In Contention

Tag: The Social Network

  • OFF THE CARPET: King…for the moment

    Tom Hooper’s “The King’s Speech” is on top of the world right now.  Telluride buzz was hot and it carried all the way through the Toronto International Film Festival to a coveted People’s Choice award.  The race is already being boiled down in some quarters to this old school Academy play versus a Gen-Y instant classic opening in just under two weeks.  You couldn’t ask for more if you were The Weinstein Company with this film as your prize pony…

    …except maybe a season half as long as it actually is.  Hooper’s film finds itself in a very precarious spot right now.  Just ask awards consultants at Paramount Pictures.

    After coming out strong with the of-the-moment “Up in the Air” last season, taking the same Telluride-Toronto crowd-pleasing path, their film slowly boiled down to an also ran and even came up short in the one category it seemed assured going into the Academy Awards.

    It’s easy to peak early in an Oscar season.  It takes tactical endurance to really come out on the other side with something to show for yourself and “The King’s Speech” is burning fuel fast and early.  But I imagine if anyone understands this it’s Harvey Weinstein, who, if he does find himself in a battle with “The Social Network” for the big prize, will be going toe-to-toe with one of his former Miramax executives, Cynthia Swartz (who has overseen Best Picture marches for “Crash,” “No Country for Old Men” and “The Hurt Locker” in recent years).

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  • 9/20 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Timberlake’s Oscar hopes, Brolin’s peculiar suggestions, flurry of Toronto purchases

    • Tom O’Neil wrangles up perspectives on Justin Timberlake’s Oscar potential for “The Social Network.” [Gold Derby]

    • Steven Zeitchik sits down with “Catfish” directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. [Los Angeles Times]

    • Debating the ethics of movie spoilage on a user-generated web encyclopedia might be the very definition of futility, but the Gray Lady gives it a shot. [New York Times]

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  • OSCAR TALK: Ep. 32 — What’s hot out of Toronto, ‘Social Network’ steals the thunder, ‘The Town’ comes out strong, ‘I’m Still Here’ has no clothes

    Oscar TalkWelcome to Oscar Talk.

    In case you’re new to the site and/or the podcast, Oscar Talk is a weekly kudocast, a one-stop awards chat shop between yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood. The podcast is weekly, every Friday (except today) throughout the season, charting the ups and downs of contenders along the way. Plenty of things change on route to Oscar’s stage and we’re here to address it all as it unfolds.

    Apologies for the tardiness this time around. Anne has been in transit from Toronto and we kept missing our windows, but she’s back home now and we offer a little more for you to chew on this weekend. Let’s see what’s on the docket…

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  • WEEKLY WRAP: Venice winners, Toronto bites, ‘Network’ raves

    • Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” surprised many by taking top honors at the Venice Film Festival; we took a closer look at the Lido winners.

    • Meanwhile, we were considerably less than wowed by the festival closer, Julie Taymor’s “The Tempest.”

    • This week’s Off the Carpet column reflected on the unusual depth of this year’s Best Actress race.

    • A race that subsequently got even deeper as Lionsgate made the biggest acquisition thus far of this year’s Toronto fest: Nicole Kidman’s comeback effort “Rabbit Hole.”

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  • Could Sorkin’s ‘Social Network’ be considered original?

    I’ve been hearing for a while now that Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay for “The Social Network,” credited in the film as an adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s “The Accidental Billionaires” (covered by Guy in Page to Screen here), could conceivably be considered an original work by the Academy.

    The first clue was the fact that Sorkin and Mezrich were writing their material separately.  My understanding was Mezrich would send Sorkin pages and they would compare ideas and notes, but Sorkin was not working from a published work and was not “adapting” it into a screenplay.  It kind of recalls the manner in which Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke worked on “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

    I’ve got a few calls out to some folks to firm this up, but I’m thinking more and more that the case may be perfectly made for an original screenplay classification.  Meanwhile there’s a big, fat (as always, amazing) Mark Harris piece in New York Magazine that deals in some detail with all of this.  But, well, it’s still just a little unclear.

