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DokBrowne [ 9.0 ]
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I wish Aaron Sorkin wrote more movies. Yes it would be exhausting but who else these days treats screenplays like dense circuitry, and with both the intellect and the enthusiasm to make complex, multi-layered thought processes snap, crackle, and pop? "Steve Jobs" is a movie I'll need to watch at least two or three more times not just to re-experience the heady rush of two whole breathless hours of dialogue assault but also "Simpsons"-style to catch all the bon mots and inter-conversational callbacks and practically overlapping ideas that went by too fast the first time. That he did it using this rigid structure limiting him to three elongated scenes with the same minutes-before-a-big-event momentum is both formally audacious and kinda like a fun creative dare to a showoff like Sorkin. For whatever the Oscars are really worth, this is 100% a Best Screenplay Winner. And what he loses from David Fincher's subtly meticulous brilliance in "The Social Network", he gains in aptly chosen Danny Boyle's restless verve and multimedia techno-literacy. Michael Fassbender, too, is the perfect actor to take on a role this demanding. As a motor-mouthed, synapses-firing, two-steps-ahead and resultingly cocky business leader, innovator and consummate showman, you'd think someone like Robert Downey Jr., Christian Bale (originally cast), or maybe I dunno Michael Keaton would be the right guys for the job, but Fassbender provides a crucial amount of less iconic star power (and flexible, piercing talent, of course) that lets him transform more convincingly into the character. Everyone else is on fire alongside him, too, especially Kate Winslet and Michael Stuhlbarg.
One of the greatly rewarding things about Sorkin scripts is that they're about smart people. It's so boring to watch movie after movie of either ordinary or necessarily dim-witted characters – yes, a lot of the time that works to make people more relatable, or funny, but there's an overpopulation of insufficiently intelligent, un-self-aware folks in our movies in order to serve contrived plots and simple-minded, perfunctory dialogue exchanges. It's depressing. So whether or not you agree with Sorkin's politics, whether or not he's a jerk in real life, whether or not his scripts sometimes feel didactic or stagey or insufferably arrogant, can we at least agree that he's performing a rare, divine service for us by writing UP to our brainpower instead of patronizing us like 95% of cinema does? His screenplays (aided by the other people selected to direct, act, edit, score, produce) are fine dining experiences. Stimulating, addicting, and richly fulfilling. I never realized how much I wanted to learn about Steve Jobs until I saw this movie.
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| Weighted Rating | : 7.0 |
| No. Ratings | : 2 | |
| No. Reviews | : 1 | |
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