Catfish

This review is full of spoilers, so I recommend not reading it if you haven't seen the film first.

"Catfish" is a moderately entertaining look at how Facebook and other online communication breeds obsession and strange franticness, for its first 3/4. But when the film in its last quarter decides to make a big reveal, it becomes much less interesting, much less direct, and much less ethically sound.

The filmmakers, Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, have not gone the Casey Affleck route and admitted that they've made a mockumentary, so there still is legitimacy in the positions of considering it real or fake. Thinking of it as real, I side with my reader Cristina Acuna, who asked: "Why is nothing private anymore?" The film is about how Ariel's brother Nev talked to people he'd never met or seen before. However, it drifts beyond the innocuous. It begins when a girl from Michigan sends Nev paintings of his photographs. He engages in insane amounts of talk on email and chat, branching beyond the girl, Abby, to her mother Angela, and finally to her half-sister Megan. He starts to, through Megan's Facebook photos, develop an interest in her. They get up to the point (with sweet talk and everything) where if they met each other, they'd really be in a relationship. So Nev decides, when out west, to go.

When they are at another stop, Nev starts to find some problems. He finds that Abby's supposed art gallery hasn't been in operation for years, that Megan keeps sending him songs she apparently covered, but instead ripped off of Youtube and the rest of the Internet, and that her ranch is empty. But what should be an anvil drop isn't when we find Angela at home, holding Megan's phone as well as hers, painting, and updating over ten different fake Facebook profiles. If this film is real, it's exploitative to the max and I don't think that it should have been made into a movie for everyone to see. That they did means that either the Schulman and Joost are the imposing scoundrels everyone says they are, or they set it all up.

I think the film could get off pretty much unscathed (if a bit cheesy) if it were fake, save one thing: at the end of the film, there is a listing that one of Angela's mentally-challenged sons died. To create that sort of stuff in the way that Schulman and Joost (may) have to me is somewhat inexcusable. If the film is fake, they obviously put it in there to try to fake authenticity. But it just sort of makes me sick.

So it's a paradox: the film is shaky either way (much like Simon Abrams noted about "Exit Through the Gift Shop," in a piece I disagree with all the same but still admire). Ariel told me that it was as real, and if he wants to go that way, let him, though I'm unsure of what good that does the movie. C+

Leaving the Parlor: Facebook and The Exterminating Angel

I saw Luis Bunuel's "The Exterminating Angel" two nights ago, an intense and draining film considered by many to rank among the best of all-time. It left me a little cold, but it provided me with very profound insight. The situation in the film, that of people who psyche themselves out of leaving a parlor and who go on to consider the simple act of walking away impossible, strikes me as relevant these days. After about a year and a half (with a couple of breaks in between), I tossed my Facebook account.

Excuse my heavy-handedness when I say that Facebook is the veritable Parlor of the Internet. It works much the same way as Bunuel's, based on the same "herd mentality" (as Zadie Smith noted) and desire to keep the status quo. It's hard to quit: why leave when no one else is leaving? To stay may seem innocuous, as Facebook is "free." But is it really? Monetarily, yes. But there are other things one can lose by continuing to be a member of the site, such as time, and, most disturbingly, dignity. For the latter: consider Facebook Stalking. This is defined by urbandictionary.com as "a covert method of investigation using facebook.com; good for discovering a wealth of information about people you don't actually know." Would a good person do this in real life? Probably not. But Facebook is transformative, just like Bunuel's parlor, and people aren't who we think they are. It is tempting to say that they "aren't themselves" online, but who is to really know? Maybe this is the "real them." When the options are available, people are capable of a lot of things.

Friends have seen Smith's New York Review of Books article "Generation Why?" and Gary Shteyngart's novel "Super Sad True Love Story" as effective anti-Facebook advocates. But I find the parallels between the website and Bunuel's film especially chilling. There are people who fancy themselves casual users of the site. Of these, there are some who actually are. But then there are those who say that they are just staying the morning, and who end up there a whole lot longer. For them, a wake-up call (or a piano piece played again) is necessary.

The Social Network

David Fincher's "The Social Network" is definitely an exciting film. It uses montage-style pacing throughout the entire film, and that's where its drive comes from. The film finds Jesse Eisenberg turning in the absolute best work of his career to date, where he takes a big step forward from "Zombieland" and "Adventureland." He plays Mark Zuckerberg, an amazing computer programmer who's at Harvard. After he crashes the networks of the school with a website that compares Harvard girls (stemming from being jilted by his girlfriend, played by Rooney Mara), he gets the notice of three elite club members (Max Minghella as Divya Narendra and Armie Hammer, who pulls off a double-role, as Olympic crew member twins Cameron and Tyler Winkevoss), who want to start a Harvard-based social network called The Harvard Connection and want Mark to be the programmer. What Mark does is take the idea, give the three the cold shoulder, and start making his own version of the site, which he thinks is "cooler," called thefacebook.com ("putting the whole social experience of college online"). He justifies this plagiarism by pleading "I didn't use their code!" Pretty desperate, eh?

He pulls in his buddy Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) as CFO, as Saverin is very good at finances. He then goes about designing the features that all Facebook users (including myself) are familiar with, like Relationship Status (which is the icing on the cake), and finally, putting it on the internet. With a little help from Eduardo's membership in the Phoenix club (thus having the email addresses of all the members to send the site to), the site outperforms what anyone thought it would, expanding across campuses and eventually reaching the eyes of ex-Napster founder and current paranoid creep Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), who wants to get himself involved.

Imagine this already pretty complex plot (as Scott Foundas noted) funneled through 3 different narrative levels: (1) Mark's hearing when he's sued by the Winklevoss twins, (2) Mark's hearing when he's sued by Saverin, and (3) the time of Facebook's creation and inception into the culture. It must be said that however clunkily this first works, the film irons itself out and does this narrative structure pretty well.

This flashback/flashforward device is one of many ways that this film is similar to Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire." Another would be their good technical qualities ("Social"'s consisting of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's score and the tinted photography by Jeff Cronenweth). The most important, though, would be that these films would be very hard to continuously rewatch (just like, as Ebert said, Fincher's own "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which also has a similar build). "The Social Network" will also get pretty dated, which is a risk run by Fincher: to make it the "movie of the moment" (as I believe Peter Travers called it) or to make it a film that can outlast its release.

The film is well-acted, with Eisenberg possibly deserving a Best Actor nomination. Garfield also turns in some interesting work, as he goes from angry to scared surprisingly in an instance over the course of two scenes. Timberlake is pretty good as well, but his performance (as the man who may have somewhat screwed him over early into his music career) sometimes drifts into that "Justin zone" that works on Saturday Night Live but not here. I do appreciate moments of the club scene, where he describes the birth of Victoria's Secret (as well as Napster), while Zuckerberg sits puzzled. The film's sort of under-treatment of Parker's womanizing of the underaged is disturbingly offhand.

The screenplay, by Aaron Sorkin, is witty almost to a fault. Every line is a zinger, and although most of them are funny, when they don't work, they really don't work. And just about every character in the film has a dramatic exit, which is a little annoying. The film also ends in a somewhat disappointing way, although I perfectly understand it. I just was so captivated by the film that the sort of minor ending that they chose didn't help. On another note, it's an interesting thing to see the levels at which Ben Mezrich's books are adapted. Consider this film and Robert Luketic's "21." Similar subject matter and source material, yet one goes to the Oscars while the other one counts its cards. B