Embedded below, please enjoy an assortment of Sean Bean deaths set to music from the insipid Dead Island trailer.

Strung together with the music suggests a man trapped in a Groundhog’s Day sort of limbo, or perhaps it’s a work meditating on mortality.

Or it can represent how I felt sitting through Dark of the Moon.

For a complete list of films (there’s some fairly obscure/weird stuff in here), clicky here.

Oh, SPOILER ALERT by the way.

The trailer for the Footloose remake/reimagining is here! Soon (soon!) we can expect remakes of Flashdance and Dirty Dancing to follow! Hopefully we’re on the verge of an 80s dance-movie renaissance! Or at the very least 80s Kevin Bacon movies. So until that Tremors remake comes callin’, sate your Kevin Bacon lust and clicky below the break to watch the glorious (awful-looking) Footloose trailer.

Kenny Wormald’s Ren MacCormick looks like someone who’s been Marty McFly’d from the early 90s (that hair!). I think I’d be able to enjoy the film if Ren were actually lost in time, teaching these squares of the 2010s how to dance like the care-free 90s.

A cursory look at Wormald’s IMDB page reveals an array of background dancer roles in films as diverse as You Got Served and a DTV-sequel to Center Stage. Does he have the chops to stand up to Dennis “General Hawk” Quaid? We’ll have to find out when the movie’s released come October 14.

[Source: MTV]

Warning: The review below contains very minor spoilers for Super 8. If you’re so spoiler-averse you can’t stand to learn that ‘the good guys win’ and other relatively inconsequential things, beware!

Confession time: I’ve never seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I wasn’t even born when E.T. came out, and I think the last time I saw that I was like seven. I have no connection to this nostalgic Steven Spielberg people keep touting while hailing J.J. Abrams’ Super 8.

The Spielberg I nostalgia-bomb myself with is the guy in the 101st Airborne jacket, the guy behind Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, Munich or Schindler’s List. Spielberg’s films fill the viewer with a certain sense of awe, wonder and adventure, and even Spielberg’s weaker entries fare far better than anything Super 8 can muster.

Super 8 is a mess. A mess that starts off promising but ends up falling apart under its own weight. This is unfortunate because there is a bevy of strong performances from the movie’s cast of kids and some interesting concepts but, like most summer schlock these days, the concept is the only aspect of the film that’s been fleshed out. Abrams had an idea for a movie and shot it before anyone finished writing the last act.

Super 8 revolves around youngster Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), who shares a distant, difficult relationship with his father (Kyle Chandler), especially after the accidental death of Joe’s mother. To complicate matters, Joe’s smitten with the lovely Alice (Elle Fanning), daughter of Louis (Ron Eldard), a man connected to Joe’s mother’s accident. Also in the mix is Joe’s best friend Charles (Riley Griffiths) with whom he and his cadre of friends are making a zombie movie on the titular film medium.

The performances of the kids are easily Super 8‘s strongest suit. Normally in a movie like this it’s easy to run into the usual kid stereotypes (the shy nerd, the gadget whiz, the jock, etc) but none of that is here. My personal favorite is pyromaniac Cary (Ryan Lee) whose constant response to the mayhem is an excited, braces-filled “you guys see those explosions?” The potty-mouthed banter between the kids is pitch-perfect, and at its best it’s reminiscent of Stand By Me. Elle Fanning’s got some impressive chops, and it’s hard to believe she’s all of 12 or 13 years old when these scenes were shot.

Most movies would take these characters and make them token kids to be shuttled off to the background. What Super 8 does get so, so right is to have these kids be the center of the film. Mostly. The movie works as long as the story stays focused on the kids, which is only the first two-thirds or so.

Honorable mention goes to Kyle Chandler as Joe’s dad. Joe’s father is the deputy sheriff of the town, and he wonderfully channels Roy Scheider’s Chief Brody from Jaws. The comic-relief shenanigans and banter he and his small-town sheriff crew get into is giggle-mining fun while it lasts before the movie’s vapid final act.

Take all of this and combine it with incredibly strong performances from all the kids and you have what amounts to the set-up for a very sweet coming-of-age tale on its own. However, Abrams tosses on top of this an alien/monster movie and this is where things begin to fall apart. Normally this sort of melding of genres yields good dividends, so that you have strong characters amid high-concept fare like alien invasions or a zombie apocalypse (see Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland on how to do this right). Unfortunately, the elements that make up the characters are so disparate from the alien invasion plot. None of the characters get any sort of arc, and the strong characterizations and narratives built up at the start of the movie are given nowhere to go. It all boils down to dumb, dumb explosions.

