16 Days of Birthday, Day 8: Social Networking and Movies

I feel as if I have done way too many posts in this marathon which are just lists. So why not ramble on a bit today? After all, it's Sunday, there's a 'snow storm' headed our way, and I'm very tired. Therefore, rambling sounds good to me.

Anyone remember when I did this post back in May? It was all about the war between Avatar, the highest grossing movie of all time, and The Hurt Locker, the little war movie that 'robbed' it of the Best Picture Oscar. But that wasn't the only war I talked about in the post. There was a bit of hate going around for The Hurt Locker, which came in the form of Facebook 'like' pages. Which just goes to show that people now have a new platform to unleash their hate towards a movie on...even though it is so so wrong.

Okay, so you all know me. I'm a teenage girl, on the cusp of reaching the legal age, who spends a fair amount of her time lurking around the internet. The essential websites I can be found on most are: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and of course, Blogger. Now these are all websites that don't deal with movies specifically, unlike IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes. In those places, it's perfectly natural to unleash a bit of negativity towards a movie, because those sites are based around people's opinions towards a movie. Blog sites are made for opinions too. Most of the movie-related comments on YouTube are spammers anyway, going on about "how great the van dropping off the bridge in a layer of dream" was in Legion. Twitter is pretty good to the movie lovers. Facebook is the one social networking site I have a real problem with.

Okay, maybe I just have a problem with those damn 'like' pages. Like, seriously? Why would you even 'like' a page just to say you hate a movie? Actually, why would you even go to all that effort to make a page like that? I think it's just ridiculous.

Let's go back to the Avatar and The Hurt Locker war on Facebook. I'll start by saying this: I like The Hurt Locker a lot more than Avatar. Yes, that probably makes me one of those 'film snobs' in the Facebook like page maker's eyes. But I do have to agree that Avatar did something great with film-making, and I guess the fact that it lost Best Picture to a tiny movie that most people hadn't even heard of was pretty...er...surprising. However, I can't imagine these Facebook page makers would even really care that much about the Oscars. They only cared in this situation because they'd never heard of The Hurt Locker (and probably hadn't seen it before the Oscars) and pretty much everyone on Earth has seen Avatar. There are a lot of people who love Avatar to death, and everything else just looked inferior compared to it. So no, its not a matter of 'hating' The Hurt Locker itself. Its a matter of resenting the fact that the cat got beaten by the mouse...or something like that.

On the flipside, Tumblr is a site which tends to over-love a movie. When I first got myself an account on there, it was back in July last year, which just so happens to be when Inception was first released. You think I was obsessed with this movie? You should have seen the people on Tumblr! First came the many memes...the 'Strutting Leo' (as pictured to the right), the 'squinting Leo', the 'we need to go deeper'...the list is just endless. Some of them were really funny, I admit, but they quickly got old. The next thing was the many 'ships'. Now, if you're not up with the 'hip kids on the internet' lingo, a 'ship' is a relationship between two characters in the same movie that is endorsed by a person on the internet. In Inception, there are a lot of characters, so there were plenty of 'ships' to go around. There were the generic ones like Cobb and Mal, Arthur and Ariadne, and Yusuf and his cats. But the ship that was endorsed the most was one between Arthur and Eames. Out of this ship came many gifs, many graphics involving the two and even rather graphic artworks. You know, I've never seen anything like the Arthur and Eames ship. It spiralled out of control, and it was a little bit embarassing after a while. Ever since then, not one movie can escape these kinds of 'ships'. But nothing, absolutely nothing can beat the amount of fandom that Inception got on Tumblr (except for maybe Harry Potter).

