Social Network

Bea says: Think the women's movement is pointless and irrelevant, or has achieved all it needs to? Go and see this film - it might change your mind. Whilst the mostly unsympathetically portrayed, socially inept young men of the film create Facebook, their young female peers' roles are limited to - ignoring them until they become famous due to Facebook, and then obligingly removing their clothes whilst drunk and/or high.
A fascinating film, which left me feeling deeply disturbed, and even, at one point, considering never using my Facebook account again.
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Cecil says: We saw this at the wonderful Byrd Theatre in Richmond Virginia. 700 people filled the auditorium at my guess:- a real vindication of the $1.99 policy of the cinema. As usual, a great scene-setter with Bob at the Wurlitzer before the feature film.

But, like Bea, I can't say I came out of this film feeling good about the world. Sure, I'm an occasional Facebook user, and have even tracked down some long, lost friends through its system. But I don't buy in at all to this constant need for updates, for gossip, for news in less than bite-sized chunks. And it kind of depressed me that the people in front of us and beside us in the cinema felt the need to check their phones every 20 minutes or so as the film went on.

This is, of course, the story of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook: The social misfit, the obsessive, the angry and vengeful billionaire. Very well acted by Jesse Eisenberg; and it was probably a great script by the maker of the TV series West Wing, but rather like in West Wing everyone spoke so fast in such complex jargon that I could have done with a rewind button every 5 minutes just to keep up with the pace and dialogue.

I'm not sure what message we are supposed to take from the film. My two thoughts were mainly: how awful all these characters were and how empty their lives (though that probably sounds really patronising); and then at the end I was left wondering HOW did they make their millions? How come the guys who put $500,000 into the company decided to invest? If money is the point of all this, how on earth did it actually make money?

But above all it felt soulless, and I left the cinema in much lower spirits than I had as Bob disappeared below stage with his wurlitzer...

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