Shaun of the Dead is about Shaun growing up, his relationship with his parents and his relationship with his friend Ed. All of this is drama set against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse. Zombieland, too, is a movie about families and relationships that happens to have a zombies in it. Both of these examples are hailed as zombie-genre greats, but when you examine them closely you’ll find that these movies aren’t zombie-a-minute kill-fests; zombie encounters are actually rare in these movies and most of the story is centered on the characters.

Even Spielberg’s own War of the Worlds is about Tom Cruise’s character trying to be a father to his kids rather than about how the government or army responds to an alien invasion.

When you apply this formula to Super 8, the movie should be about Joe’s grief for his mother and repairing the damaged relationship with his father. Lamentably, the drama ends up taking a backseat to big, blurry CG-aliens and tanks blowing shit up.

There are so many obvious ways for Super 8‘s various loose ends to be resolved, and Abrams simply chooses to not resolve them at all.

Why set up Joe and Alice’s fathers’ conflict through the first half of the movie only to solve it with a single brief chat in the last act? Why have the relationship and love-triangle between Joe, Charles and Alice only to have Charles take a back seat during the climax? Why does all of this build to our protagonists wistfully waving bye to an alien who has spent most of the film viscerally tearing apart and eating innocent townsfolk?

Everything regarding the alien and it’s rampage and chase feels half-baked and not really thought through. Our main villain for most of the story is Noah Emmerich’s evil Colonel Nelec hellbent on capturing and exploiting the escaped alien. But Nelec is killed off long before the start of the last act. This leaves our rampaging monster as the only remaining villain, who is basically given hugs and a teary sendoff by Joe. Huh?

Throughout the film, Joe keeps a locket belonging to his mother close at hand, as a security blanket. At the end, the alien is finally escaping, forming a ship above our heroes by drawing metal objects (soldiers’ rifles, bicycles, cars) around the town water tower. One of the last things to go is Joe’s locket, which he finally lets float up towards the mass of metal coalescing above the town.

Joe is finally letting go of his grief and moving on, and this is indeed quite nicely done. Unfortunately this touching scene is linked directly to the escape of the horrific, murderous monster finally escaping from Earth. Even the strongest, most concise narrative element in the film is unsatisfying and confused. Is there another version of the script where the monster isn’t chowing down on human flesh, but is instead a misunderstood, cute alien to be saved?

On the positive side, Michael Giacchino’s score is excellent, reminiscent of his brief Godzilla-esque track from the ending of Cloverfield. The movie lovingly sprinkles excellent choices of period music coming in through walkman headphones, car stereos or the cast of kids singing “My Sharona” together. Really, any movie that features The Cars and Blondie in such a way earns a couple extra points right there. The 80s-nostalgia is there but never overwhelmingly precious or obnoxious.

Speaking of obnoxious, the infamous J.J. Abrams lens flares are present here, but thankfully never at the seizure-inducing level of Star Trek. However, the CG-effects themselves do bring the film down a couple notches. The train crash at the start of the film and star of the trailers is exciting, well-edited, bombastic stuff but is marred by featherlight CG-trains twisting all over the screen.

The alien itself, a cousin to Cloverfield‘s monkey-squid-whatever, seems over-designed with at least six limbs and eye-slits. The eye-slits slide back to reveal big E.T. eyes which is neat but it also seems like his entire skull can slide apart? We can’t ever tell because we never really get a decent look at it. I get that maybe the movie’s keeping the monster hidden for most of running time, like the shark in Jaws, the xenomorph in Alien or the wampa in the original Empire Strikes Back. The difference in these movies, though, is that we still get an idea of what the monster is capable of. We get a glimpse of the wampa as being some sort of mean yeti (with teeth), or we eventually see the tail and gruesome head of the xenomorph (with teeth). The shark in Jaws is a shark (with teeth); it’s not like the shark suddenly vomits graboid-tongues to coil around Quint. But the Super 8 monster’s apparently got tentacles that come out of its arms or maybe its chest? Who knows? It’s all way too confusing and blurry, and, in the end, it’s boring.

Is a movie with a promising set-up bad because its ending is so whiffed? Your mileage may vary, but Super 8 certainly can’t be called a modern classic or be worth any of the hyperbolic praise it has received. The movie could have been something spectacular but ends up being just more forgettable summer fare.

BOTTOM LINE: A strong, interesting coming-of-age story marred by an awful, confused script. See it for the amazing performances by pretty much the best cast of kids in any movie ever, followed by an utterly baffling ending. However, make sure to stay for the credits which includes the full zombie-film Joe and his friends were working on. It’s so good it almost makes up for the last reel of the movie.

