When David Thomson, author of the mammoth and hugely enjoyable “Biographical Dictionary of Film” was in town to promote it, I asked him about “The Social Network.”
He said, “Today a film like the new David Fincher film gets hugely overwritten. Because it seems to harken back to what movies once were. That movie did modest business in its first week and it will die. That is not a mainstream movie. Nobody knows how to make a mainstream movie. Television knows. Great work in filmmaking these days is on television. And people love it. People have an amazing capacity and interest in watching on smaller and smaller screens.” Thomson went on to say that while he found the film very engaging, he had a feeling that “David Fincher does not like people very much.” Ouch.
In a similar vein, writing for The Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz summarized the film in this way:
“The acclaimed new movie ‘The Social Network’ is a two-hour exploration of a single question: Is Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, an assh—? It begins with a conversation between Zuckerberg and his girlfriend in which she asserts he is an assh—, and it concludes with a conversation between Zuckerberg and another woman in which she tells him he isn’t an assh— but that he seems to be trying very hard to be one. What the makers of ‘The Social Network’ fail to understand is this: Whether Mark Zuckerberg is or is not an assh— may be the least interesting and most trivial question to ask about him. So while the extraordinarily well-made movie that revolves around it has all the trappings of a searing investigation into the character of the world’s youngest billionaire, it is finally as meaningful as a Facebook posting about what your wife’s third cousin had for lunch.”
Thomson’s new edition of his Biographical Dictionary of Film would make a great gift for a film lover.