Yesterday L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein, writing from a standard city-desk, big-city-newspaper, shoe-leathery perspective, cast doubt upon the general cred of The Social Network by sugggesting that its portrait of Mark Zuckerberg is, in the words of Facebook Effect author David Kirkpatrick, “horrifically unfair.”

One retort (which also posted yesterday) came from New Yorker critic David Denby. He says in his Social Network review that “the debate about the movie’s accuracy has already begun, but David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin, selecting from known facts and then freely interpreting them, have created a work of art…accuracy is now a secondary issue.”

“Movies tend to exaggerate retellings of true-life stories for dramatic emphasis, and…like, whatever, Francis Bacon wasn’t a naturalist,” I wrote a few weeks back. “Welcome to the art world. People want strong points of view, and basically to see the non-provocative stuff pruned down so the provocative stuff can be savored all the more, and so the core issues confronting characters can be addressed in some detail. Didn’t William Shakespeare play more or less by these rules?”