items tagged with The Social Network

THE FIVE-YEAR ENGAGEMENT

Say what you will about the current state of movies. Yet in the history of the medium, have the actors who populate film comedies ever been as across-the-board-excellent as they are right now? It took about 20 minutes for this question to pop into my head during The Five-Year Engagement, and once it did, I’m not sure I ever stopped pondering it; from the stars to the supporting cast to the bit players who show up for all of three seconds, director Nicholas Stoller’s rom-com features an embarrassment of performance riches. The movie itself? Eh, it’s okay.

Before getting into what went wrong at last night’s Academy Awards ceremony – and sadly, quite a bit went wrong – let’s begin by addressing the one portion of the telecast that, for maybe the first time in Oscar history, went magically right.

NO STRINGS ATTACHED

Against all expectations, at least my expectations, director Ivan Reitman’s No Strings Attached is a perfectly enjoyable piece of midwinter fluff, engaging and breezy and of no consequence whatsoever. Yet I’ll admit to being somewhat shocked when, two days after seeing it, I replayed the notes I quietly recorded during my screening, and discovered that I didn’t whisper even one criticism or complaint in the whole of its 105 minutes, which is a claim I can’t even make about The Social Network.

Then again, the movie is a formulaic romantic comedy starring Ashton Kutcher, so I suppose the complaints do take care of themselves.

Before commencing with the annual fawning, I thought I’d begin by exercising one of my God-given rights as a reviewer: the right to bitch about the sorry state of movies. I think it’s supposed to go something like this:

Boy, are the movies in a sorry state!

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

You may have heard that a lot of critics, in their reviews of the film, have been comparing the Facebook saga The Social Network to Citizen Kane. So before this turns into one of those inaccurate, Al-Gore-says-he-invented-the-Internet sort of myths, let me clarify: They’re saying that in terms of its storyline, themes, and protagonist, director David Fincher’s and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s movie is more than a bit reminiscent of Orson Welles’ 1941 untouchable. No one, to my knowledge, is saying that The Social Network is as good as Citizen Kane.

Having said that, The Social Network is as good as Citizen Kane.