There have been plenty of other movies to get all of this fandom. The Social Network had the famous ship between Mark and Andrew. Along with that, you could pretty much watch the entire movie in gifs on there because every line was so quotable. X-Men: First Class has had a little ship between Erik and Raven, and a huge ship between Erik and Xavier. Plus, the Tumblr universe has gone mad on Michael Fassbender, mainly comparing him to a shark because of his rather big smile (it's the 'new thing' to be one of Fassy's teeth). One of the newest ships that has just rolled around is for a movie that hasn't even been released yet: The Avengers. Which lucky superheroes get a ship? Captain America and Iron Man. Which is weird, considering Iron Man is Howard Stark's son, who like, gave Cap his powers.

So I'm going to wrap this up now since it's snowing in Dannevirke properly for the first time in eight years and I'm too excited to form coherent sentences. Social networking has it's ups for the movie industry...people have the power to easily tell people what they like and dislike about a movie without being a critic. But most of the time, social networking is a place where people can either unleash their hate in an extremely unhealthy way, or obsess over a movie in an unhealthy way. Either way, I'll just stick to my blogging.

What do you think about the relationship between social networking and movies?

The Hurt Locker vs. Facebook

So, just last week, I decided to rewatch The Hurt Locker to sustain my new obsession with the wonderful Jeremy Renner. I quite like the movie...I find it raw, gritty, well-made, sweaty, well performed (Guy Pearce was amazing in that short scene, and Jeremy Renner and Brian Geraghty are HOT)...blah blah blah, you've heard it before. As I do, I went on Facebook to 'like' it. I found this:

All well and good. 427,641 people like it, which is pretty popular.

I kept scrolling down, trying to find some fun 'likes' to do with the movie, and then I found some pretty negative ones. I couldn't help but add my own smartass comments to these useless pages:

Yes. That's why it won Best Picture.

Yeah, neither. But aren't you glad it did win so you heard of it? And by the way, you didn't spell 'until' right.

Best Picture*

First of all, America is a place name therefore it requires a capital letter to begin the word.

Second of all, the Academy are apparently very elite people, so I doubt they are taking drugs. Unless it is some sort of pain killer, which is justifiable.

Third of all, have you ever spared a thought for all the other nominees? In my opinion, An Education, Inglourious Basterds, Up and Up in the Air were far better than either The Hurt Locker and Avatar.

Fourth of all, a movie with blue people isn't generally the kind that wins Best Picture.

Haha, that is witty. But Kanye should have been there when Crash beat Brokeback Mountain in 2006. That was a much more worthy Kanye cause.

And Avatar didn't give you such 'intense motion sickness' from it's overkill of the colour blue.

Let's just pretend that Pearl Harbor doesn't exist.

THAT IS GREAT. GO EAT SOME TOAST NOW, BECAUSE I'M SURE THAT WOULD BE JUST AS EXCITING AS LIKING THIS PAGE.

So all up, 579 people (give or take) feel such negative emotion towards Kathryn Bigelow's masterpiece that they have taken to Facebook to express their anger in an unhealthy way. And everyone I've ever talked to pretty much hate this movie. Which is a shame, because this is so much better than Avatar. While that blue movie may have had all those ground-breaking achievements with technology, you better not forget that The Hurt Locker scored a Best Director Oscar for a woman. For the first time ever. How's that for ground-breaking?

I guess the point of my rant is this: There are a lot of people who hate The Hurt Locker. But these people obviously haven't seen the movie for what it is: a thrilling tale of a man who can't live without war and how people risk their lives for the greater good of the rest of the world. Oh well, it's not my fault that people would rather watch three hours worth of big blue people running around fairyland.

Just for some research, I searched Avatar. On the top of the page:

16,695,589. I guess that's what happens when you're the highest grossing movie on the planet.

Also an effect of being the highest grossing movie ever.

I tried to search for more negative pages towards the movie, but after going through at least 200 pages entitled "Avatar", "AVATAR!!!!" "!!AVATAR!!" or "AVATAR :)" I gave up.

Here's a piece of statistic:

The amount of people who like The Hurt Locker enough to say so online are only 2.5% of the amount who like Avatar.

