Pun Salad

IMDB users, as I type, have rated this movie as #177 of the top 250 movies of all time. I don't know about that, but it's pretty good. Its got eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Director, Actor, and Screenplay.

I was able to suspend my distaste for the jerk screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin.

It's the story of Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg), and how he, with a little help from his friends, founded Facebook. He went from being just another genius Harvard undergrad in 2003 to (according to Forbes) just another genius Harvard dropout worth $4 Billion. Along the way, there's plenty of drama, as Zuckerberg shafts (first) a couple of jock entrepreneurs who hired him to work on their (arguably similar) idea for a Harvard website, and (then) his partner Eduardo Saverin, who found himself edged out of the company when his vision differed from Mark's.

Many critics have claimed that Zuckerberg is portrayed as an asshole, and that's not without merit. But the larger truth is that he had a capital-V Vision about where he wanted Facebook to go, and (like most Visionaries) he was single-minded and relentless about pursuing that Vision. (He forms an instant bond with investor Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake), who recognizes and buys into the Vision himself. I buy that narrative.

I enjoyed the movie's more-or-less accurate flinging around of Linux-geek terminology: Apache, emacs, wget, Perl, Python, etc. They must have had a consultant to get that right. Otherwise, there's a lot of controversy about the movie's relationship to actual reality; here is an example.

Local angle: Zuckerberg graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, just down the road.