6.5/10

Preface: This was supposed to be a review of Super, but I couldn’t help contrasting the craziness in Super with the craziness in Sucker Punch. Both James Gunn and Zack Snyder are swinging for the fences with these movies, but Gunn hits it out of the park while Snyder epically whiffs. Both movies have the distinction of being totally batshit insane, but only one of them resonates.

If another movie comes out this year that I enjoy more than Super, I’ll be very surprised. I think a lot of people will see trailers for Super and write it off as just another Kick-Ass or another piece of shit movie that Rainn Wilson makes to pay the bills between seasons of The Office. Frankly, those are perfectly reasonable assumptions. However, the people who are making those assumptions probably aren’t familiar with James Gunn. And why should they be? The man put together the criminally under-seen Slither as his feature debut, which was disgusting and twisted and perverse in all the best possible ways, and then he sort of dropped off the face of the earth (not so! PG Porn! –Dan). Which is too bad, because at a time when up-and-coming filmmakers like Zack Snyder are generating lots of buzz, it’s James Gunn’s filmography I’ll be more interested in from here on out.

With Sucker Punch, Zack Snyder may think he’s made the craziest movie in the history of the medium, but what he doesn’t seem to understand is that his amazingly shot, beautifully rendered set pieces mean next to nothing if the audience can’t connect to the characters involved or the story being told. I do admire Snyder’s effort to try and elevate his extravagant multi-million dollar light show with an undercurrent of stuff like gender politics and objectification and commentary on geek culture but none of it is nearly as profound as he thinks it is. He’s not a good enough storyteller to make coherent sense of any of it. Despite Snyder’s best intentions, Sucker Punch ends up being painfully hollow and a complete mess.

It seems like Sucker Punch was conceived as a series of action scenes, and from there Snyder worked backward and tried to make the story work by shoehorning in his half-baked subtexts and metaphors. Maybe that’s not actually how it went down, but that’s how it feels. It’s a terminal case of Michael Bay-syndrome where the director’s hubris goes completely unchecked and any potentially interesting ideas are swallowed up by a total assault on the senses and an aggressively stupid plot.

As insane as the action sequences are (and they are quite insane) they razzle and dazzle on a purely visual level and nothing more. Snyder can stand toe to toe with the best with regards to visuals, but here there are no real stakes and no real sense of danger and I’m left wondering why I should care. Or why I ever need to hear “Where is My Mind” in any movie ever again. Seriously, ‘Where is My Mind” over an insane-asylum montage? Come on. Snyder’s song selection is so painfully contrived and on-the-nose that it completely undercuts all the surreal strangeness he’s trying to bring to the table with these extended musical numbers in the first place. I’d be willing to cut Sucker Punch significant slack if there were actual songs and dances like in Moulin Rouge (that would be truly transcendent) but there aren’t any. What we get instead are slickly edited music video montages with remixes of songs we’ve already heard a million times already. It’s hard to be invested in anything going on in the movie because of the sloppy storytelling and the massive emotional disconnect from the characters. Sucker Punch is thrilling and exciting, but in the same way that a Kanye West music video is thrilling and exciting.

Enter Super.

James Gunn’s very personal and very heartfelt superhero story revolves entirely around Rainn Wilson’s character, Frank. He is the heart of Super and a huge part of why this crazy-ass movie works as amazingly as it does. Frank is a real and honest and genuine character and Gunn understands that we need a character like this in the middle of all the insanity. Frank is the emotional core of the film, a place where the audience can find its footing amidst all the chaos. It’s the fundamental difference between “crazy stuff happening” and “crazy stuff happening to someone we care about” that Snyder seems to either be oblivious or indifferent to.

All we know about Sucker Punch’s Baby Doll is that she accidentally wandered onto the set of Marilyn Manson video in slow motion and got somebody killed. In Snyder’s vision, this is perfectly acceptable characterization.

Meanwhile, the narrative for Super is fairly conventional. Frank is a mopey loser-type who’s somehow managed to marry Sarah (Liv Tyler). The circumstances surrounding their marriage are eventually revealed and they really add extra depth to Frank and his relationship with Sarah. It’s surprisingly moving, and Gunn is unflinching as he covers a lot of raw, uncomfortable emotional ground with great dexterity.

Frank’s happiness is fleeting, though, and Sarah is soon whisked away by pimp/drug dealer/all-around scumbag Jock (an effortlessly sleazy Kevin Bacon). After a divine vision involving space tentacles, an ultra-conservative Bible-thumping TV superhero (Nathan Fillion (!!!)), and even God himself (presented à la that episode of The Simpsons where Homer skips church), Frank decides he is destined for bigger things and sets out to win back his wife as the superhero the Crimson Bolt.

