Year: 2010

I decided to catch an 11 am public screening of John Madden‘s Israeli Mossad guilt thriller The Debt, so I waited in front of Toronto’s Elgin for nearly a half-hour in hopes of finding one of the film’s publicists and mooching a free ticket. The nearby TIFF volunteer waited 25-plus minutes to inform that talent (i.e., Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, Sam Worthington) wasn’t expected. And therefore no publicist. So I paid $15 Canadian bills for admission and it’s now about to begin.

And here’s John Madden arriving onstage and offering remarks. So the volunteer gave me a bum steer. Thanks.

Today’s films include Richard Ayoade‘s Submarine, Adam Wingard‘s A Horrible Way To Die, John Madden‘s The Debt, Tom Tykwer‘s Three, John Cameron Mitchell‘s Rabbit Hole, Justin Lerner‘s Girlfriend and perhaps a peek-in revisiting of Alex Gibney‘s Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer. Of these seven, I may see three. I’m blowing off The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town (i.e., the Bruce Springsteen doc) as it’ll be on cable fairly soon.

Three exceptional DVD Beaver captures from Criterion’s The Thin Red Line Bluray, available (a) 13 days hence, (b) a week from Tuesday, and/or (c) 9.28.

This is probably the Thin Red Line shot that inspired the line “I’ve never met a leaf I didn’t like.” I don’t know who originally said it, but this line stuck in the same way “a movie about cufflinks” stuck to Martin Scorsese‘s The Age of Innocence and “a movie about a man walking through the woods” stuck to Anthony Minghella‘s Cold Mountain.

(a) “Polls say we’ll be throwing the Democrats out in November and bringing back the Republicans. Which is like hearing the words Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein and saying ‘I’ll take Frankenstein'”; (b) “Not all the troops exiting Iraq are coming home. Some are going to Afghanistan in order to fight those who attacked us on 9.11, who are now in Pakistan. It’s all perfectly logical if you just don’t think about it.”

Phillip Kaufman‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (’78), a new Bluray of which came out yesterday, didn’t work at all as a metaphor for what was happening in the culture 32 years ago, and therefore didn’t seem like quite the right thing. Creeping conformity wasn’t an issue for anyone I knew in the late ’70s, or at least not on the level that applied when Don Siegel‘s original came out in 1956.

Which is why, for me, the Siegel still resonates. The Kaufman version is an eerie, well made, grippingly acted thriller — it’s a higher-grade thing than the Siegel — but if Martian invaders were to take over the world and issue an edict stating that no one will ever be permitted to watch it ever again, I wouldn’t be happy — but I wouldn’t be devastated either.

I did two interviews after returning from New York around 10:30 am or so — Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky at 12:30 pm, and then Let Me In director Matt Reeves at 2:30 pm. I love both these guys and especially their films, but interviews are killers. They eat your schedule and vaccum your day up — they just take everything. And then I tried and failed to upload, convert, edit and post both video files before the 4:45 pm screening of Sarah’s Key that I’ve decided is important. Next comes a Bruce Springsteen-Ed Norton stage interview happening at the Bell Lightbox around 6 pm, and then two parties.

It hasn’t been a productive day. Not every day is. You have to take this in stride. But I need to say for the record that Second Cup’s policy of charging $6 per hour for internet access is a rip. Because it is.

In a recently posted New Yorker profile of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Social Network screenwriter Aaron Sorkin tells Juan Antonio Vargas that the film is “a classical story of friendship, loyalty, betrayal, and jealousy.”

Sorkin describes Zuckerberg as a “brilliant guy who’s socially awkward and who’s got his nose up against the window of social life. It would seem he badly wanted to get into one of these final clubs” — one of the exclusive, elite-within-elite party clubs at Harvard.

“In the movie’s opening scene, according to a script that was leaked online, Zuckerberg and his girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara), a student at Boston University, sit in a campus bar, exchanging disparaging zingers. (‘You don’t have to study,’ he tells her. ‘How do you know I don’t have to study?’ she asks. ‘Because you go to B.U.!’) Erica takes his hand, stares at him and says, ‘Listen. You’re going to be successful and rich. But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a tech geek. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.’

“Sorkin insisted that ‘the movie is not meant as an attack‘ on Zuckerberg. As he described it, however, Zuckerberg ‘spends the first one hour and fifty-five minutes as an antihero and the last five minutes as a tragic hero.’ He added, “I don’t want to be unfair to this young man whom I don’t know, who’s never done anything to me, who doesn’t deserve a punch in the face. I honestly believe that I have not done that.’

“Despite his goal of global openness, however, Zuckerberg remains a wary and private person. He doesn’t like to speak to the press, and he does so rarely. He also doesn’t seem to enjoy the public appearances that are increasingly requested of him. This makes the opening of The Social Network an awkward situation. It will be the introduction that much of the world gets to Zuckerberg.

“Facebook profiles are always something of a performance: you choose the details you want to share and you choose whom you want to share with. Now Zuckerberg, who met with me for several in-person interviews this summer, is confronting something of the opposite: a public exposition of details that he didn’t choose. He does not plan to see the film.”