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  • 9/17 Oscarweb Round-up

    • The Chateau Marmont, setting of Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere,” is ready for its close-up across the pond. [The Independent]

    • Jay Fernandez reports from the Washington premiere of “Waiting for Superman,” which received a “monumental stamp” when Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called it a “Rosa Parks moment.” [Hollywood Reporter]

    • Trent Reznor releases five tracks from his and Atticus Ross’s wonderful score for “The Social Network.” [Nullco]

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  • You are here: ‘Catfish’ and ‘Social Network’

    I was instructed very early on by studio friends who saw “Catfish” during Sundance, when it was still looking for a buyer, not to read anything about it.  I have, as a result, instinctively dodged every bite and nugget about the film over the last few months, so much so that you all probably knew more about the film than I did when I walked into the Arclight for last night’s final press screening (I’m also good at procrastinating).  And after all, it’s been a sponsored Twitter trending topic for a few days now.

    What I saw was an absolutely brilliant piece of filmmaking that is staggering when considered in the year of “The Social Network.” It’s a study of the here and now with just as much focus and an even greater emotional context (if you’re looking for it).  And whether it sought to be or not, the film is just as defining of where we are as a society as David Fincher’s effort.  Releasing it two weeks before “The Social Network” is also brilliant marketing strategy.

    After the jump, I am going to talk about “Catfish” in extensive detail.  There will most certainly be SPOILERS, and I urge you (unless you couldn’t care less, of course) not to click through until you’ve had a chance to see the film.  (The poster even implores, “Don’t let anyone tell you what it is.”)  That’s about as clear as I can be in the way of a warning.  I’d also stay out of the comments section if you want to steer clear of spoilage.  So, if you’d like to proceed…

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  • Dishing ‘Social’

    Devin Faraci, formerly of CHUD, and CNET.com’s Caroline McCarthy talk “The Social Network” on G4’s Attack of the Show:

  • ‘The Social Network’ interactive trailer

  • 9/15 Oscarweb Round-up

    • Anne Thompson sits down with Golden Lion winner Sofia Coppola, from Venice. [Thompson on Hollywood]

    • Patrick Goldstein on Hollywood’s on-going lover affair with mobster cinema. [The Big Picture]

    • Pete Hammond concurs with the Oscar buzz surrounding “The Social Network” after a slew of screenings in New York and Los Angeles. [Deadline]

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  • Schemers trying to control their little worlds

    It’s intriguing that two of the most press shy entrepreneurs of the internet age – Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker – have suddenly participated in two dense magazine profiles this month.  It’s almost as if there was a film depicting key moments in their lives set for imminent release and they want to set the record straight.  Oh…

    Really, though, I was struck reading this Vanity Fair profile of Parker that the character described is perhaps a bit more interesting than the more simplistic character Aaron Sorkin wrote in “The Social Network.” In the film, Parker is portrayed by Justin Timberlake as a paranoid, mean-spirited misfit.  A misfit (and party animal) he may be, but Parker is lauded in the piece as a “higher being,” “generous” and “loyal,” and frankly comes off as something of a saint.

    The writer does mention that Parker reached out to potential sources to smooth out his image, but even still, the accounts of generosity become a bit too consistent to ignore.  Parker works well as an antagonistic figure in the film, mind you, but I think an instance of some of this would have added a nice layer of depth to the character.  After all, Zuckerberg sure is dealt with in complex hues, and is all the more fascinating for it.

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  • 9/14 Oscarweb Round-up

    • Ben Affleck discusses “The Town” across the pond. [Daily Telegraph]

    • The Best Picture race begins to take shape for Sasha Stone. [Awards Daily]

    • Michael Cieply talks to Kevin Spacey about his work as “Casino Jack” and his involvement with “The Social Network.” [New York Times]

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  • Fincher’s ‘Social Network’ nails human frailty

    The best films are rarely about just one thing, but rather that one thing as reflected through a variety of narrative prisms.  And there is something to be said about a film that manages to distill an era while profoundly conveying a character study within.

    David Fincher’s “The Social Network” may be the quintessential story of young Machiavellian entrepreneurship in an age of streamlined communication, but it is also a story of the social disconnect that can be as galvanizing as any other source of ambition…for better or worse.  The Mark Zuckerberg of Fincher’s film uses the sting of that disconnect to spark a fire of creativity, and the film very much concerns itself with the gauntlet of his motivation.  (The New Yorker’s profile, culled from rare extensive interviews with the 26-year-old billionaire, is a wonderful primer for the dramatization.)

    In some sense, the film could be viewed as a distant cousin of Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan,” both presenting protagonists flawed by their own aggressive drive.  But while Nina is a tragic figure of self-destruction, Zuckerberg is a tragic figure of self-alienation.

