Video review: "Steve Jobs"

Let's be clear: although "Steve Jobs" is based on a biography by Walter Isaacson, who received the official blessing of the Apple computer pioneer, the movie is an utter fabrication from beginning to end.

Well, maybe not totally. It is about Steve Jobs. And includes conversations with several key figures in his life, spaced out over the years. And it shows the launch of actual iconic Apple products, including the original Macintosh and iPhone.

And the film depicts Jobs as both visionary and bully -- qualities that everyone who dealt with him agreed he shared in equal, plentiful quantity.

But beyond that, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director Danny Boyle have not really tried to make a factual biopic of Jobs. Rather, they are staging a sort of Shakespearean rumination on the man and the myth. Jobs encounters the most important people in his life, nearly all of whom have turned against him, almost like Scrooge with his sundry ghosts.

The movie is not just an exaltation of Jobs the technology visionary, but also an examination of how his personal failings brought him low. "Steve Jobs" is more about the idea of the man than the flesh-and-blood one who left this mortal coil in 2011.

Michael Fassbender is commanding and slithery in the title role. Perhaps deliberately, he looks and sounds absolutely nothing like the real incarnation we know from video, usually talking about how some expensive new gadget was going to forever change our lives. Fassbender's Jobs is hyper-smart, super aggressive and views every social interaction as a contest to be won.

Kate Winslet is terrific as Barbara Hoffman, his right-hand woman and fixer. Other recurring characters are Michael Stuhlbarg as Andy Hertzfeld, an early Apple developer; Jeff Daniels as John Sculley, Apple CEO and Jobs mentor-turned-nemesis; Seth Rogen as former partner Steve Wozniak; Katherine Waterston plays his resentful ex-girlfriend.

This fictional version of Steve Jobs may or not bear much relation to the real guy. But "Steve Jobs" is a gripping tour de force portrait of an overpowering personality.

Bonus features aren't terribly extensive, but they are quite meaty.

There is a lengthy making-of documentary. And not one but two feature-length commentary tracks: one by Boyle, the other by Sorkin and editor Elliot Graham.

It's too bad that actors are so rarely included in these conversations, because it makes for some wonderful insights. Maybe that'll come in "Steve Jobs 2.0."

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Review: "Steve Jobs"

"Steve Jobs" is the second screenplay by Aaron Sorkin that peeks behind the fabricated legend of an Information Age titan and finds a small boy bearing many scars who lashes out at those around him. It's not quite on the level of the Oscar-winning "The Social Network," but even a half-step below is pretty rarified territory.

Michael Fassbender plays the title role of Apple co-founder Jobs, a man who was equal parts visionary and bully. As one character points out to him, he couldn't write code or create circuit boards or really do much of anything practical, but was a master at getting those who could to synthesize products in dynamic new ways.

Jobs didn't believe in letting the customer tell you what they wanted; he would invent a need they didn't know they had, then construct a product and marketing bombardment to convince people to satisfy it.

Directed by Danny Boyle ("Slumdog Millionaire"), "Steve Jobs" is already being attacked as a largely fictional version of the man and those around him. I don't doubt that. Although based on the book by Walter Isaacson, a mostly friendly portrait in which Jobs willingly participated prior to his 2011 death, Sorkin conducted extensive interviews and research on his own, and has used the text as a mere springboard.

What we're seeing is less biography than cogitation.

Start with the story structure, which is divided into a three-act play format, each centered around pivotal product launches in Jobs' career: the Mac in 1984, the NeXT cube in 1988 and the iMac in 1998. Each time Jobs is visited by key people in his life, and spars with them, like Scrooge and his ghosts. They difference is that here the man rejects the lessons his interlocutors would impart.

There's a whole lot of big speeches and emotional tirades, always in the minutes leading right up to the moment Jobs is supposed to go on stage and wow the audience. Pretty amazing coincidence, that.

Some of what is put forward is pure bullshit. For instance, Jobs' marketing chief and major domo, Barbara Hoffman (Kate Winslet), is shown putting out fires all three times, when she actually retired in 1995. And Jobs is shown as using the NeXT launch to springboard himself back into the Apple camp, when really that didn't happen until a decade later.