Kevin McCarthy‘s indelible screen moment happened in 1956, in the last scene of the original version of Don Siegel‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. His small-town doctor character is wildly freaking out — terrified, out of breath, screaming — in the middle of congested traffic as he tries to warn everyone about the pods.

The point, of course, was that creeping conformity was spreading across the land, etc. (Allen Ginsberg‘s “Howl” was saying roughly the same thing, if I’m not mistaken.) This ending was jettisoned in favor of a slightly more upbeat one with a skeptical doctor (Whit Bissell) at a medical clinic, and at long last a heeding of McCarthy’s warning.

McCarthy — a good actor and, in my anecdotal opinion, a gracious and very likable man (I spoke with him at a Los Angeles party in the the mid ’80s) died yesterday at age 96 — now that’s a life.

HitFix’s Drew McWeeny also saw The Social Network last night and, like me, had kittens.

David Fincher‘s The Social Network (Columbia, 10.1) is Zodiac‘s younger, geekier, greedier brother. That means it’s good, as in really good — a movie for guys like myself and critics like Eric Kohn, Karina Longworth and Robert Koehler to savor and consider and bounce up against, and basically for smart, sophisticated audiences to savor in every cultural corner, and….can I just blurt it out? It’s the strongest Best Picture contender I’ve seen so far this year, and in saying this I’m obviously alluding to Inception.

I flew down from Toronto today [i.e., Monday] to see it in New York. Huge pain to travel all that distance and deal with customs and all the usual crap, but it was worth it and then some. Because now I have something to live for and feel great about. All hail screenwriter Aaron Sorkin for the deliciously hyper, cyber-attuned dialogue, and for the bracing, always inquisitive, often confrontational vibe in each scene.

The Social Network is a high-velocity art film about greed and human values and shadows and feelings of loneliness surrounding and blanketing everything. Fincher is up for Best Director, guaranteed. In fact, everyone involved with this sucker will benefit. Cheers to Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti and Michael De Luca for producing yet another edgy, high-toned drama that will probably play best with people who (gulp) went to college.

It has a Best Actor performance in Jesse Eisenberg‘s turn as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. He’s playing a certain kind of intellectually remote monster — an incandescent asshole with brains — and yet a semblance of humanity (or at least Zuckerberg’s idea of what humanity might be if he managed to find a piece of it within his parched and arid soul) seeps out of his pores. He wears a kind of mask the whole time, but emotional leak-throughs occur.

On top of which Network has two Best Actor-level supporting performances from Andrew Garfield as Zuckerberg’s former partner and his one and only emotional pally Eduardo Severin, and Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker — the best thing Timberlake has done since his largely unseen turn in Alpha Dog.

The Social Network is tight and fast — like His Girl Friday on Adderall, like a machine gun — and a gripping moral fable about how Zuckerberg fucked certain people over, and is perhaps even a tale about where GenY really and truly lives. It’s a whipsmart, brilliantly written, wired-tight drama about greed and soullessness and the emptiness of the Facebook dream (i.e, all my “friends” really like me), and a superb revisiting of the Treasure of the Sierra Madre fable, which is to say a reconsidering of what gold does to men’s souls.

It’s only mid-September but The Social Network, a story of hard 21st Century hunger for the hot thing and more-more-more, feels to me like the absolute shit. I’m not able to figure how it isn’t at the front of the pack now. A movie might come along that’ll “beat” The Social Network, but I can’t imagine right now what that might be, and I know whereof I speak. The contenders have been thinned and there are very few Best Picture contenders that seem anywhere near as good in a high-throttle, smart-ass sort of way. This is brilliant Fincheresque agitation, brilliant madness — the kind of movie that makes the struggle of my life seem worth it and then some.

You know you’re seeing something exceptional and amazing when all you can think about 20 minutes into it is “I have to see this again as soon as possible.” This is significant. I’ve been seeing film after film at the Toronto Film Festival that has made me want to open my veins in the bathtub, and then this thing comes along and I’m going “oh, fuck… this is good…please let it go on longer…this is it, I love it, I’m in Zodiac Heaven, thank you God.”

And now that I’ve ruined or at least colored the Social Network waters for some by over-praising it….sorry. 6:51 am Update: I had a graph up about the ending last night — I’ve since taken it down.

I’ve recently been thinking I need to stop reading scripts because the final movie versions always disappoint. I loved Sorkin’s script, but I was a bit afraid of what I might see. So I knew it was something exceptional when it hit me that The Social Network is better than the script. The last time this happened was when I realized that the projected version of Rushmore was better than Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson‘s script.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross‘s original music is award-quality — don’t even think about disputing this. Ditto Jeff Cronenweth‘s cinematography and the editing by Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall — all world-class.

There’s a scene between Eisenberg and Timberblake in which they excitedly discuss in a club where Facebook should go, and the sound mix is just astonishing. It’s the first scene of this kind in which the music is mixed at the proper realistic levels sot you can hear the dialogue the way it always sounds to anyone trying to converse in a club with extra-loud music, which is to say barely.

I could go on and on about this film, but it’s 12:27 am and I have to fly back to Toronto on an 8:55 am flight tomorrow morning, or this morning, I should say.