What the Steve Jobs movie got right, and wrong
cnn.com
cnn.com
I was surprised by the technical accuracy (ha, what do I know?) and so I feel much better about recommending it to people who show interest.
There were parts that I enjoyed more than Pirates of Silicon valley, but also times when it felt long. Music was used to okay effect, but also drawn out.
Movie Spoiler: There is no recent history portrayed in the film.
Edit: A couple more thoughts. Contrary to the inaccuracies between Jobs and Wozniak mentioned above (and as noted in the linked article) the movie did accurately give Wozniak credit for doing the engineering on Breakout (and getting shortchanged in the process) which I felt was important.
The movie only really covers Jobs at Apple, a bit of University and family, so if you are interested in NeXT/Pixar/etc. you may be disappointed.
One of them gave us Apple, the other, Oracle.
Not hard to pick a winner.
(the followup review deals with user responses to the prior one - that one's here: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/43 )
Jack London in Oakland had about 30 people in attendance at the 9pm premiere.
The critics are pretty harsh on it, but if you're at all interested in the subject matter, it's definitely worth seeing. I thought it was flawed but interesting.
1. Kutcher did a fantastic job as Steve Jobs. I was extremely pleasantly surprised by how well he portrayed the role and adopted Steve's mannerisms. You can even see his gait and speech evolve over the course of the movie.
2. My fundamental problem with the film was that it tried to cram so much into two hours that a lot of scenes felt fake and over-simplified to the point of being insulting. Extreme examples of this include the "I'm going to sue Bill Gates" scene and the Jony Ive scene.
3. The beginning is stupid and irrelevant. Also, Jobs's transition from idealistic hippy acid-dropper to steely-eyed businessman is portrayed in a manner of seconds and does not feel realistic whatsoever.
4. I still enjoyed the movie and would watch it again if it were on television. It certainly had emotionally moving scenes, and I wouldn't say it was a poor movie.
The only other option would be that the people who care about it fund it, but even though that pool might seem large inside of the tech microcosmos, it's comparitively small, and you'll have a low budget movie that has trouble being shown in theaters.
Engelbart could actually make a movie character, given his obsession with improving the human intellect through computers. It's questionable though whether you can work his life into a movie script that has popular apeal whilst respecting the work he has done.
Borlaugs work could be worked into a movie as well, but it suffers from the same problems that making a movie about Engelbart has. It's tough creating an accurate portrayal of his life whilst having a dramatic story arch in there.
That's part of the reason why the Social Network has such strange set of priorities. I doubt that the court case and the unrequited love story were integral parts in Facebook becomming Facebook, but they fit the story, and the love story likely beat the film over the 2 demographics line.
So in any case, we're the best you can do is either a small film that represents their life accurately (with all the nitpicking that will come with it), or a huge film that twists their lives into 127 minutes screentime and will likely irritate the very people that asked for it. Because if Universal went out and made a biopic about Dennis Richie, there'd be a 1809 Comment thread discussing how they didn't put enough focus on his work in kernel design.
Were better off without a big movie about any of them, however much that may hurt.
What really confuses me is why there isn't a major movie about Richard Feynman. His life is a movie script. Worked on nuclear missles, had his wife, and longtime love interest die of tuberculosis (granted, there is a movie about that part), and so much other stuff that would just fit perfectly. But I digress.
But far more people will see the watch face than the clockwork (some watches expose it partially to show craftsmanship, but we hide it as well as we can). It's not that people wouldn't cherish the work of these men if they knew it ("Oh, Engelbart, he's the reason you see clickable pictures on your screen instead of a flashing cursor" "That's pretty cool, never heard of the guy before"), but they simply don't know them.
Really, if we want these men to be appreciated for their impact, it's us that have to go out and spread the word, because we're the only ones knowing that impact. If we're not ready for spreading that awareness (I don't think it's easy to do), then appreciation of the clockwork by watchmakers is what we'll have to be satisfied with.
It's quite likely that given the reviews on this Steve Jobs movie, not many people are going to see it. Aaron Sorkin probably has a much more entertaining version in the works.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charisma
as Steve Jobs? His life is up to the very end the stuff many a film can be made of.
Imagine just one of the most recent the scenes: being on the hospital bed weighting like 50 pounds and rejecting the medicine equipment that was "not designed nicely enough!"
Even his "bad" side is what makes his life more thankful for films.
I'm claiming again: even Jobs' bad sides are very thankful for films! Hey, we're talking about the guy who drove without the license plates and parked at the parking areas for those with disabilities. Absolutely perfect for a movie.
You don't need to understand it. The people who decide which movies to make need to understand it.
Some of what was shown in The Mother of All Demos had been done elsewhere better - his group suffered from Not Invented Here Syndrome. He was enamored with the idea of one big software program that did everything (badly) rather than a lot of component parts that do specific things well - sort of the polar opposite of Dennis Ritchie's approach to problem solving. So his team had a program that did email and text editing and videoconferencing and drawing but didn't do any of those things as well as a system that focused specifically on any one of those things.
On the plus side, he had lots of severe personal setbacks (including at one point his house burning down) that could be played up for melodrama. And the end was poignant. And he did patent the mouse. And some of his most oddball ideas seem even more prophetic today (life-blogging) while others are weird enough to be entertaining on their own (chorded one-hand keyboards).
Although having Douglas Englebart arriving at the mother of all demos on the back of a triceratops would be worth paying to see.