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    The Social Network

    Outstanding film. Probable academy award nominee.

    The writing by Aaron Sorkin is what you'd expect. Fast, precise, and smart. But it somehow works better in this than in some of his stuff.

    The casting is perfect. Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg is very good, but the best parts are Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin and Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker, the Napster guy who invested in Facebook and helped to run Saverin out. He's turning out to be a very good actor. Sean Parker is kind of a douche, apparently.

    The film starts when Zuckerberg did the Facesmash thing at Harvard, which crashed the Harvard network, which then led him to get the attention of some wealthy rowers who wanted to do kind of a dating site sort of thing that would, according to the film, take advantage of the exclusivity of Harvard.

    The film flashes back and forth between depositions from the suits against Zuckerberg by Saverin and the Winkelvoss twins (the rowers) and the events in dispute.

    It ends with the moment they got their 1 millionth user.

    It suggests that his conversation with the rich kids about programming their site did inspire Zuckerman's first idea for the original thefacebook, but he did all the work and made it much more than what they had in mind.

    He definitely did screw over Saverin, but it doesn't seem like Saverin was contributing much after the initial investment of $19k. He was pushing ad sales early, but it seems like Parker's idea of building the customerbase first was probably the smart play. He's done ok financially, and got laid out of the whole deal, but he lost his best mate.

    But it's about more than all of that. It's about what it is to be cool and how badly kids want it.

    The two lines that summarize it are at the beginning and the very end. ********spoiler*******
    Early on, his girfriend, played by Rooney Mara - the granddaughter of Wellington Mara and great great grandaughter of Art Rooney. I looked it up. - dumps him because he insults her.
    Her: I have to leave so I can go study.
    Him: You don't have to study.
    Her: Why not?
    Him: Because you go to BU.
    He then fails to apologize. She concludes by saying (more or less) "You're going to be a brilliant computer guy, and you're going to grow older thinking girls don't like you because you're a nerd, but in fact, girls won't like you because you're an asshole." I've noticed that about a lot of nerds. They assume people don't like them just out of jealousy.

    Then at the end, he's talking to his lawyer's co-counsel, played by Rashida Jones. He asserts he's not a bad guy and she agrees but advises him that a jury won't see it that way, so he should settle, which he does. She concludes "Mark, you're not an asshole, but you're trying so hard to be one."

    "

    #2
    The Social Network

    I think I would quite like to see this. And I saw Justin Timberlake in something else where he was a [strike]photographer[/strike] journalist (with the police... or something) and once you got over the fact 'Its Justin Timberlake, acting' he was very good in that. Shit film though. (Edison?)

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      #3
      The Social Network

      I've been fascinated by the facebook backstory since I saw the Winkelvoss twins being interviewed in the build up to this year's Varsity boatrace.

      The interviewer asked them about the Zuckerberg lawsuit and they seemed a little uncomfortable talking about it but the voiceover suggested that they had settled out of court at about £85m. If we are to believe, as this particular programme suggested, that they had a watertight case which proved that they were the facebook co-founders then they settled pretty cheap.

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        #4
        The Social Network

        Nice review, Reed. I'd like to see this.

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          #5
          The Social Network

          I think the film said they got $65 million. I think they did well given that they didn't really do anything. Facebook is really just a much better version of Myspace and Friendster which already existed.

          They wanted to make it exclusive for posh universities. Facebook started that way too. They don't really explain why Zuckerberg wanted his first expansion sites to be Yale and Columbia, because it says that soon thereafter he went for Baylor, which isn't Ivy-ish at all, and obviously it's not at all exclusive now. It's not clear if expanding it to all universities and then to all humans was Zuckerberg's vision or Parker's.

          Zuckerberg had the same ambivalence to exclusivity that a lot of kids do. He resented the Final Clubs at Harvard, but kinda wanted to be in one. He hated priviledged kids like the Winkelvosses, but definitely thought he was better than his BU girlfriend.