Simply put, I believe people only hate The Hurt Locker because it beat Avatar. Or 97.5% of the population haven't seen the movie. I tend to go with that one.

I know this is pretty much old news now, but I was just a little bit interested in what Facebook had to say about this great movie.

Oh well, in the meantime, I think this is the best page I found in my search for The Hurt Locker:

GO BECKHAM! HE SELLS GOOD DVDS!

*I realize this post went nowhere, sorry about that.

Cinema--The Social Network

or: More than just 'the Facebook movie'.

One word to sum it up: Intriguing.

I first heard about The Social Network in July. I remember trying to register this in my head: David Fincher directing a movie about Facebook starring Jesse Eisenberg. It took me a couple of months to register that thought, but after I saw the trailer with the amazing cover of 'Creep' by Radiohead online, I knew I had to see this film. In the months leading up to watching this film, I watched more David Fincher, fell even more in love with Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield, tried to take Justin Timberlake seriously, and read 'The Accidental Billionaires'. And now I see how the David Fincher directed Jesse Eisenberg starring Facebook movie worked.

On a fall night in 2003, Harvard undergrad and computer programming genius Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) sits down at his computer and heatedly begins working on a new idea. In a fury of blogging and programming, what begins in his dorm room soon becomes a global social network and a revolution in communication. A mere six years and 500 million friends later, Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in history...but for this entrepreneur, success leads to both personal and legal complications.

The Social Network is a near perfect film. Everything, down to the last little detail, is so well put together that I barely believed I was watching a film. Instead, I thought I was watching history unfurl right before my eyes, and the story of how our generation got to be the way it is. There are so many good things I have to say about the film. The first scene, where we first meet a jabbering Mark talking at his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara), is among one of the best openings to a film that I have ever seen. It was like Aaron Sorkin jammed every word in the English language into that one scene, thus setting the tone for the rest of the film. The script is simply impeccable, taking a very intelligent and talkative approach the story. The characters could talk the world to an end.

Because there is such a highly intelligent script, which Aaron Sorkin did the best job possible with, the actors had to be fairly on their toes. The good thing is that they all are, including Justin Timberlake (still can't take him seriously, oh well). But you've really got to hand it to it's lead stars, Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield. Jesse is simply brilliant as Mark. I couldn't get over what a transformation he made from the awkward nice guy to the awkward arrogant prick, almost effortlessly. Give the guy an Oscar nomination; he more than deserves it. Andrew, on the flipside, serves as the films emotional joint. He is terrific in the role of Eduardo Saverin, and provides that kind of victim character against (insert description here) Mark. Their talent is particularly well shown in the scene where Eduardo goes to confront Mark in the Facebook office. Andrew completely breaks down (in such a realistic way), while Jesse can sit there and take it, emotionless. I don't know how either of them could possibly have done it.

David Fincher's direction is, like the rest of the film, perfect. He uses the right amount of everything, with elements from previous films like Fight Club and Zodiac coming through. This is a film he should be proud to have on his CV, and one that millions of other directors should be jealous of. While it's not as in your face as Fight Club, the subtlety used fits the college backdrop amazingly well. The final element that makes The Social Network so great is the amazing score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. It compliments every finely combed scene in this movie, and perhaps that's why it's so great.

Does The Social Network work as a movie? HELL YES. I'll be lining up to try and get a second watch in. It was frequently funny, but all in all a thought provoking piece that shows us an insight into the (maybe fictionalized) life of the most influential figure alive. Everything is perfect, and this is modern filmmaking at it's very best. Is it the best movie I have seen this year? Well, I'll still be an Inception fan through and through, but let's just say this movie definitely gives it a run for it's money. Come Oscar time, I'll be putting my money on this for a few wins.


THE VERDICT: Amazing performances from Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield, amazing direction from David Fincher, amazing music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, amazing script by Aaron Sorkin. EVERYTHING I had hoped for.

10/10