The Social Network
This is truly the Citizen Kane of our time, but it’s only accidentally brilliant. Know idiot and delusional Aaron Sorkin tries to suck Zuckerberg’s cock while maintaining eye contact all the time, but it backfires and both look like absolute idiots.
This was released at the right time too, before all the brouhaha with inciting genocides and shit. 2010 is just two years after Obama’s team exploited the algorithm, Cambridge Analytica was in the far future.
The script is painful to hear at times. You can tell some parts that the writer thinks are devil-may-cry fuck yous to the establishment sound to normal people as incredibly shitty scumbag behaviour. And “pulling rank” with money, yet another mark of the asshole.
This is where the accidental brilliance comes from: the writer, being the privileged fuckwit he is, sees a mere son of a dentist laugh in the face of literal aristocrats that can pull a face-to-face with Larry freaking Summers as a massive victory for the American Dream. Justice and American Exceptionalism are alive and well, generational wealth doesn’t matter and we are all the same.
You can do it too, just break a couple eggs to get there.
The script is very uneven, painful at times, so they got kids without star power for all parts. Ironically, nearly all of them became stars afterwards.
Sorkin himself even shows up as an evil ad exec. Other like-minded real pieces of work that show up as minor characters: Bill Gates, Larry Summers, Peter Thiel.
Of course, Armie Hammer playing literal billionaires that rub shoulders with royalty is a brilliant casting choice. No acting is really required.
You can tell this is fiction, as if Peter “Namibian Uranium Mine” Thiel would even be in the same room with a black guy. At least when both have their clothes on.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.