As totally expected, and as I predicted on 9.25, N.Y. Press critic Armond White has panned The Social Network.

The Social Network “is simply Hollywood’s way, post-Obama, of sanctioning Harvard’s ‘masters of the universe’ mystique,” he writes. “It’s an attempt at glorifying a contemporary aristocracy-cumplutocracy through flattery of Zuckerberg and his ilk. Like one of those fake-smart, middlebrow TV shows, the speciousness of The Social Network is disguised by topicality. It’s really a movie excusing Hollywood ruthlessness.

“Here’s the truth: Citizen Kane was not about a brat’s betrayal, but about a sensitive braggart’s psychological and philosophical shift inward. The Social Network is more like Hollywood’s classic film industry self-romance The Bad and the Beautiful. Yet that Kane-lite film never excused its bad-boy protagonist’s sins and ended magnanimously by converging his three injured parties’ points of view into one beautifully clarifying narrative. It admitted our cultural compromises; this is TV-trite. In The Social Network, creepiness is heroized.”

TSN “excuses” the sins of its Mark Zuckerberg character?