So the Aaron Sorkin/Danny Boyle "Steve Jobs" movie opened today. Well, opened in about four theaters, all in New York and LA, because apparently 2015 studios still think platform releases are a good idea for anything that isn't a horror movie in January. I'm not in either city, so I didn't see it today and probably won't for another couple weeks when it finally limps out to a theater near me. That's not a complaint about the movie. That's a complaint about distribution, and I have a lot of feelings about distribution that nobody asked for.
Anyway. I've been reading the early reactions since the NYFF screening on the 3rd, and the reviews are doing that thing where critics fall over themselves praising Fassbender and then spend a paragraph hedging about whether the whole thing is even true. Which, fair. Sorkin isn't writing a documentary, he's writing Sorkin dialogue with a Jobs skin on it, the same way The Social Network was Sorkin dialogue with a Zuckerberg skin on it. People walk fast and say clever, cutting things to each other in hallways. That's the format. I don't think anyone goes into a Sorkin movie expecting cinema verite.
What's actually got me interested is the structure — three acts, each one set backstage in real time right before a product launch: the 1984 Mac unveiling, the NeXT cube launch in 88, and the iMac in 98. No time jumps except between those three scenes. It's a stagey, theatrical trick and I kind of love it as an idea even before seeing it executed. Biopics usually feel obligated to hit every beat of a Wikipedia page, birth to death, and this one is deliberately refusing to do that. Whether it works is a different question. I'll report back whenever my town's one arthouse screen decides to bother.
The accuracy complaints are the part I find genuinely funny, mostly because Woz himself has been out there in interviews basically fact-checking his own biopic in real time, which is a very specific kind of surreal. Sculley too. When the actual people involved are alive and doing press tours correcting the movie about themselves, you start to wonder what the point of "based on a true story" even is anymore. I'm not against dramatic license. I just think it's funny that the studio's PR strategy this month has partly consisted of the real Woz saying "that didn't happen" to reporters.
I'll admit some of this interest is personal baggage. I bought the Isaacson biography back when it came out in 2011, right around when I started this blog actually, and I still haven't finished the back third of it. It's sitting on a shelf with a bookmark stuck somewhere around the NeXT years, which I guess makes me exactly the right kind of person to be curious about a movie that spends a whole act on the NeXT years and basically nothing else. I keep meaning to finish the book before I see the film so I can be insufferable about the differences. Realistically I will not do this. I will see the movie unprepared like a normal person.
Funny timing footnote: this is the same week Microsoft had its own event in New York, Tuesday the 6th, showing off the Surface Book and the Surface Pro 4 and the new Lumia phones. So you've got Microsoft on a stage in Manhattan doing the exact live-product-reveal theater that the Jobs movie is dramatizing from thirty years ago, practically back to back on the calendar. Nobody planned that, I assume, but it's a nice accidental echo — the format Jobs basically invented for tech launches is still exactly how Microsoft ran its show this week, keynote and all. The Surface Book looks genuinely interesting to me, a laptop that detaches into a tablet with the hinge doing double duty as the battery, which is a weirder and more ambitious idea than I expected from a Surface product. But that's a whole separate post, and everybody else on the internet is already writing it this week anyway.
For now I'm just going to sit here with my four-theater-release movie I can't see yet and my half-finished biography, feeling like the target audience of exactly one product that isn't actually available to me. Seems about right for a Friday.