Tuesday, October 26, 2010

The Social Network (David Fincher), 2010

Some short thoughts:

Fincher and Sorkin have created a film that succesfully avoids to talk about the issues which are the center of said movie. It was not really a dissapointment, since I expected this feeble attempt to convert all plausible sociological and economic reasons for the rise of Facebook into a light psychological portrait of its creator.  The glossy shots of young girls are welcomed, the rest is insulting to the intelligence. Other than nerd-hate for normal thinking girls, it is difficult to understand the reasons for Sorkin´s treatment of females.  We are also told many times that money is not important, and then again flashed with impossible amounts of it. So it is important or not? It is not really the reason for this enterprise? Why is not discussed in the film the contribution of people to the site? Who are all those programmers in the background? Why Sorkin treats banal additions to Facebook ("the wall") as revolutionary contraptions that require intelligence to create? After all the appeal of FB initiated due to Harvard´s appeal, not the technology aspect of the site.  The secret was in its simplicity in dealing with the desire of exclusiveness of some people.  But in the movie this is treated as a given fact, as something obvious, as the right of Harvard kids to rule the Universe.

IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/

Friday, October 1, 2010

Make Way For Tomorrow (1937) - Leo McCarey

Amazing film from the Great Depression era, relentlessly dissecting the treatment of old parents by their middle class children in the United States. As Orson Welles put it "it can make a stone cry", indeed.
There is not too much that I can add to the experience of watching this film, but to admire how it takes you from one point of view to another, from understanding the childrens´ motives to despise them. It contains several genial moments, subtle interactions, an acknowledgement of the viewer, some silently spoken lines that are suppossed to be too strong to be heard, and an ending that puts anybody in tears (5/5).