Hereafter

I started wondering earlier today if my lack of posts on this blog is a direct result of a lack of ideas or if I'm just not that interesting. I'm hoping it's the lack of ideas. I'd like to think that there are some good thoughts that roam through my head from time to time. Maybe it's pure laziness. Now that I think about it, laziness seems more like a viable option.

I get to see a lot of movies for my job. Apparently I'm a member of the press so I get all of the invites that real movie reviewers get. I'm not complaining. It's actually my favorite perk that comes along with my job. I love going to the movies but I certainly wouldn't go anywhere near as often as I do now if I actually had to pay for all of them. There's something powerful about sitting back with a bag of popcorn and leaving reality for a couple of hours.

I do run into a lot of actual movie critics and I like to get into conversations about films with them. Discussions like what they do and don't like about movies are usually the hot topic. Generally, I find that we never agree but sometimes the stars align and we can enjoy the same films. There's one critic in particular that I really respect. She has an amazing knowledge of movies. My one major complaint with her is that I think she has lost sight of what people are looking for when they go to the theaters.

She will often say things to me like, "I didn't like it but I think it's right up your alley." At first I wasn't sure if that was an insult. Basically saying she thinks I'm a simple person and I don't care about the art in movies. I should be offended by that right? I am to an extent but not fully. I think I know what she means. I find enjoyment in some of the movies that she would find to be dumb. She would rant and rave about The American with George Clooney saying how brilliantly done it was where I would say that The Expendables was the best movie of the summer. OK, I wouldn't say that exactly but it's a movie that proves my point.

The American was boring and very uneventful. Not the kind of movie that the vast majority of people want to see when they spend $10 at the theater. When I went to see it, I fell asleep for a few minutes. My friend actually leaned over at one point to tell me that she was bored and she had to wake me up just to say it. That's how boring it was. Most Americans felt the same way as it did horribly at the box office yet most critics gave it phenomenal reviews.

Now The Expendables was a poorly written filled with horrible acting but it kept me glued to my seat for the entire 90 minutes. It was pure fluff and entertainment. Even Sylvester Stallone said that was what he was going for. He wanted to make a movie that was a throwback to the old style of the 80's action flick. I think he achieved superbly and so did the public. It was #1 at the box office for, I think, 3 weeks in a row. The movie critics did not agree. It did not garner very good reviews and some critics even said that they felt their intelligence was insulted by it. I think those critics have been insulting our intelligence for years.

Commercial success does not always prove that a movie is good (ie the Twilight series) but a good review doesn't either. Critics don't seem to understand that we just want to be entertained. We don't care that the director used a different kind of lens for the first 30 minutes of the movie then switched over to show a different shade of light. We want to escape our lives. We want to laugh, cry, ooohhh and ahhhh at the screen. Sometimes we want to think but it's more likely that we don't.

That rant brings me to the point of this posting. I went to see the new movie from Clint Eastwood starring Matt Damon. I had been under the impression that Clint Eastwood just couldn't miss. He was behind movies like Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River and Gran Torino. All really great films and some with Oscar winning performances. This movie breaks that trend. The opening sequence of Hereafter is amazing. I had goosebumps and was absolutely riveted for the first 10 minutes or so. I thought Eastwood really put together a great intro but unfortunately he blew his wad too early and the rest of the movie was a bit of a let down.

It follows the lives of 3 different people and their struggle with what comes when you die. The first person you meet is a woman that has a near death experience in a giant tidal wave during the intense opening sequence. The second is a young boy in England who loses his twin brother in an accident. Then comes Matt Damon who is a psychic who can supposedly speak to the dead but looks at this as more of a curse than a gift. At first you're drawn in because each character has a very intriguing story. Then as the movie progressed, I started to get more and more impatient as I tried to figure out how he would tie them all together. I'm not going to give anything away but the payoff isn't worth the wait. It has some very interesting moments but overall it comes across as being disjointed. Almost like it was thrown together at the last minute. That theory is very possible considering no one even knew it was coming out until about a month ago. Whenever I spend a good amount of time asking myself the question, "Why do I care about this" I think the movie has missed something.

Do I think it was a bad movie? No. Do I think you need to rush out to the theater and see it this weekend? Absolutely not. Wait until it hits DVD. You could even wait until it hits basic cable in 3 years. I don't think you're going to miss anything.

Facebook Backlash?

When I first heard that there was going to be a Facebook movie, I cringed and said to a friend, "I'd rather watch 30 A-Team remakes than see a movie about Facebook." To me, the creation of Facebook is a non story. The site is absolutely a great networking tool. There's no question about that. But is there really a story behind a site that was created entirely off of ideas stolen from other people (except the like button of course)? I'm not taking some self-righteous stance here and saying I would never use Facebook. I was late to the Facebook party but I still signed up and I've been able to get in touch with some great people that I lost touch with as well as people that I had hoped I would never see again. It's a great way to share my life with friends and also to kill some time. That being said, Facebook is not by any means an original idea and that's why I questioned the decision to make a movie based on it. Why should I care about some over privileged kids that stole other people's ideas and made billions of dollars? The answer to that question is I shouldn't and I don't, however, the movie was fantastic. It was put together in such a way that the monotony of the real story didn't seem quite as boring.

I've taken heat from some that don't agree with me when I say that Facebook isn't as revolutionary as many believe it to be. There are a few scenes from the movie that help prove my point. At the very opening of the film you hear Zuckerberg mention that unlike other schools, Harvard doesn't offer an online Facebook for its students. He even took the name from an already available service. Side note...when I was a freshman in college (1999) we were all given books with head shots of our classmates that we all called "The Facebook." That was 5 years before Zuckerberg's creation. Another example is when the Winklevoss twins are sharing their idea with Zuckerberg he asks how it would be different from Friendster or Myspace. Their answer? It would be exclusive. They wanted to create a site based off of Myspace but make it only available to Harvard users. Exclusivity is not synonymous with originality. Other instances in the film include the moments when Zuckerberg "thought" to add relationship status and photo galleries to the site. Both of these options were already available on Myspace before Z had what he felt were brilliant ideas.

Someone reading this might think that I'm a huge Myspace supporter. That's not true. In fact, I deleted my account around the same time that I signed up for Facebook. Even at that point, I hadn't been active on Myspace in quite some time.

Though much of Facebook was stolen from other ideas, it did change the game a little bit. Where Facebook succeeded was in its design. It took the disaster of images and videos that were on Myspace and simplified it immensely to make a much easier networking experience. When you log in, you're not instantly bombarded with a song or some ridiculous video that was posted in your comments. I also really enjoy the mutual friends section when you look at someone's profile. I have found many old friends simply because we had mutual friends on Facebook.

While movie critics across the board have been praising the film, the tech bloggers seem to have all teamed up to support the real Zuckerberg (Try THIS ARTICLE or THIS ONE as examples). Many say that it doesn't show Zuckerberg the way he truly is. That could be true. I've never met or spoken with the man so I can't comment on that. The people that have will clearly know that better. They have also complained that the film doesn't accurately show anything about social networking. There are two reasons for this.

1) The movie is about the creation and subsequent law suits stemming from Z's theft of the ideas. Not about using Facebook.
2) A 2 hour movie about people using Facebook would be the most boring thing to ever hit the big screen.

While we like to think what we're doing on Facebook is important (and to us, it is) it's actually not interesting in real life at all. Posting that you're heading to the grocery store could be important information to your friends, or burglars waiting to rob your house, but it's not important to the other 499,999,985 people that are on Facebook and thus, not important to the rest of the world.