Rainn Wilson is a revelation here. Reading that back to myself sounds ridiculous, but I stand by it. It’s just a tremendous and brave performance. Frank is a kind of mash up of Dwight Schrute and Travis Bickle: he’s awkward and dopey and kind of sweet, but also somewhat unhinged and delusional. Frank straddles the fine line between gentle weirdo and full-on nutjob. The movie as a whole is entirely contingent on the audience remaining sympathetic towards Frank, whether he’s weeping through a self-deprecating prayer session or brutally beating a man with a pope wrench for cutting in line at a movie theater. It’s a tough sell, and you might not believe that a sitcom guy could really bring such intensity and vulnerability and emotional depth, but Wilson really nails it.

As fantastic as Wilson is, Super’s secret weapon is Ellen Page, who plays Libby, a geeky comic shop girl who has to teach Frank about costumed heroes. Frank’s modus operandi is divine intervention; he’s not fulfilling some childhood fantasy where he punts on the Crimson Bolt costume (he’s never even read a comic book).

Page is deceptively adorable in this, which pays off dividends as the film barrels towards the finale and it becomes frighteningly clear that Libby is even more delusional and unhinged than Frank. She brings a shocking amount of intensity and sexuality to the role as her cutesy exterior is gradually chipped away to reveal a complete psychopath underneath. I was in awe at some of the places Gunn was willing to go with her character.

At this point, I guess I should mention that Super is funny. Really funny. The film is extremely dark and vicious at times, but Gunn mines comedy not from these moments of extreme violence (well, maybe he does once or twice), but from the characters that exist within them. It’s an incredible balancing act going from sudden shocking violence to tender character beats to weird slapstick comedy to honest emotion catharsis. Gunn is all over the map, but everything feels organic and, more importantly, earned.

This is where Super succeeds and Sucker Punch stumbles. At the heart of Super is a gentle weirdo going through a tough breakup; he’s real and fleshed out and just about everyone can relate to some aspect of what he’s going through. From there, Gunn takes us on a crazy ride to some really fun places and some really dark places. The audience stays tethered to Frank through all the chaos and insanity; we are invested in his motives and actions, horrific as they may be.

Sucker Punch doesn’t have that core. It doesn’t have any core. Snyder can shout from his soapbox about subtext and stream-of-consciousness all he wants, but at the end of the day there are no real stakes and the ladies of Sucker Punch are just devices to get the movie from one extravagant set piece to the next. A potentially fascinating piece of cinema collapses in on itself and fails in the most frustrating way.

Sucker Punch: 2.0/10
Super: 10.0/10

The mad geniuses of Fall On Your Sword have done it again.

As they describe it, “Spanish Ladies” is “inspired by Spielberg’s heart breaking tale of a triangular love affair set at sea.” The tangled romance of three men hunting a killer shark far outshines anything the Twilight series could possibly muster. Clicky the embedded video behind the break, and know what it is to feel love.

The longing glances between Brody, Hooper and Quint gel wonderfully with the latin beat and pulsing bass, and seeing Quint banging his head at 1:35 has pretty much made my week.

Fall On Your Sword is a group of composers and filmmakers whose members include former LCD Soundsystem maven Phil Mossman. If you’re not familiar with them, I suggest you head on over to their website. Their eclectic oeuvre is deliciously entertaining to sift through, from their original musical works such as the seminal “Shatner of the Mount” to the hypnotic “Tangerine.” The commercials they’ve done for folks as varied as ESPN and Google are definitely worth checking out as well.

Also, if I ever use anything as stupid as the phrase, “As vérité as” please feel free mock me as hard as you can.

See also: Star Trek, Super 8, Fringe, Lost (basically anything J.J. Abrams related) as well as that pretty damned great Battle: Los Angeles trailer, embedded here:

Tony Scott’s directorial output over the past decade has been rife with eye-bleedingly obnoxious symphonies of shakycam shenanigans and over-stylized mishmash. Among the most annoying offenders are his shots in which the camera dollies in a circle at ludicrous speed around something as innocuous as a character sitting at a computer or having a normal, irrelevant inside-voices conversation.

Suffice to say, I was not looking forward to Unstoppable. The last time Tony Scott played with a train set we ended up with the miserable The Taking of Pelham 123. Pelham 123’s opening scenes feature John Travolta in freeze-frame cosplaying as a member of the Village People and set against the dulcet tones of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems.” It is utterly ridiculous.

I braced myself against the seat, awaiting the inevitable wave of thumping bass, freeze frames and joyless camera-tossed-in-a-clothes-dryer action.

Jarringly, it didn’t come. Instead, Unstoppable’s title cards play over interesting shots of the train in question; filmed as some great metallic beast barely controlled by man. This is followed by rather lovely shots of small-town Pennsylvania train yards, railway bridges and the like.