          As an aside, I think BU's proximity to Harvard hurts it, because it causes BU people to underappreciate the unique assets of their own school. The administration seems to have an inferiority complex and wants to be more like Harvard even though that's impossible. A lot of the students seem to think "fuck it, we don't go to Harvard, so we might as well just half-ass it." I was certainly guilty of that at times when I was there for an MA.

          Another aside, I think exclusive university clubs like the Final clubs at Harvard, among others, ought to be considered an embarassment. American universities ought not be promoting social division and snobbery. It's not just at places like Harvard. Even Penn State, a "cow college," has Skull & Bones and Lion's Paw and there's a fair amount of dickitude in the Greek system. W&M was actually pretty good on this. There were assholes a plenty, but it wasn't really systematic.

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            #6
            The Social Network

            Skull & Bones is at Penn State? I thought it was a Yale-only thing.

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              #7
              The Social Network

              No, my understanding is that there are lots of them, but the one at Yale is the most famous and is the one with The Tomb. I don't think the one at PSU has a house of any kind. It's just a cool thing to be in because it shows "you're special." Like a friend of a friend of mine who went to my high school got in because she rocked a 4.0 GPA and did various student leadership things (she's now a prof at Virginia Tech) and because of that she was friends with Olympic wrestler and all-around badass Kerry McCoy.

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                #8
                The Social Network

                More on the soundtrack, by Trent Reznor.
                http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/sns-reznor-social-network,0,5014620.story

                Very good job. Really enhances the movie.

                As I mentioned on that other Facebook thread, the trailer for the film, at least in the USA, uses this haunting choral version of Radiohead's Creep.

                Trailer:


                Whole song:


                It doesn't appear in the film, but it's remarkable how perfectly it fits the themes and the character. Sometimes I think that most film trailers are made by some kind of lazy automated process or perhaps by monkeys and the choice of music is usually pretty obvious and current and slightly cloying, but this one is brilliant.

                It also reminds me what a great song that is. Unfortunately, I don't think Radiohead's original version does it justice. It's all a bit too paint-by-numbers early 90s semi-grunge.

                This is a much better version, also by Radiohead, who I actually quite like even though they are not really OTF-approved.

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                  #9
                  The Social Network

                  I didn't realise this was by David Fincher. That has settled me on going to see it I think. That miserable faced child boy lead is kind of fascinating looking and all these traumatised overprivileged rich kids have to be good for a laugh.

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                    #10
                    The Social Network

                    I think exclusive university clubs like the Final clubs at Harvard, among others, ought to be considered an embarassment.
                    We've done this before, but that was certainly how I thought of them when I was there and was, I would say, the plurality opinion. And by far the majority opinion among people who had a view, as opposed to "What's a finals club?"

                    FWIW, the Winkelvosses were members of the most exclusive of the lot.

                    The settlement was USD 65 million and was "inadvertently" disclosed by the Winklevoss' (well-regarded) lawyers in marketing materials. That disclosure led to a malpractice claim against the lawyers, which the twins lost (the firm got 20% of the settlement).

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                      #11
                      The Social Network

                      How can they be exclusive if only a few students want any part of it? (although, of course, Harvard itself is something that lots more people want to be part of than can be).

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                        #12
                        The Social Network

                        They are self-perpetuating.

                        They both appeal to, and draw from, a small fraction of the class (c. 10% when I was there).

                        And Porcellian was the most difficult of the lot to get into (as anyone who did would tell you within 120 seconds of meeting them).

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                          #13
                          The Social Network

                          An interesting perspective on the film from a woman who was there when Zuckerberg was.

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                            #14
                            The Social Network

                            That's interesting. The strangest bit is that the girlfriend he had since the time he started FB never appears at all. I just learned that. That would seem to cast the whole story in a different light - and not a particularly flattering one for her. In the film, and to some extent in reality, he's alienating a lot of people around him. Obviously, there was at least one person that didn't feel totally alienated from him. But then that mean she stood by him while he was fucking over his former best friend. How was that not worth including in the story?

                            The film does, as many films do, insert hot girls as sort of a symbol of "this guy can have whatever he want." I guess I should be sensitive to the fact that women don't want to be in movies as mere "symbols."

