfield as Eduardo. He's going to be the next Spiderman so we'll definitely be seeing him a lot more in the future. As for Justin Timberlake playing the part of Sean Parker, did anyone else find it SUPER ironic that JT was playing the founder of Napster? N'Sync was in its glory days when the whole Napster/free music debacle went down. I just thought it was kind of odd and it took me out of the movie because I kept thinking how weird the whole situation was... This is irrelevant, but I'm so used to seeing him in those big plastic glasses and fedoras lately, that I didn't realize he looked like good ol' Justin from N'Sync again. As for his actual acting, I have to say that it was better than say his portrayal of Jason in Model Behavior BUT I really don't understand why he's getting Oscar buzz. I mean, really? He was good, but he wasn't great. There was nothing that would have stood-out about that performance had it been played by someone who wasn't JT. As for our protagonist/antagonist Mark Zuckerberg played by Jesse Eisenberg (anyone else think it's funny their last names end in 'berg? How German of them...) I thought Jesse did alright. He definitely had this look of confusion on his face or some other countenance that just made you kind of pity the guy. Not sure if that was on purpose or not, but it worked.

Let's talk about the "fiction-ness" of this film. First of all, we have to remember watching it that this film is fiction. However, because of the use of the actual character's real names, we kind of forget that this isn't necessarily the way everything went down. This brings up the question of the responsibility of Hollywood production studios to portray real life events as they truthfully happened. Of course, there is no such "responsibility" and Hollywood execs don't give a care whether or not it's 100% true as long as the story is interesting enough to garner some $$. And I understand that it doesn't always work plot-wise or cash-wise to produce something as it happened, it just stinks for the people who are getting portrayed in a false light. Even though the studios will tell you it's "fiction" so you shouldn't form any real opinions off of the story line, passive audience members will always believe what's put in front of them.

I really thought the portrayal of Zuckerberg throughout this film was very interesting. On the one hand, you think he's a complete jerk. But for whatever reason, you also kind of identify with and pity him. There's some great writing here because his character is so dynamic and as audience members, we have a very complex  opinion of him. I thought it was important that they left out the conversation between Zuckerberg and the executives where it was decided that Eduardo's shares of the company would be the only ones watered down. We kind of identify with Zuckerberg because it's clear that that's clearly not how he wanted it to go down, but we also know he didn't give up any of his shares to save some of Eduardo's. Very interesting...

Otherwise, I just saw a couple of funny things I thought I would share. For one, Kevin Spacey was an executive producer. What the heck? Random! Secondly, there were a couple of continuity errors but one I found particularly obvious was the end scene where Zuckerburg was adding someone as a friend and the 'add to friend list' pop up was present. Wasn't that a super new feature that probably wasn't there when that scene took place in real life?

Overall, I'd say this film was really a lot better than I had expected. Oscar worthy? We'll see after some of these other contenders start showing up in the coming months but if I had to guess, I'd say no. Perhaps nominations for writing and cinematography though. Well done, David Fincher, well done!