The calm, idyllic opening actually makes it seem as though the movie could actually prove to be something worthwhile. It’s definitely a welcome change of pace from the jittery likes of Pelham, Domino, Déjà Vu et al. There are slower shots of quiet, working-class towns and working-class men and women wrangling giant machines.

However, once the “action” starts up you, the audience, are the collective mayor of Shakycamtown once more, and your world becomes a spinning migraine.

People tend to exaggerate Michael Bay’s over-the-top directing; Bay’s indulgences pale in comparison to the constant visual irritation of Scott’s. Unstoppable’s action sequences are bizarre impressionist pastiches of up-close shakiness and incongruous editing. Nothing that happens in one shot logically follows or matches with the next and it’s a real chore for the audience to try and piece out exactly what is going on.

Complicating this, nearly 90% of the movie is presented as faux breaking news footage, but even that fails to be immersive as the news presentations are riddled with Tony Scott-ified footage of a CGI-train flipping cars and smashing through horse-trailers. Either news crews in Tony Scott’s world place CG cameras right along the rails spinning and sputtering around, or something happened in editing somewhere along the way with Unstoppable and a decision was made to shoehorn most of the footage shot into local news overlays and graphics.

Unstoppable has a niggling insistence on stopping whatever little bit of momentum it builds up in order to toss in news report after news report, each one duller than the last. They serve only as exposition dumps to tell the next phase of the story or the next obstacle in our crazy train’s path. There’s no sort of statement on our 24-hour media consumer culture, no indictment or parody, they simply exist to avoid dead-air and get the train to the next thing it needs to crash into. Like most of Unstoppable, it’s all hollow and pointless.

A poorly executed story or series of set-pieces can be elevated by an excellent cast. Unfortunately, that’s not to be the case here. Denzel Washington is apparently not finished repaying Tony Scott’s Wookiee life-debt as this marks movie number five for the duo. Washington doesn’t exactly do much of anything outside of rehashing his working class schlub persona from Pelham.

As lovable as Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk was in last year’s Trek reboot, there’s none of that charm or charisma on display here. Pine plays a rookie conductor bumping heads with Denzel Washington’s veteran worker, and pretty much nothing happens beyond a couple scenes of dreary conversations for most of the movie.

These two new colleagues are forced to work together in order to save small-town Pennsylvania from the explosives-laden runaway train, but not until what’s probably 60% of the way through the film’s running time. Prior to this, we watch Washington and Pine shoot the shit and couple train cars. It’s not exactly dynamic stuff. These two are ostensibly our main characters but are passive and, frankly, missing from what feels like two thirds of the show.

Rounding out the cast is Rosario Dawson, who shouts into every radio and headset she can find that the train in question is “HALF A MILE LONG.” The usually-irascible Kevin Corrigan is terribly miscast as an exposition-spouting engineer hovering on the outskirts of the frame, occasionally interrupting Dawson’s “HALF A MILE LONG” tirades with random factoids to help out our heroes on the ground.

What this adds up to on the non-train side of this movie’s equation isn’t exactly mission control from Apollo 13; hell, the mission control parody in a recent episode of Community is more titillating than the dull teleconferencing action of Unstoppable. Unless you’ve got as much of a fetish for transit diagrams as Tony Scott seems to have, these characters pretty much don’t do anything either.

Really, no one in the movie does all that much of anything at all, and the movie’s a slogging bore because of it.

Ultimately, Unstoppable fails to be interesting on any level. There’s something to be said about an action movie in the Great Recession using rusting American industry as its setting, but unfortunately Unstoppable doesn’t seem interested in saying it.

Scott opts to make a movie that puts forth the bare minimum amount of effort to set up its characters and story. The relationship and rivalry between Pine and Washington never even gets close to simmering, and there are so many missed opportunities that could have been exploited regarding populist class warfare, racism, ageism, breathless 24-hour news coverage, or anything that could have made the characters or the movie engaging.

As mentioned above, the start of the movie features some great shots and sounds of the titular train. Had the movie continued along that route, this great hunk of bolts and steel could have made a great villain for our heroes to fight; instead all we get for a “villain” is Kevin Dunn having a conference call in his office. It’s boring and dull and pointless.

What you end up with is a movie whose climactic action sequence is Chris Pine hopping from a truck cab onto a train engine’s platform.

But it’s based on true events, you may be saying – why unnecessarily embellish a true event?

To say Unstoppable is loosely inspired by true events is a galling understatement. The actual event did not involve anything like dropping people out of helicopters, high speed chases, flipping police cars or crashing through trailers trapped at railroad crossings. There’s nothing really overtly wrong with this sort of stretching of actual events (see, for example, The Social Network) but it has to be done in service to an intriguing story, character or engaging and exciting action sequence. Unstoppable does none of these things and the result is a lifeless, uninteresting and boring movie.