So keep in mind as you watch Jobs battling with co-founder and rare friend Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) or Apple CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels) that we're not seeing stuff that actually happened. These are Sorkin's words, not the real people's.

This is Hollywood-style high art here, folks: 'Lying in order to impart a greater truth.'

That's reflected by Fassbender in the title role, a sterling actor who does not resemble or sound like Jobs in the faintest. But it's still a whiz-bang performance, portraying a man of limitless imagination and stunted emotions. Here was a guy who denied the paternity of his daughter, Lisa, for years, allowing her and her mother to subsist on welfare while he became worth billions.

The movie is essentially a series of dialogues between Jobs and one other person. With each he has a different motivation and mindset, and that evolves over time along with events. He starts out friendly with Sculley, even seeing him as a father figure, but that changes when dad orchestrates his ouster from Apple. (Though, as the movie claims, it was a mutual assured destruction scenario.) For "Woz," there is affection tempered with resentment, each man recognizing and desiring qualities in the other they themselves lack.

Michael Stuhlbarg plays Andy Hertzfeld, a key figure in the early days of Apple, who is bullied and berated by Jobs but somehow attains a sort of geeky grace with time. The relationship with Hoffman is probably the deepest, as she seemed to be the one person in his life who didn't need anything from Jobs and could stand up to him without endangering her own position.

The face-offs with his daughter's mother (Katherine Waterston) are more rote than the others and therefore less interesting; we know how it's going to play out, with recriminations and eventual demands for money, and wait for them to pass. His interactions with Lisa probably best mirror reality: halted, fractured, but gradually moving toward warmth.

"Steve Jobs" reminds me of a phrase used in another context but pertinent here: "Fake but accurate." It's a remarkable film that gets to the essence of a person largely by making things up.

What a magnificent fib.

Video review: "Moneyball"

I truly believe Brad Pitt gave the performance of his career in "Moneyball," far outpacing his overrated work in the pedantic "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

Playing Billy Beane, the general manager of the dirt-poor Oakland A's baseball club, Pitt shows layers and nuance that have been missing in his previous straightforward acting turns.

Billy is outwardly brash, even cocky in the face he presents to the his organization, the media and even his family. He has to, when he's trying to beat teams that can spend three times as much on player salaries. Inside, he's a nervous wreck who's convinced he's cursed.

With the help of a socially awkward young computer genius, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), Billy institutes the then-radical concept of sabermetrics. Essentially, this means jettisoning tried-and-true methods for evaluating players and instead relying on complex mathematical algorithms to determine the best team to be had at the lowest price.

Soon Billy and his apprentice have assembled a cast of players who are over the hill, injured or playing out of position -- what Peter dubs "an island of misfit toys." After some initial stumbles, they start racking up W's.

Director Bennett Miller and screenwriters Aaron Sorkin and Steve Zaillian succeeded in making a baseball movie with very little baseball, where the real action happens not on the diamond but in the executive offices.

Video extras are a solid base hit, but they failed to put some mustard on the offerings.

At least the basic DVD edition has a few nice features -- it's so common nowadays to find all the good stuff saved for the Blu-ray. The "Moneyball" DVD comes with a making-of documentary, a feature on the real-life Billy Beane, blooper real with Pitt and Hill, and a number of deleted scenes.

The Blu-ray version adds a featurette on selecting the movie's cast and crew and another about adapting a non-fiction sports book into a feature film. There's also a preview for the 2012 season of the "MLB" video game series.

Movie: 3.5 stars out of four
Extras: 2.5 stars out of four

Review: "Moneyball"

“Moneyball” is simultaneously deeper and funnier than I thought it would be. Based on the nonfiction book by Michael Lewis, it’s a look at how number-crunchers have changed the game of baseball through something called sabermetrics. Instead of relying on gut instincts and baseball acumen to evaluate players, this method employs computers and bean-counting to identify the best players that can be had for the least amount of money.

