The Social Network (PG-13)
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First of all, I want to say this movie is probably better than my rating suggests (though I do consider two and three quarter smileys a good rating), and I definitely very much enjoyed watching it. I just don't know if I'm ever going to feel the need to watch it again.

Anyway, it begins in a pub. A Harvard student named Mark (Jesse Eisenberg) is sitting there with his girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara). I pretty much immediately thought he had Asperger's. And, speaking as someone with Asperger's, I also pretty much immediately thought he was an asshole. I kind of felt bad for him because he clearly couldn't tell that he was being an asshole, and probably would not be capable of preventing himself from being that way. So it's not his fault. But when Erica broke up with him and called him an asshole, I was of course completely on her side. I'm generally nowhere near as bad as he seemed to be, but even so... I don't feel like I deserve to ever be with anyone, because I can at least get kind of like that, occasionally. Most of the time I'm nothing like that, but a lot of the time that I'm not being that way, it's because I'm consciously forcing myself not to be, because I would hate myself for being that way. And yet on some level, I will feel like I would be entirely justified in being that way, and it causes me pain not to be. And it's not fair to me to have to constantly constrain myself from being what I am, no matter how desperately I wish I didn't think or feel the way I do. And it would be especially unfair to expect anyone else to either put up with me being that way, or else only think she loves me, because I'm pretending, at least part of the time, to be less of an asshole than I really am. Deep down. On some level. ...But this movie isn't about me (thank God). It's about Mark Zuckerberg, who probably doesn't have Asperger's, nor was anything even remotely like that ever suggested in the film. So maybe it's just me, but I couldn't help feeling like that's the way the fictional version of Zuckerberg was portrayed. If that wasn't the intent... then maybe he was just an asshole who was oblivious to his own assholiness. (Wait, that's not a word.) Whatever, God knows there's plenty of assholes who have no idea they're assholes.

Anyway, most of the movie is set in 2003, and into 2004, though those scenes are intercut with scenes set a few years later, when Zuckerberg was the defendant in two lawsuits related to the website he eventually created, Facebook. Back on that fateful night in 2003, Mark gets back to his dorm room after Erica had broken up with him, and he continues drinking. And starts blogging about her on LiveJournal (ah, how nostalgic!) Then he decides to take his mind off her by creating some new website (facemash.com), where guys can vote on which girls at school are hottest. Not the most original concept, but somehow it was apparently different from similar things. I'm not clear on exactly how it's different, but whatever. At least it was really impressive seeing him work. Anyway, it immediately becomes so popular that it crashes the university's computer network. And he receives six months of academic probation. Not long after that, two other students, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, approach Mark to ask for his help in programming their own site they had planned, the Harvard Connection. He says yes. Their idea wasn't particularly different from existing social networking sites like MySpace, except that it would be exclusively for Harvard students. Anyway, Mark soon starts getting other ideas, and creates his own website called The Facebook, with programming assistance from a couple of his friends, and financial help from his best friend, Eduardo Saverin, who becomes CFO of the Facebook company. When the Winklevoss Twins find out about this, one of them, as well as their partner, Divya Narendra, want to sue Mark, but the other twin wants them to try to resolve the problem in a more gentlemanly fashion. (Honestly, I could never remember which was the "good" twin and which was the "bad" twin, though I don't think any of these three guys were really bad guys.)

Anyway, Mark is eventually contacted by Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), who had previously created Napster. He gets deeply involved in the company (I'd say he has almost a svengali-like influence over Mark, but Eduardo never trusts him). Oh, and I should mention that Eduardo started dating a girl named Christy, played by Brenda Song, with whom I'm probably more familiar than any of the other actors in the movie, even if most people would probably call the other actors more famous than her. Whatever. Christy seemed nice enough at first, but later she turns out to be bat-shit crazy, which seemed totally out of left field, to me. Um... anyway, as the story progresses, we see how Eduardo is slowly forced out of the company, so he's the plaintiff in one of the eventual lawsuits against Mark, while the Winklevoss twins are obviously the other. And... um... you know, a lot of the time Mark didn't really seem like a bad guy, so much as misguided and... not very empathetic. Sometimes I actually found him pretty funny (as were some of the other characters). In the end, I certainly didn't hate him. As for whether he actually stole the Winklevoss's idea... meh, I dunno. I think he built it into something that went far beyond their idea, but at the same time, he did seem somewhat duplicitous about it.

Still... it's hard for me to really think of anyone's ideas as particularly innovative. It's fun to watch Mark come up with different ideas to incorporate into facebook at different points, but none of them seemed to me to be radically different than things that already existed on other sites. I feel like there are lots of different kinds of websites that end up replacing older, similar websites; that's just how the internet works. It's how everything since the dawn of time works, actually. So it's hard for me to get behind the idea that facebook is really this super-amazing thing. I use the site every day, and while it can sometimes be terribly annoying, for the most part I really like it. But I don't consider it revolutionary, and I expect it'll be replaced, sooner or later. But it was definitely a good movie, with good acting all around.

Also I guess there was some decent music, probably. Including "Baby, You're a Rich Man," by the Beatles. I feel like this is probably the first time I ever heard that version, and in fact I had no idea it was a Beatles song, until now. I only ever remember having heard a version by The Fat Boys, in the movie "Disorderlies." Ah well, live and learn.