The Social Network - WTF? :D

Ahhhhh, here we are at another moment of supreme zeitgeist. The highly anticipated, for me, movie "The Social Network" comes out on DVD next Tuesday and I got to watch a preview copy of it last night. Highly anticipated because the critics, across the board and speaking in one huge, thumbs up, four star voice, gave the movie the highest marks they could. That sort of rah-rah proclamation makes for a watershed moment. This is one of those cultural events in which you must participate to feel like you were there for it.

In my video store, the trailer for the movie has been playing in rotation and that caused me to be more excited because the trailer featured a beautiful, choral rendition of the Radiohead song "Creep". The song is one of those covers that stands out so much that it comes close to transcending the original. I got goosebumps on first hearing it the way I did when I heard Gary Jules' version of "Mad World" in the Gears of War TV commercials.

Music, for me, is an important part of the movie-watching experience. A good soundtrack can make or break a movie for me and, when it works seamlessly with the film, it's frequently the tipping factor. Danny Elfman, Mark Mothersbaugh, Jon Brion, Carter Burwell, artists like these make you feel the movie. The soundtrack for The Social Network was done by Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor so I was looking forward to seeing what he would bring to the table.

So, going in I was skeptical simply based on the overwhelming good feeling associated with this film. I'm not sure what I was expecting. I already knew the story of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. You'd have to be living in a vacuum for the past few years to have missed any of it. My expectations had been tweaked because I was expecting the critical reaction to be based on some amazing cinematography and a score that kept me enthralled. I guess I was thinking it would have some feel to it like what Sophia Coppola did with Lost in Translation.

What I got felt like a pat retelling of the story with unobtrusive camera work and a soundtrack that got on my nerves. Seriously, the Trent Reznor soundtrack was so irritating that I had to pause the movie to take a break from it. There are conventions in soundtrack music; there are ways the music is used to transition from scene to scene and to set up key moments through tension and release. I was thirty minutes into the Social Network when I realized that the, what I had perceived to be, five minutes of music I had been hearing and perceiving to be some sort of exposition leading into the movie getting into its groove was still just droning on in the mode typically reserved for transition. We weren't transitioning though. This is how it went through the whole movie.

The song I had wanted to hear in context, "Creep", wasn't even in the movie.

So this is one of those "social phenomena" that comes along every other year or so where you have to see it and you have to love it or you're on the outside looking in. Sort of parallel to how Facebook came to be so popular in the first place. But, ultimately, the movie is just a retelling of the story with nothing to make it stand out. The Social Network will win some Oscars over some much more worthy works as always happens. I'll have fun doing Oscar predictions this year as I always do, not based on how good a movie or performance is, but based on buzz and other external factors. You can reference Denzel winning for Training Day here. It's all a bunch of predetermined crap.

I guess the movie that stood out most for me in 2010 as far as being a complete success in direction, story, acting, cinematography, and soundtrack was The Kids Are All Right with Toy Story 3 being a strong second. I really fear the inertia that has been created by The Social Network though. I'm a little handicapped in that I don't go to theaters. I've grown to hate that experience so I wait for DVD releases. I'm really looking forward to seeing some other Oscar-buzzed movies like Black Swan, True Grit, and The Kings Speech; The Social Network for me, though, was a solid B- experience with Trent Reznor's soundtrack getting a firm D.

Ultimately, for now, Facebook has won the social network wars by a large margin. You'll have to remember that VHS beat out Beta and Blu-Ray beat out HD DVD and there's always something next. I'm not sure the guy that invented VHS deserved a bio-pic as pervasive as VHS was at one time.

Since it didn't get included in the actual movie, here's the amazing version of Radiohead's "Creep" performed by The Scala Choir.