Now, baseball is not my thing. And mathematical algorithms are even less my thing. But instead of zeroing in on the technical aspects of sabermetrics, “Moneyball” is the story of Billy Beane. The General Manager of the cash-poor Oakland Athletics, Billy must try every year to put together a roster that can compete against teams like the New York Yankees, which can spend three times as much on payroll.

It’s a terrific performance by Brad Pitt, quite possibly the best of his career. His Billy Beane constantly operates on two levels: The brash, confident side he presents to his employees, the media and even his family; and the dark and brooding side that expects failure at every turn, refusing to even attend his own team’s games because he’s convinced he’s jinxed.

There’s one great scene where Billy confronts his newly-acquired 37-year-old star player, David Justice (Steven Bishop). It’s a standoff between two savvy baseball veterans who see through each others’ bluster, and want the other guy to know it.

Justice tells Billy he knows face-saving patter when he hears it. Billy cannily wins Justice’s loyalty by laying out their respective goals in stark terms: I want to squeeze the last bit of baseball ability out of your aging body, and you want to stay in the big leagues.

Billy’s scheme doesn’t go over so well with the rest of the organization. The head scout quits/gets himself fired after being pushed aside: “You don’t put together a team with a computer!”

The manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), at first refuses to put Billy’s new recruits on the field, such as a catcher Scott Hatteburg (Chris Pratt) with permanent nerve damage in his elbow, who Billy thinks will make for a cost-efficient replacement at first base for recently departed free agent Jason Giambi.

Howe, who’s been rebuffed in his demand for a contract extension, coldly tells Billy why he won’t put Hatteburg in: “I’m playing my team in a way I can explain in job interviews next winter.”

But Billy has faith in his young right-hand man, Peter Brand, played against type by Jonah Hill. Peter’s golden measuring stick for players is their on-base percentage – doesn’t matter if it’s a home run or a walk, though players who get walked a lot tend to come much cheaper than those walloping dingers. Peter gets his own lessons from Billy on how to deliver the news when trading or cutting a player: ‘One bullet to the head rather than five in the chest.’

The end result of Peter’s calculations is what he dubs “an island of misfit toys” – players who are injured, or too old, or playing the wrong position, who have been systematically devalued by their teams and the sport of baseball. By patching together a quilt of utility men, Billy and Peter believe they can not only win games, but change the game itself.

After a disastrous start, the A’s soon prove the naysayers wrong, even breaking the American League record for consecutive wins. Eventually, other teams come calling for Billy’s magic potion, and with big paychecks to pay for it.

The film ends with a coda that doesn’t quite tell the whole story. It says Billy is still the GM of the A’s and is still trying to win “the last game of the season,” aka win the World Series. What it doesn’t mention is that the team hasn’t even made the playoffs since 2006, and that other teams have adopted Billy’s methods with more success than he.

“Moneyball” was adeptly directed by Bennett Miller (“Capote”), who wisely concentrates his energy less on the action inside the baseball diamond than the grunt work that goes on behind the scenes.

But this film’s success is attributable mainly, I think, to some heroic script work by two heavyweights: Aaron Sorkin, who won the Oscar for “The Social Network,” and Steve Zaillian, who has his own statue for “Schindler’s List.”

The creative team decided not to make a typical sports movie, but a deep and probing film that gives us a glimpse at the high-stakes games that happen off the baseball diamond.

3.5 stars out of four

Video review: "The Social Network"

Who would've thought a few short months ago that a verbose drama about computer nerds would end up as the front-runner for the Best Picture Oscar?

But it's true: "The Social Network," which contains zero sex or violence, and consists mostly of legal depositions and flashbacks of college kids hunched over computers, was the best movie of 2010.

It's the story of the founding of Facebook, an experiment to link college students on the Web, and became a phenomenon -- and a company worth billions. It might not surprise you that Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder who was recently named Time Magazine's Person of the Year, was not universally liked by those who knew him.
Especially those who ended up suing him.

The movie, which is a self-conscious evocation of "Citizen Kane," may not bear much resemblance to the actual Zuckerberg, in the same way that Orson Welles' opus was a fictionalized account of another media mogul, William Randolph Hearst.

