Went into the city this weekend and finally caught the Steve Jobs movie, the Aaron Sorkin/Danny Boyle one with Fassbender. It's only playing in a handful of theaters right now since its a limited release, so I had to actually plan around it instead of just wandering into a Friday night show like normal. Worth it, mostly. But it's been rattling around in my head for two days now and I want to get some of it down before I lose the thread.
The whole thing is built around three product launches, the original Macintosh in 84, the NeXT Cube launch a few years later, and then the iMac in 98, and Sorkin uses each one as basically a locked room where Jobs has to deal with everybody he's wronged in the twenty minutes before he goes on stage. Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet, doing a genuinely great accent-that-shifts-over-the-decades thing) chases him around backstage like she's the only adult in the building. Wozniak, played by Seth Rogen, keeps showing up to ask why the Apple II team never gets a mention. It's basically a stage play wearing a biopic costume, and once you clock that, the walking-and-talking rhythm makes a lot more sense.
Here's my actual complaint though, and it's not really about the movie's craft, because the craft is fine, the dialogue crackles the way Sorkin dialogue always does. My problem is that Fassbender plays Jobs as someone who is cruel almost recreationally, like the cruelty is the point rather than a byproduct of the obsession. I've read the Isaacson book (yeah, I'm one of those people who actually finished it, not just the parts that got excerpted everywhere) and the guy in that book is a genuine mess of contradictions — generous in weird specific ways, awful in others, but not performing meanness for an audience. The movie version feels a little too aware of its own zingers. Every insult lands like it was workshopped, because obviously it was, it's Sorkin. I don't know. Maybe that's just what a two-hour backstage drama needs to keep momentum. Doesn't make it less distracting.
Small thing that got me though: there's a scene referencing the original 1984 Super Bowl ad, and sitting in a theater in 2015 watching a dramatization of a guy dramatizing a computer launch, while carrying an iPhone in my pocket that has more compute in it than every Apple product onscreen combined, gave me one of those weird vertigo moments. Thirty years is not that long. It just doesn't feel that way when you're the one living through the thirty years.
Unrelated but stuck in my head the same week: Twitter cut something like 336 people, roughly 8 percent of the company, and Jack Dorsey sent around one of those "this is genuinely hard but necessary" memos that every CEO sends when this happens. I don't have anything sharp to say about it except that it's strange watching a company that's barely a decade old already go through the layoff-memo ritual that used to feel like a thing only old, bloated companies did. Dorsey's only been back as permanent CEO for a couple weeks now too, so this was basically his first real move in the job, which is a rough way to start. Doesn't inspire a lot of confidence, though I get that new CEOs inherit decisions that were already baked in before they walked back through the door.
Anyway. The theater I went to has this ancient popcorn machine that's louder than the actual movie previews, and the guy next to me narrated half the third act under his breath like he was live-tweeting it to himself. Not mad about it, honestly, it was kind of a nice reminder that people still go sit in dark rooms together to watch things instead of waiting for it to show up on a streaming service six months later. That part hasn't changed much since 2011, even if everything else about how we watch stuff has.
Going to go re-read the Wozniak chapters in the Isaacson book this week, I think. Curious how much of it holds up against what Sorkin decided to keep.