Movie of the Week: The Social Network

   

    Movie of the Week (3/30/14-4/5/14): Many of you clicked on a link from Facebook to see this review, well without the story in our movie of the week this week, we would not have a Facebook. You already know the movie of the week, but without Mark Zuckerberg and his story Facebook would never exist. So, that is what we have here, a story of a young man who appeared to have made enemies out of his friends because he wanted something all to himself in, The Social Network.  
    Social Networking, it's what most people do everyday now, we have Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and the grand daddy of them all, Facebook. Now, Facebook might not have been the first social networking site, but it took it and made it bigger and better. That is what we see in this movie. It all starts in a Harvard dorm room when Zuckerberg gets angry at his ex-girlfriend. He blogs for hours over how he feels about her, gossip, which is what he see a lot today on Facebook. With some inspiration of twins, he takes this and begins building a site for people to get to know each each other on campus. It soon makes its way all the way to California where a man named Sean Parker wants to take it to a whole new level.
    The cast in this movie is very young with barely any veteran actors, but that didn't stop them from doing the best jobs of their lives so far. First, we have Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Mark Zuxkerberg, and he knocks it out of the park with this role. It is really hard to ever see him doing a role as good as this one again, plus he was perfect for it. As great as he was, I think my favorite performance in this film was that of Justin Timberlake, who played Sean Parker. He delivers his several monologue scenes with perfection and so much energy that I couldn't believe it was him in this role. I wish he would do more roles like this one because he was extraordinary. Armie Hammer was great too as he played the Winklevoss twins, along with Andrew Garfield, who had great character development as Eduardo Saverin.
    As great as the young cast was, they probably couldn't have done it without a veteran director in the drama genre, David Fincher. Fincher directed this film with ease and gave it his trademarked dark and eerie feeling in a place where you wouldn't thought had been in a world where Facebook was created. Where he shines is directing this young cast to performances of their lifetimes and makes it feel like a dark place where all this started. But, we couldn't have had that without the wonderful screenplay by another drama veteran, Aaron Sorkin, who put together such a great flowing film with the perfectly timed flashback or forward scenes to make this film complete. Whenever a flashback or forward occurs, it doesn't disrupted the flow of the film, in fact it adds to it. This might be the best screenplay, so far, for Aaron Sorkin.
    Since this is a drama film with a lot of dialogue, it really isn't in much need of a score throughout the majority of the picture. However, when they do use the musical score, it is used perfectly and with the score being a somber type score or a light intense score at times, it gives the film that perfect feel. We can think Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for that short, but wonderful and breathtaking piano score. One last thing that makes this movie one of the best in 2010 was the cinematography. There are no big beautiful outdoor scenes that make this film look great, but instead it is how they used smaller sets to make it look great and give it that very realistic feel. This is a dark film in a world where you wouldn't think it would be thanks to the extraordinary direction, spot on cast, groundbreaking screenplay, simple but effective score, and beautifully done cinematography. All of those things make it the third best movie of 2010, but still stars across the board.
4/4 Stars