But in a performance of contrasting attraction and repulsion, Jesse Eisenberg paints a portrait of a young man who would change the world by bringing friends together, even as he pushed his own away.

Extras, which are identical for the Blu-ray and two-disc DVD editions, are rife with goodies.

There are two separate feature-length commentary tracks: One by director David Fincher, and another with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and cast members Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer and Josh Pence.

There is also a feature-length documentary, "How Did They Ever Make a Movie of Facebook?". Plus several featurettes on various aspects of production, including editing, musical score and soundtrack, visual effects and more.

I'm double-clicking "Like" on this one.

Movie: 4 stars out of four
Extras: 3.5 stars

Review: "The Social Network"

I cannot tell you if "The Social Network" is an accurate account of the founding of Facebook, the Internet colossus the lets people project their identity -- even create one -- on the Web.

The book it was based on by Ben Mezrich has been accused of being a highly fictionalized, one-sided affair that paints a portrait of Facebook founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a brilliant but destructive genius who estranged anyone close to him.

The irony being, of course, that the wunderkind who helped connect 500 million friends doesn't have any of his own. The few people he hadn't turned off with his abrasive, domineering personality he drove away through his obsessive need to build the millennium's Next Cool Thing.

What I can say about this film directed by David Fincher from a script by Aaron Sorkin is that it's an altogether mesmerizing tale, filled with unexpected dark humor, that plucks a lot of resonant strings about the Digital Age. On the surface it's a legal drama, but the story underneath the story is how techno-savvy nerds are using computer code to rewrite the power structures that have endured for generations.

It's an extravaganza of greed, ambition, stupendous egos and cutthroat business deals. It is certainly one of the best movies of the year.

In a bravura performance brimming with nervous energy, Jesse Eisenberg plays Zuckerberg, a computer science sophomore at Harvard who is dumped by his girlfriend in the film's opening minutes. Angry and half-drunk, Mark rushes back to his dorm and performs the Internet equivalent of a drive-by shooting, creating a nasty site called Facesmash where male students can rate the attractiveness of their female peers side-by-side.

The stunt crashes the school's servers and earns Mark academic probation from Harvard, but also demonstrates the power of social connections transported online.

When a pair of blueblood twin upperclassmen, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, pitch him the idea of creating an exclusive social networking site for Harvard, Mark immediately walks it across the street to his best friend, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), who has an affinity for business and the cash to get them started.

The site goes live and is an immediate sensation, spreading to dozens of schools. The Winklevosses -- or Winklevi, as Mark dismissively dubs them -- try to use their old-money connections to shut Facebook down. When that fails, they sue.

The narrative unfolds as a series of flashbacks framed by depositions for the Winklevoss lawsuit ... and also, Eduardo's. As we learn early on, a massive split grew between the two co-founders, leading to Eduardo suing Mark for pushing him out of the company right as it was headed to the stratosphere.

The performances are universally terrific. Armie Hammer is a hoot playing both Winklevosses -- through the magic of CGI -- portraying basically decent young men trapped by the arrogance of the bubble of entitlement in which they've lived their whole lives.

And Justin Timberlake has a sly, scene-stealing turn as Sean Parker, the rogue entrepreneur behind music-sharing site Napster. Parker gloms onto Mark like a metrosexual Rasputin, coaxing him into moving the fledgling operation out to Silicon Valley and whispering sweet nothings in his ear about becoming billionaires.

Eduardo wants to play it conservative, building Facebook through conventional advertising, but Sean senses that Mark is more of a social outcast at heart, longing to flip his middle finger at the establishment -- encouraging stunts like showing up to an investor's meeting in a bathrobe, or printing business cards that say, "I'm CEO, Bitch."

The final, compelling shot of "The Social Network" shows Mark Zuckerberg sitting at his laptop on Facebook, hitting the refresh key in search of his Rosebud. It's an exquisite moment that reveals the character's interior better than any words could. What matters if it's true?

4 stars out of four