BOTTOM LINE: Unwatchable. Powerless, passive characters and flipping cars, crashes and helicopters are conservatively sprinkled atop a huge, boring cake of faux-news footage. Save your money and spend two hours watching the local traffic/weather updates instead.

4.1/10

A David Fincher film is an event.

Seven was my very first Fincher film way back in 1995. There are scenes and images from that movie that are burned into my memory. But, like many others, it wasn’t until 1999’s seminal Fight Club that I truly became enamored with him.

Like for many of the impressionable youth of my age at the time, Fight Club was and remains a milestone film. It came out at just the right time alongside flicks such as The Matrix and was a gateway drug into cinema for a generation raised on video game consoles, Napster and the Internet (née Interbutt).

Fight Club was one of the films that made me want to learn more about the movies and their history and their creation; it’s what dragged me into digging through Blockbusters and Movie Galleries, and to explore the rest of Fincher’s distinct oeuvre over last decade.

There’s the paranoia of The Game, the strangeness of Alien 3, the Jared Leto-ness of Panic Room. I tried in vain to celebrate Zodiac while the rest of the general public ignored it in favor of Wild Hogs or 300.

And now with a new decade comes a new Fincher film that, on the surface, is completely different from anything he’s done before. He’s teamed up with the eminent Aaron Sorkin on, of all things, a Facebook movie. A business deals and lawsuits movie about Facebook doesn’t exactly spin the gears in your brain like serial killers or imaginary friends.

Shame if you had any doubts. Fincher tackles the story with aplomb, and the character of Mark Zuckerberg as realized by Sorkin and Jesse Eisenberg fits right in with the rest of the characters in the Fincher pantheon: isolated, alone, and beset on all sides by forces beyond his control.

By Sorkin’s own admission the movie is not striving for strict historical accuracy. There is little difference between “real” truth and cinematic or artistic truth (something explored in a little movie called Inception earlier this summer). Fincher gives the story a biographical vibe as we trace the conception of what would eventually become one of the biggest websites on the web with near universal global reach.

The movie could have gone the way of similar clichéd rise-to-power-and-success stories, having “fun” scenes of characters buying crossbows and Lamborghinis and giraffes or what-have-you, but Sorkin and Fincher are much more interested in finding a meaningful story within the obfuscated origins of Facebook, and have cranked out a tight and universal tale of betrayal and jealousy.

These story elements combine and play into a layered and deep narrative that, thanks to Sorkin’s script, is also blisteringly funny. I don’t mean a few chuckles here or there; The Social Network is probably the funniest movie of 2010. It’s ingenious that they’re not marketing this as a comedy but I doubt they’re having trouble filling theaters considering all the positive buzz surrounding the film.

Breathless comparisons to Citizen Kane or The Godfather are somewhat unwarranted (though The Social Network is certainly of very high quality), however they do make sense in terms of how those stories and plots are structured. The creation of Facebook becomes the centerpiece for grand drama.

While The Social Network doesn’t succinctly define a generation the same way as something like Easy Rider defined the counterculture of the 60s, it certainly articulates the 21st century milieu far better than any other motion picture. Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, status updates and the loss of privacy are all very much the world of this movie.

In every other case, something like Facebook, Twitter or its ilk are shoehorned into a script as an easy generation-gap gag which always fall flat (kid in headphones playing a PSP in the back of the family minivan loudly announces he is updating his VLOG, and the parents smile and shake their heads – kids these days). They sound exactly like some screenwriter on the subway peering over the shoulder of someone flipping through an iPhone, shivering with the-future-is-here astonishment, like Bill Clinton or George Bush staring at Mystify Your Mind screensavers with mouths agape or Ted Stevens’ Adventures in Tubeland. Here is a film that treats our fair internets seriously, as an integral part of the world rather than as a magical Jefferies tube.

The Social Network is also at times a sort of mini-history of the Internet. Friendster, MySpace, and even Cats That Look Like Hitler all get name-dropped. I half-expected a ytmnd reference to pop up in there. This is a movie about the world of the 21st century that feels like it is written in the 21st century.

Fincher and Sorkin expertly weave several themes into the creation of Facebook which is why the movie works so well. Sexual frustration and jealousy fuel the wonderful “hacking” sequence at the beginning and works itself into the conception of Facebook proper later on, as well as lots of neat references to various early Facebook memes and well-known tropes (creating the insidious “Relationship Status” field is a fun example). There are breakups and meltdowns, and much has been made of the parallels between the story’s various lawsuits delving into the no-longer private lives of the accidental billionaires while account privacy is a near-constant source of controversy for the site in real life.

