Title: The Social Network

Year Released/Rating: 2010 PG-13

Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake

Directed By: David Fincher

Written By: Aaron Sorkin, Ben Mezrich

Genre: Drama, Biography

Star Rating:  3/5 stars

Where I Got It: On the server

Trivia:

• During one of the depositions, it is mentioned that the invention of Facebook made Mark Zuckerberg "the biggest thing on a campus that included nineteen Nobel Laureates, fifteen Pulitzer Prize winners, two future Olympians, and a movie star." One of the lawyers then asks, "Who was the movie star?" and the response is, "Does it matter?" This movie star was, in fact, Natalie Portman, who was enrolled at Harvard from 1999 to 2003 and helped screenwriter Aaron Sorkin by providing him insider information about goings-on at Harvard at the time Facebook first appeared there.
• Most outfits that Mark wears in the film are things that the real Mark Zuckerberg has been seen wearing in pictures, with at least one exception, a T-shirt from a theatre company that Jesse Eisenberg had belonged to.
• Andrew Garfield came into rehearsal with a copy of Economics for Dummies. Inspired by that move, Jesse Eisenberg bought C++ for Dummies. According to Eisenberg, both he and Garfield read the introductions of their books and then put them down.
• Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield became good friends during filming. According to Eisenberg, the dramatic rivalry between their characters was hard for the two because it affected them emotionally.
• Rashida Jones who plays an associate of Mark Zuckerberg's attorney was a graduate of Harvard University, the school Zuckerberg attended.

Summary: Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg creates the social networking site that would become known as Facebook, but is later sued by two brothers who claimed he stole their idea, and the cofounder who was later squeezed out of the business.

Review: 

I finally got around to actually watching this one and I was not super impressed.  Maybe it's because almost every single on the characters are complete idiots.  Or maybe I just don't really like Jesse Eisenberg.  The bright spot here is Aaron Sorkin's writing.  And yes, you can definitely tell that he had a hand in writing this movie.  It's dialogue and monologue heavy.  So much dialogue is crammed into small spaces, the audience really has to pay attention to follow all the twists and turns in the conversations.  Overall though, I just couldn't get behind any of the characters and therefore I just didn't love the movie.

Best Bits: 

• Marylin Delpy: The site got twenty-two hundred hits within two hours?  Mark Zuckerberg: Thousand.  Marylin: I'm sorry?  Mark: Twenty-two *thousand*.  Marylin: [to herself] Wow.
• Mark: You know, you really don't need a forensics team to get to the bottom of this. If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook.
• K.C.: Seven different people spammed me the same link.  KC's Friend: What is it?  K.C.: I don't know, but I'm really hoping it's cats that look like Hitler, because I can never get enough of that.
• Erica Albright: You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole.
• Sean Parker: We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we're going to live on the internet!