Social Network = Citizen Kane (?)
I just saw 'The Social Network' the other night and I loved it... *no spoilers*
it really is about guys who don't know any nice intelligent women and wouldn't know how to talk to them if they met them, they can only relate to women as trophies: objects.
But that isn't the main point or purpose of the movie... and I think it does hold up in comparison to Citizen Kane:
In Citizen Kane you have a powerful man who built a communications power structure with his newspaper while destroying the lives of the people around him (and also treated women as trophies) and at the end of a long life (which was successful financially and disastrous personally) the only thing important to him on his death bed is that one childhood moment of happiness with his sled.
It is a movie about the changes in society and the definition of power....
And Social Network is too, only it is a new modern age when the billionaire isn't even out of college, and his powerful communications structure exploded into being in less than a year and encompasses millions of people around the world. Now days everything happens faster and happens bigger... but you could really go through the two films and find so many similarities, while the differences just seem to point to the difference between the 1920s - 30s, and the new computer age when newspapers are dying and success online comes and goes in the blink of an eye.
Jesse Eisenberg's performance as Mark Zuckerberg was astonishing, and definitely Oscar worthy! But I was impressed with all the performances, and frankly I didn't think that Justin Timberlake had it in him: his performance as Sean Parker (the creator of Napster) was really excellent.
So even though you may have zero interest in facebook, that isn't important because the film is not about facebook (just as Citizen Kane was not about The San Francisco Chronicle), I recommend Social Network: it is about the growing power of the internet, about the way people can exploit that power (and each other), and it is about how success really doesn't mean anything to someone who is lonely and isolated, which is really what both films were basically telling us....
So I thought it was pretty great....
it really is about guys who don't know any nice intelligent women and wouldn't know how to talk to them if they met them, they can only relate to women as trophies: objects.
But that isn't the main point or purpose of the movie... and I think it does hold up in comparison to Citizen Kane:
In Citizen Kane you have a powerful man who built a communications power structure with his newspaper while destroying the lives of the people around him (and also treated women as trophies) and at the end of a long life (which was successful financially and disastrous personally) the only thing important to him on his death bed is that one childhood moment of happiness with his sled.
It is a movie about the changes in society and the definition of power....
And Social Network is too, only it is a new modern age when the billionaire isn't even out of college, and his powerful communications structure exploded into being in less than a year and encompasses millions of people around the world. Now days everything happens faster and happens bigger... but you could really go through the two films and find so many similarities, while the differences just seem to point to the difference between the 1920s - 30s, and the new computer age when newspapers are dying and success online comes and goes in the blink of an eye.
Jesse Eisenberg's performance as Mark Zuckerberg was astonishing, and definitely Oscar worthy! But I was impressed with all the performances, and frankly I didn't think that Justin Timberlake had it in him: his performance as Sean Parker (the creator of Napster) was really excellent.
So even though you may have zero interest in facebook, that isn't important because the film is not about facebook (just as Citizen Kane was not about The San Francisco Chronicle), I recommend Social Network: it is about the growing power of the internet, about the way people can exploit that power (and each other), and it is about how success really doesn't mean anything to someone who is lonely and isolated, which is really what both films were basically telling us....
So I thought it was pretty great....