Every once in a while over the last year and a half or so, I’ve thought to myself: “Oh, yeah. I remember hearing that some pirate army of douchebags is making a Facebook movie. Now THAT’s gonna be a train wreck.”
I need think such things no more. Some pirate army of douchebags HAS made a Facebook movie, and it IS a train wreck, at least judging from the godawful trailer online at thesocialnetwork-movie.com which, incidentally, suggests that you recommend it on Facebook.
Apparently troubled by my not yet having ulcers, ReelAdvice.net expresses its earnest wish “That this would give justice to the Facebook story,” a glurgy Hershey squirt of a line that makes me want to rip my eyeballs out just having read it, either to ensure I never read such a vapid sentiment again, or just to punish myself for living in a world where people worry about giving justice to the Facebook story.
But the FIRST rule of The Social Network is that you do not tell anyone about The Social Network; furthermore, you want The Social Network? You can’t handle The Social Network
Yes, this puppy is helmed by Fight Club and Se7ven director David Fincher, and if that’s not enough to make you want to cram Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box, it’s penned by A Few Good Men and West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin.
Did I just call Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher a “pirate army of douchebags?” Why yes, yes I did, and as they tack their rampant prows, load up their punt guns and wave their swarthy cutlasses in my general direction let me observe that I am doubtless alone in my utter disregard for the talents of either Fincher or Sorkin, both of whom at various times have I loved and lost, and both of whom at other times I’ve wanted to punch.
On the other hand, the apparently less-bitchy-than-Thomas-Roche Washington Post today finds those two auteurs’ involvement in The Social Network to offer a glimmer of hope that the film won’t be a warmed-over piece of garbage, despite the fact that, as the Post’s Anne Hornaday puts it, “Can there be anything more potentially obnoxious and inert than a movie about an Internet start-up?”
I give her an answer: Not unless you consider Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which in my book lost him every shred of street cred he’d earned with The West Wing. Even a score by Trent Reznor can’t save The Social Network, especially judging by the shirt-rending trailer.
Ill-defined projects like this, predictably about nothing and with nothing to say about something that’s actually important, don’t make me feel hopeful for the project because Sorkin and Fincher are involved; they make me mourn a world where the — I’m just gonna say it! — fascinating and exciting world of the tech business is reduced to a parade of the same old empty, familiar, trite Hollywood cliches we’ve all seen a zillion times in flicks about dance studios in the ghetto and barbershops losing their lease.
The only thing that could possibly make this flick seem interesting to me is a little controversy, maybe a lawsuit or two but — wouldn’t you know it? Every time Mark Zuckerberg has a tantrum about it, he sounds like a snatchy debutante rolling her eyes and stomping her Uggs because people are talking about her. Even the weird news that the film’s star has a cousin working at Facebook can’t rouse me from my slumber.
But, hey, watch the trailer and love it as much as I do: Zombieland‘s Jesse Eisenberg pirouettes amid an overdirected orgy of pathos worthy of the last ten minutes of The Godfather; Eisenberg vomits an overwrought earnestness that, if Mark Zuckerberg actually possesses, should have long ago gotten him a double-tap. That’s one of my rules, Jesse. Now friend me.
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