On NFL Stadium Names in Order of Respectability
Soldier Field seems like a pretty great name to me, much better than Arrowhead.
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On Two McNally Jackson Booksellers Argue About Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom'
So far I've only read the beginning and it seemed like awful imitation DeLillo, essentially indistinguishable from Rick Moody or Benjamin Kunkel or Oscar Wao or Eggers or Foster Wallace on a really bad day. Contemporary fiction really is in a cul-de-sac. Like, I understand that brands are a pretty integral part of 2010 life, but there must be a better way to write than this series of meaningless details about people's Volvos and the little stupid comments they make about them when in conversation with other Volvo-drivers. I felt like the whole thing was this vapid exercise in showing off his research of The Way People Lived in 1980s Suburban Minnesota. Much like bad episodes of Mad Men. Like the obscenely clunky bit around page 20 where he goes, what's her name had become a Republican, and this was happening a lot these days in that neck of the woods! Why, their mayor, Norm Coleman, switched parties! And he was thinking of running for Governor! And they had this wrestler-dude who already WAS Governor! Who wasn't actually a Republican but he was a wrestler so, like, same difference.
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On Elements of Stale: How I Have Missed George W. Bush
Oh yeah.
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On Elements of Stale: How I Have Missed George W. Bush
He was the forty-third President, not the forty-first.
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On Flicked Off: "The Social Network"
Some comments:
1. The dialogue in this movie wasn't really very Sorkinese. I can barely remember a single line from it; that's how nondescript and functional most of the dialogue actually is (as it should be). I wouldn't claim that it's a very apt representation of how people at Harvard talk, but it wasn't so far off the mark to kill the verisimilitude either.
2. There's no reason why this movie had to be about Facebook. Or even about the Internet. You're asking for a completely different movie. Now, I'm going to agree that it wasn't especially good at what it was trying to do, but it's absurd to claim that a movie about the Facebook founder must necessarily be an Internet parable. Citizen Kane, to which this thing is not altogether ridiculously compared (not ridiculously because formally they have a lot in common, even though the one's far greater than the other), was about the founder of modern sensationalistic mass media, but the movie isn't about that at all. The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles's much better second film and his real masterpiece, is in large part about one of America's first big car manufacturers. But it's about the car manufacturer's love life, not the massive cultural impact of the automobile, interesting subject though that would be. (In fact, just like here, where we never see any of the Facebook users, there's only one car you ever see in The Magnificent Ambersons: the manufacturer's. All the end users are completely absent; there's no reckoning of how his product affects lives.) Here, Fincher and Sorkin have decided to make a movie about a guy who screwed his one friend out of billions of dollars and also screwed a couple of huge blond rowers. You might say that that's not as worthwhile an area of Zuckerberg's life to make a movie about when he's the fucking creator of Facebook. You probably also would've complained when Citizen Kane came out that it should've been about Hearst instigating the Spanish-American War, not attempting to turn his second wife into an opera star. Of course there's a great film to be made about the Zuckerberg-Saverin bromance (just like you could make a great movie about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and skip any serious discussion of Iraq or New Labor), but:
3. This just isn't one - not at all or even close. For one thing, Saverin's a personality-less cipher (Garfield doesn't really help matters here), so it's hard to care much about him. Why does he spend any time with Mark (or for that matter date a crazy girl who introduced herself to him by attacking him in a bathroom)? Does he even enjoy Mark's company? Do they ever spend time together in non-watching-Mark-program ways, or is that how they bond? One can only guess. And then Mark doesn't seem to really be interested in him for anything more than financial support, so when things go sour it's not exactly like we're in The Fox and the Hound territory. It was never much of a friendship to begin with. Rather, all the movie shows us is a generous dope who lends his genius college roommate some money, gets really rich when genius roommate turns that money into billions, and then wants to complain that he doesn't get to keep a way bigger share of the billions even though all he ever really did for the company was loan it $25000. And then he makes some sad faces and we're supposed to nod our heads in knowing ironic response to the tritism that the founder of Facebook doesn't get "real" friendship. Moreover, the Mark-Eduardo relationship, which should have dominated the movie because, as meaningless as its dissolution is, it's the only thing that even slightly resonates, gets buried by all the entertaining but ultimately pointless stuff with Timberlake, and the Winkelvosses, and all the "shall we or shan't we advertise" tedium that you can go read about in a book if you're interested. Ultimately it's this incoherent, semi-topical, semi-biographical mess that fails at doing either right because they tried to do both.