While the plot point of Zuckerberg’s desire to fit into the elite college clubs is factually dubious, within the film it works because it ties into the jealousy and friendship themes it explores. Zuckerberg-the-film-character looks at other people with disdain and a distinct superiority complex and getting into these exclusive clubs would grant him the recognition and notoriety he feels he deserves from the masses. He’s basically a prick to the many, many characters more likable to the audience than he is, so if you had any reservations about Michael Cera-typecasting with Eisenberg as an awkward, shy teen, you can safely leave them at home.

By the film’s close he’s finally obtained his recognition, brandishing business cards labeled “I’m CEO, bitch!” and sitting on a company worth billions. The promise of this kind of Fuck You-badge lights up his eyes when he first meets with Napster co-founder Sean Parker (played with rock star gusto by Justin Timberlake) but by the time he’s actually gotten there it’s lost its luster from all the Machiavelli-ing and lawsuits. Eisenberg looks drained and dejected, but then again $25 billion buys a lot of happiness.

None of this would work without a strong performance from your lead to bring everything together but Jesse Eisenberg is uniformly excellent here. Eisenberg’s portrayal of the man who would be Zuck does not slip into the generic nerd-who-can’t-talk-to-girls stereotype; instead he makes Mark Zuckerberg a person who just can’t interact with people without alienating them or driving them away. The film’s cold open in the Harvard bar introduces us to Mark’s personality in an off-kilter and awkward conversation with girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara). Everything Mark says or does seems to be one or two beats ahead of or behind Erica and it is hilarious, fascinating and pathetic all at once.

If handled wrong the wrong way, this can easily turn down the road of silly Asperger territory, but Fincher and Eisenberg totally nail it. He’s pedantic and a douche, but he either doesn’t realize or doesn’t believe he’s behaving so poorly. Zuckerberg is also not portrayed as some autistic, fancy-pants Mozart prodigy either. His ideas aren’t revolutionary, but rather he simply combines the right ideas and the people all at the perfect time.

It is these ideas that cost him his friendships and relationships, yet Eisenberg makes the audience root for Mark. He’s an ass, but of the likable Tony Stark variety. You feel for him when his best friend is laying down a litany of insults through lawyers and cheer him on as he shuts down the condescending old-money Winklevoss counsel.

Zuckerberg-the-film-character is the main draw here, but The Social Network is filled with characters who snap and pop off the screen thanks to Sorkin. Having such an exceptional cast of kids tearing into that script certainly helps. The brotherly relationship between Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield, who plays best-friend, co-founder and CFO Eduardo Saverin, collapses into so much dust in such a spectacular fashion that you can’t help but feel for these guys. Timberlake does extremely well here, threatening to steal the spotlight with his nihilistic shadiness; meanwhile the haughty Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are hugely entertaining in every scene they’re in as well.

Special mention goes to the characters of the Winklevoss twins, who are yet another set of plaintiffs in one of the several lawsuits encompassing the film’s latter half. I learned after seeing the film that the Winklevoss twins are actually both played by newcomer Armie Hammer; one twin played fully by Hammer while the other is a body double with Hammer’s head tracked atop it à la Benjamin Button. It’s an astounding and seamless dual-performance, with one twin aching for Zuckerberg’s blood while the other tries to hold back in the interest of preserving a “gentlemanly” decorum. Every line that comes out of his mouth(s) is pure gold, and now that I know he was playing both roles I can’t wait to see the movie again.

And that’s really the important thing here. What Fincher and Sorkin have created is a movie that is essentially comprised of talking heads and lawsuits, and yet it’s a movie I would love to watch again and again. They have crafted a compelling story of sex, money and jealousy that is exciting, well-acted and beautifully presented.

Cinematographer Jeff Cronenworth, who worked with Fincher on The Game, Seven and Fight Club, is just as much a star here as Fincher and Sorkin. The entire movie is beautifully photographed, and anyone who fancies themselves a film fan owes it to themselves to watch this gorgeous movie. The opening half of the film is spent on Harvard’s campus, and the film is drenched in a monochromatic palette of pale yellow nightlights which is contrasted by the switches in narrative focus to the various sterile law offices where the lawyers duel. It all culminates in Facebook’s colorful and bright Google-tastic HQ with Zuckerberg on his throne and Grand Moff Sean Parker at his side.

Cronenworth maintains a shallow depth of field throughout the film, keeping the focus squarely on the characters and giving what could have been very mundane proceedings weight and life. The effect is subtle and almost subdued. However, while there are no Panic Room-style takes or Fight Club frame splicing or overt trickery, there is an absolutely amazing interlude halfway through the film at a UK regatta using tilt-shift photography. The scene is punctuated by a sped up, frantic rendition of “In the Hall of the Mountain King.”