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  • 8/31 Oscarweb Round-up

    • Peter Sciretta rounds up early reactions to Mark Romanek’s “Never Let Me Go.”  It’s across-the-board praise and admiration. [/Film]

    • Nathaniel Rogers takes note of one of the biggest Oscar sleepers: Jacki Weaver in “Animal Kingdom.” [The Film Experience]

    • Sasha Stone talks marketing in the age of cynicism, ending with a hope that the Academy can turn a blind eye to the snark of tweeners.  (It almost always does, no?) [Awards Daily]

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  • OFF THE CARPET: Once more into the breach

    So nine years ago yesterday I started a crappy, embarrassing little amateur site on Yahoo!’s now defunct Geocities platform and called it Oscar Central. It was a way to blow off steam in film school, maybe fold an offline hobby (Oscar-watching, predicting, obsessing) into an online community that seemed to already have healthy numbers. Plus, hey, it was the early years. I figured some low tech internet training was far from the worst thing I could be doing.

    That’s a long way of saying today kicks off my 10th season of Oscar coverage online, and in that decade, plenty has changed. One thing has remained the same, however, and that is a focused interest, both from myself and a growing readership, in the admittedly arbitrary and somewhat solipsistic process of awarding the “best” in filmed art and entertainment.

    To put it more succinctly: Here we go again.

    The 2010-2011 Oscar season takes its first real steps Wednesday as the 67th annual Venice Film Festival sets sail on the Lido. That opening night will see Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” get its toes wet as Fox Searchlight tests the season’s waters, perhaps with a worthy follow-up to the director’s 2008 awards title “The Wrestler,” perhaps not. Two days later the 37th annual Telluride Film Festival lifts its curtain in the mountains of Colorado, bringing any number of “surprise” bows (we all know what they’ll be but, again, I’ll respect the fest’s wishes in this space), before Toronto’s media circus fills in the cracks and brings us to mid-September and the fiery beginnings of Oscar’s 83rd barbecue.

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  • 8/30 Oscarweb Round-up

    • Rooster Cogburn must be a leftie this time out, because his patch covers his right eye!  See! [American Thinker]

    • Naturally, Thomas Friedman goes to bat for “Waiting for Superman.” [New York Times]

    • Lane Brown points out a strong season of lead actress contenders on the horizon. [Vulture]

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  • Defriending ‘The Social Network’

    With David Fincher’s “The Social Network” already accruing positive buzz ahead of its New York Film Festival premiere next month, its handlers would do well to pre-empt the inevitable pushback over matters of factual accuracy — complaints that have already dogged the film’s sloppy source book, Ben Mezrich’s “The Accidental Billionaires” (discussed at length in Page to Screen here).

    No one will (or should) be seeing “The Social Network” for an exhaustive journalistic essay on the origins of Facebook. Rather, what we’re hoping for from writer Aaron Sorkin is a tangy interpretation of the facts that reaches for broader truths about the social-networking generation; dramatic flexibility, then, is the order of the day. Needless to say, the powers behind Facebook, including founder (and “Social Network” protagonist) Mark Zuckerberg, don’t quite see things that way. This recent New York Times piece goes into the friction between them and the film’s producers.

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  • Foundas on ‘Social Network’: “Big, brash and brilliant.”

    If you’ve read the script for Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Network” then you know it’s powerful stuff waiting to be unleashed on the season.  Well, Scott Foundas is first out of the gate with an extremely early critique of the film, and it’s all thumbs up from Brett Ratner’s best bud.  To wit:

    David Fincher’s The Social Network is big and brash and brilliant…It is nominally the story of the founding of Facebook, yes, and how something that began among friends quickly descended into acrimony and litigation once billions of dollars were at stake. But just as All the President’s Men—a seminal film for Fincher and a huge influence on his Zodiac—was less interested by the Watergate case than by its zeitgeist-altering ripples, so too is The Social Network devoted to larger patterns of meaning. It is a movie that sees how any social microcosm, if viewed from the proper angle, is no different from another—thus the seemingly hermetic codes of Harvard University become the foundation for a global online community that is itself but a reflection of the all-encompassing high-school cafeteria from which we can never escape. And it owes something to The Great Gatsby, too, in its portrait of a self-made outsider marking his territory in the WASP jungle.

    To sayt he least, in most conversations I’m having leading up to the awards season, Fincher’s film is perhaps the most anticipated.  If even half of these sentiments are fair, then I think it’s safe to say a bona fide contender is comin’ round the bend.  Read the rest of Foundas’s thoughts at Film Society of Lincoln Center.

    “The Social Network” opens the New York Film Festival September 24.