I went and saw the Steve Jobs movie last night, the Sorkin one with Fassbender, and I've been turning it over in my head all morning instead of doing actual work. Fair warning, this post has nothing structured about it. It's just me thinking out loud.
For anyone who's missed the marketing blitz: Danny Boyle directed it, Aaron Sorkin wrote it, and instead of a normal cradle-to-grave biopic it's built around three product launches: the 1984 Macintosh unveiling, the NeXT Cube launch in '88, and the iMac in '98. Kate Winslet plays Joanna Hoffman like she's the only adult in the building, which, from everything I've read, might not be far off. Seth Rogen is Woz. Michael Fassbender does not look anything like Steve Jobs and about ten minutes in you stop caring.
Here's my actual complaint though, and it's a real one, not just contrarian bait: the walk-and-talk dialogue is exhausting for the first twenty minutes. Everyone in this movie talks at the exact same clipped, overlapping, too-clever-by-half pace, whether they're a marketing exec or Jobs's own daughter. Thats just how Sorkin writes, I know, I've seen the West Wing, I know what I signed up for. But biopics live or die on whether you believe the person on screen is a real human and not a delivery mechanism for zingers, and there were stretches where I didnt believe it at all. The scenes with Lisa land though. Those actually got me.
I read Isaacson's biography back when it came out, which if you've followed this blog for any length of time you'll remember was right around when I started writing here — Jobs died in early October 2011, the book came out like two weeks later, and this blog's first post went up that same November. Kind of a weird little bookend, watching a dramatized version of that story four years on almost to the week. The movie takes way more liberties than the book did, obviously, it has to, but I kept catching myself doing the annoying thing where you mentally footnote every scene with "well actually that's not quite how it happened." Not a great way to watch a movie. I'd recommend turning that instinct off if you can manage it, which I mostly couldn't.
Anyway, small tangent because I can't help myself: this was also the week Microsoft's Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 actually started shipping to people who preordered back in October, and my feed was full of unboxing photos while I was sitting in a movie theater about a rival company's dead founder. Didn't order one myself. The detachable-screen hinge thing on the Book looks cool in photos but I've been burned by first-gen hardware gimmicks before and I'm content to let other people be the guinea pigs this time. Maybe I'll feel differently in six months. Ask me again then.
Also, unrelated, but I finally updated to iOS 9.1 last week and there's a taco emoji now. I bring this up constantly to anyone who'll listen and I make no apologies for it. Small things.
Back to the movie for a second because I don't want to leave it on the hardware tangent. The thing that stuck with me most wasn't Jobs at all, it was Winslet's Hoffman, specifically one scene where she basically tells him he's a bad person in this very flat, tired way that isnt dramatic at all, its just exhausted. That felt truer than most of the "great man" stuff around it. If you've got two hours this weekend and you dont mind a movie that's more interested in being a stage play about ego than a documentary about a company, it's worth the ticket. If you're expecting something closer to that Ashton Kutcher one from a couple years back, this is not that, thank god.
I'll probably write something more useful later this week, I've been meaning to do a proper post on the podcast app situation since Overcast's Smart Speed thing has ruined me for every other player. But tonight I just wanted to get the movie thoughts down before they evaporated, which is basically what half of this blog has been for four years running now.