That track of course being a climactic highlight on a moody, pulsating synth score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and is definitely the movie’s greatest strength. Slow moving, throbbing pulses grant something as simple as running towards a dorm an unholy sense of dread. Meanwhile a quiet, simple piano motif crops up periodically, an idea bobbing just near the surface of the water waiting to spring forth. It will be a crime if this film isn’t drowning in Oscar nominations.

Facebook has fundamentally altered the way we communicate with people. Back in the day when it was first cropping up, people assumed it was just another profile site like so many of the Friendsters and MySpaces before it. In the first half of the decade, no one had any idea how quickly it would morph and evolve, or how quickly people would embrace the concept.

An oft-repeated line in The Social Network, “we have no idea what we really have here” sums up the feeling. The creators say it as if speaking about a weapon or a monster, and Fincher and Sorkin gleefully take us into the dramatic maelstrom of these mad scientists’ lives.

It’s not perfect, but it’s damn close. The end of the film almost comes too quickly and it hadn’t felt like all the various storylines and vendettas had been given enough time to smolder, and cross-cutting between several different timelines can possibly get a little overwhelming, but the film does nothing to exacerbate these problems. They are nitpicks.

When you’re walking out of a movie theater to The Beatles’ “Baby You’re a Rich Man” after seeing a movie filled with such strong performances, directing, writing, score and cinematography there’s very little to complain about.

BOTTOM LINE: Citizen Zuck.The story of Mark Zuckerberg’s uncompromising rise to power makes for great cinema. This isn’t a movie about Facebook so much as it is a movie about friendship and relationships and how easily they can be distorted or destroyed. A must-see technical and artistic triumph.

9.8/10

Last week, an earthquake ravaged the greater Washington area (the ground shook a little bit and I think a mailbox may have fallen over) and the good citizens of Rockville, Maryland were aflutter the next morning, visions of Roland Emmerich’s latest apocalyptic masterpiece (prophecy???) fresh in their hearts and minds. While this unprecedented catastrophe (the earthquake, not the Emmerich movie) sent the uninformed masses running frantically to consult the nearest Mayan calendar, I was merely inspired to dust off my 2012 DVD.

It also made me realize that I’m a pretty easy mark when it comes to apocalypse movies.

Yeah, I’ll fess up to not only owning a copy of Knowing, but also to enjoying it, and not just for Nic Cage’s trademark wackiness and surreal hairpieces. Whether it’s Bruce Willis blowing up gigantic asteroids, Tommy Lee Jones directing the flow of molten lava through the streets of Los Angeles, or Roland Emmerich sticking it to Dick Cheney via ridiculous ham-fisted allegory, these movies are made for me. Well, maybe not Volcano. Volcano sucks. But interestingly enough, these movies tend to come in pairs. Armageddon had Deep Impact, Volcano had Dante’s Peak, and 2012 had Knowing.

However, I submit to you that a good end of the world movie doesn’t necessarily have to be a visceral assault on our senses. A good end of the world movie can be spiritual, small and intimate, scaled way back, and still be effective. Filmmakers can present us with a poignant tale of people reexamining their fractured lives as the inevitable rapture fast approaches. Or they can present us with the remnants of the human race, picking up the pieces in the aftermath of the unthinkable, forging onward into a fragile and uncertain future. Or they can just throw some shit together about angels and zombies and the Bible. Like I care.

So without further adieu, midway through 2010, I present you with a very different pair of apocalypse flicks.

ON PAGE TWO: LEGION

Witness the latest in cutting-edge podcast technology!*

IT CHANGES COLORS

LIKE THE CHAMELEON

IT USES THE JUNGLE

Thrill as we blabber incoherently on the following:

• Inception – IMAX, speak up Ken Watanabe, is it all a dream (and does it even matter?) – spoilers ahoy
• Predators – Brodychest
• The Social Network – the evolution of David Fincher, director of the music video for Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up”
• The Room – meeting Tommy Wiseau
• M. Night Shyamalan’s Neckbeard Army
• Machete – we demand more Jeff Fahey
• Steven Seagal vs. vampires!
• the dearth of decent Nazi Zombie movies
• Zack Snyder makes a crazy owl movie
• You can’t see the eyes of the demon until him come callin

Get ‘em while they’re hot!

Woogmoog Triweekly Podcast 07-17-2010

Straight up, now tell me, do you really wanna love me forever?

(oh oh oh)

MUSIC
Intro: Mike
Outro: Mike and Pat

*nope