                            But I didn't think the film was trying to show that Zuckerberg was doing it all for a hate-fuck. In fact, in the film it seems like he doesn't care about girls much at all. He just wants to be cool, whatever that means and whatever that entails. The hot girls were just trappings of the larger coolness, and not one of the trappings he's terribly interested in.

                            The fact that Parker didn't learn about facebook from some hot girl at Stanford he banged is immaterial. I think the facts show he's the type of guy who would probably do that sort of thing. As the film shows, he was involved with a too-young intern and did get busted for a cocaine thing (except it was in North Carolina, not California).

                            "Maybe for some of them, what Zuckerberg's (fictional) ex-girlfriend says is true, that they were "going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a geek. ...[but] it'll be because you're an asshole."
                            I didn't realize she was fictional. But the point is still valid. Lots of geeks think people - not just women, not even mainly women - don't like them because they're geeks, when really it's because they're just not nice people. I knew at least a dozen of those people in high school, a lot in college, and that describes about 90% of the philosophy grad students and profs I met.

                            And I sense that may be true of Zuckerberg. He's definitely deaf to a lot of his user's concerns about privacy and all of that. It suggests that he just wants to do what he wants to do and expects the rest of us to get with the vision, rather than the other way around.

                            Did anyone ever get tapped (or punched or whatever the word is) and reject the invite? Or was it the kind of thing that one bashed until you get invited?

                            Harvard also has that whole deal where you live in a particular house and, I'm told, generally stay there for your whole four years. MIT does that too and Yale has something kind of like that. That's foreign to me. No housing lottery? It's madness. What do you have to look forward to in college if not the chance of living in a slightly less shitty dorm?

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                              #15
                              The Social Network

                              Strangely enough, I was just trying to remember if the "official" term was "tapped" or "punched", and couldn't. Yes, some people did turn down invites (I was asked if I was interested and made it manifestly clear that they were wasting their time).

                              When I was at Harvard, there was a lottery for Houses (a concept based on (but not quite like) Oxbridge residential colleges for the Brits)). All freshmen lived in Harvard Yard, with no choice as to where. You turned up where the admissions office told you to on the appointed day, and only then found out who your suitemates were (there are very few singles in the Yard). In the spring of your Freshman year, you entered the House lottery (either individually or in a group), ranking your first three or five choices in order (again, I can't remember). Most people got into one of their top three choices, but not everyone did. The afternoon when the results were posted was a big deal.

                              After I left, Harvard switched to the system that Yale had already had for a number of years, where one is assigned to a House (or in Yale's case, a "College") when you accept. You still live in the Yard (or Old Campus) for your first year, but know where you will be spending the next three. That has led to the homogenisation of the Houses, which is good in some ways and bad in others (they each had rather distinct personalities when I was there, though not as distinct as they did in the "Master's Choice" era, when the professor who "ran" (and lived in) the House had a veto over each student who wanted to live there (amazingly, that lasted through the 60s). You also have housing lotteries within each House (you don't live in the same room, or with the same people, for all three years).

                              Comment


                                #16
                                The Social Network

                                I think at MIT you get assigned, but then can pick and a lot of people just chose to stay where they are. There were four math geniuses from my high school the year behind me and they all went to MIT and all lived the same building all four years.

                                It's cool that at least a few of the faculty and grad students are involved with the undergrads in the house set-up. Are they all expected to do that at some point? In my experience, grad students and faculty at big research schools want as little to do with the undergrads as possible.

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                                  #17
                                  The Social Network

                                  No, it's something you volunteer for, and a way to get free housing and make a few bucks. The professors who serve as "Masters" are generally very into the whole undergraduate education thing (they also get ridiculously nice houses and a staff).

                                  Yo-Yo Ma was the "Music Tutor" in my house my senior year and hosted a couple of parties for us. He's a genuinely good guy (and his wife is wonderful).

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                                    #18
                                    The Social Network

                                    It's good that Harvard has some faculty that care about the undergrads. At a lot of research universities, caring about the undergrads is considered a sign of weakness, and not conducive to tenure or a glorious career.

