Belated Thoughts on "The Social Network"

It took me less than a year, which is good for me, but I finally caught up with The Social Network over the weekend.  I thought it was a fine movie, engrossing and very well acted, deserving of all the praise it received.  Then I ran across a comment on a blog the other day which I had heard before but I can only now relate to, that it was a travesty that Network lost out at the Oscars to The King's Speech because it was a type of film that had never been done before.

I haven't seen King Speech yet so I can't comment on how it compares to Social Network (though as far as last year's big movies go, I liked the delirious rush of Black Swan best of all)  but anybody who thinks that the Facebook movie was new and innovative hasn't seen many films that are more than ten years old.

  Aaron Sorkin's dialogue is sharp and clever but it goes right back to the fast-paced talk of the crime films and screwball comedies of the Thirties. It's like Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur crossed with the clipped, ping-ponging pace of Jack Webb's Dragnet.  As for the plot, take away the high-tech jargon and illusion of youth and you have a story as old as the dawn of time. A guy just muddling along at his chosen profession, works his way up to becoming rich and famous but changes for the worst and ignores all his friends and loved ones.  I saw almost the same story on TCM a couple of days ago in a 1932 film called Crooner about a struggling musician who becomes a Rudy Vallee-like singing sensation. In that movie, as in most of the older cases, the star falls on hard times and, humbled, reunites with his girlfriend at the end. That doesn't happen in Network, Mark Zuckerberg ends the film still a billionaire and alienated from his one-time friends, but the story arc up to the end is basically the same.

Cooler heads have compared the movie to Citizen Kane and I see those connections although Welles' masterpiece invariably wins any comparison. Network even ends on a "Rosebud" moment.  Throughout the film it's pretty well established that wealth and power mean nothing to Zuckerberg.  He really just wants to impress Erica, the girl who dumps him in the opening scene of the film for being a clueless, asocial geek.  At the end he pulls up her Facebook page, sends her a friend request, and waits in vain for her to accept it.  It's a powerful moment, one as touching in its way as Kane's burning sled, but not some great innovation. There are only a finite number of dramatic plots in the world. Social Network for all its virtues does not create a new one.

2010 Movies

This is the time of year when everyone in Blogland seems to look back and reflect on what were their favorite movies, music, TV shows, books, etc. of the past year. The only two of those I even halfway keep up with are the first two and I really don't see or hear enough of what is new in either realm to comment the way others do.

As far as music goes I do prepare a Top 10 CD list for Cadence but that is confined to what has been reviewed in the magazine over the past year, not what came out in the actual calendar year. With movies, I simply don't go out to the theatre to see current films that much. Instead like most people these days I see most things at home through my TV, DVD player and computer. So instead I'm going to list a bunch of movies I saw for the first time in 2010 with some comments.

The Ones I Saw In A Theatre (and liked):
Black Swan, Get Low, White Material, Inception, Boxing Gym, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Art Of The Steal

Classics I Finally Got Around To:
2001: A Space Odyssey, The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three (original version), In A Lonely Place, Peeping Tom, A Walk In The Sun, The Burmese Harp

Recent Acclaimed Films:
Burn After Reading; Ghost World; The Informant!; Rabbit Proof Fence

Robert Ryan Was One Bad Ass:
On Dangerous Ground; Day Of The Outlaw - a strange Western where Ryan plays a rancher whose feud with neighboring farmers is interrupted by a band of ruthless outlaws led by Burl Ives

Assorted Asian Weirdness:
Thirst; Dr. Akagi - The story of a Japanese doctor in the waning months of World War II who is obsessed with curing hepatitis. Far less normal than it sounds.

Jazz Documentaries:
Anita O'Day: The Life Of A Jazz Singer; 'Tis Autumn: The Search For Jackie Paris - Films about the rocky lives of two great jazz singers, one who was famous and one who should have been.

The Troubles:
Hunger; The Magdalene Sisters

The Really Obscure Stuff:
Where Are My Children? - A 1916 anti-abortion film(!) directed by one of the early woman filmmakers, Lois Weber.
Antares - An intricate Austrian drama about three interlocking domestic dramas that all take place within the same apartment complex.
Christ In Concrete - A grim story about the struggles of an Italian immigrant worker in New York City that was actually a prequel of sorts to the novel of the same name. With a blacklisted director in Edward Dmytryk and blacklisted star in Sam Wanamaker.
Shotgun Stories - The story of a blood feud between two Southern families that share the same father.
Claire Dolan - An unsettingly dispassionate look at the career and self-redemption of a New York prostitute.
Carosello Napoletano - A pageant-like musical trawl through Italian history from the Renaissance through post-Mussolini with a young Sophia Loren featured in one sequence.