                                    I had an international econ prof at W&M who was fresh off her PhD and had been at tutor, I guess its called, and lived with the undergrads at Harvard. But I think she was struggling with the transition. It felt like she was trying too hard to be our friend and worrying if everyone was having a good time and felt included and not enough on just teaching international econ. The class was too easy. Not that I was complaining at the time, but I don't know shit about international econ.

                                    I think that's why people who couldn't name one other professional cellist, like me, know who Yo-Yo Ma is. He's personable. He's interested in education and other people and what not so he gets on Sesame Street and does great interviews on Fresh Air and so forth.

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                                      #19
                                      The Social Network

                                      Strangely enough, I was having a rather similar conversation with the mother of one of the player's on ursus minor's Little League team, who is a professor who did her Ph.D at Harvard, and worked with (or at least knew) many of the same professors that I did (though she is significantly younger than I am).

                                      What we concluded was that certain groups of Harvard professors were so full of themselves that they treated their grad students just as poorly as the undergrads, which created a certain bond of shared misery that caused grad students and undergrads to bond.

                                      It is completely surreal (but quintessentially Upper West Side) to be discussing such things while trying to keep score and monitor pitch counts for 11 year olds.

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                                        #20
                                        The Social Network

                                        It's good that you keep a pitch count.

                                        I looked up that prof of mine. She got tenure at W&M but then she and her husband went to Rutgers. She's in the women's studies dept there. Her husband was chief economist for the Labor Dept for a while and is now in Rutgers school of public policy among other things.

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                                          #21
                                          The Social Network

                                          Saw this today, very good indeed, as Reed says, thanks to the pacy, witty script and the quality acting. Though even without knowing much about the Facebook back story, you could tell it was highly fictionalised - for example (SPOILERS), the one millionth user coming moments after Eduardo is humiliated and ousted, followed later the same day with Parker getting busted for cocaine with the intern. Plus, in a film about computer geeks you have to spice it up with sex in the toilets, some top Henley rowing action, and a crazy girlfriend trying to set her boyfriend's flat on fire. But then you can always go home and google an approximate version of the actual story.

                                          My sister's pressing me to go on Facebook now she's finally online at home, although I've never been arsed. Is it something that's going to cause me to waste even more hours of my life sat here on my arse staring at a screen?

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                                            #22
                                            The Social Network

                                            I'd love to know if the Winklevoss twins had given Mark Zuckerberg:-

                                            a) a contract
                                            b) a deposit for the work

                                            From what I've read/heard, they hadn't.

                                            Anyone can have a good idea - not many people have the conviction in their idea to properly get contracted/non-disclosure agreemented up and properly hired developer(s).

                                            If the Winklevoss boys truly believed in what they had thought of, they would own Facebook right now.

                                            As it is, they thought they could take advantage and take the piss out of a socially awkward geek and lost.

                                            They were lucky to get what they got.

                                            Comment


                                              #23
                                              The Social Network

                                              I saw this on Wednesday, and thought it was really good. As has already been mentioned, Timberlake is ace, playing Sean Parker as a butthead - I don't know how accurate this is but it makes good cinema. The twins are similarly unlikeable, and appear to have lucked out getting what they did.

                                              Thoroughly recommended.

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                                                #24
                                                The Social Network

                                                Parker comes off In interviews a lot like Timberlake plays him. He didn't first learn of Facebook from a Stanford undergrad he just shagged, but he seems like the kind of guy who might do that, so the scene works. He has been pushed out of several companies and he did get into a cocaine-related jam while partying with a young intern from Facebook, but it happened in North Carolina and not the same day as they hit a million users and screwed over one of the original partners.

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                                                  #25
                                                  The Social Network

                                                  The odd thing for me about the introduction of Parker is that the 'other' partner in Napster - Shawn Fanning - was way more famous than him.

                                                  Before this film, if you asked anyone who invented Napster and they wouldn't answer 'Shaun Parker'.

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