Probably Cause... gets Nominated!

My post, To Friend or Not to Friend (Mark Zuckerburg): David Fincher's "The Social Network" has been nominated for an award by the Movie 411 News Site.

If you liked the post and want to show your support, please click on the badge on the left of your screen (the one with big green letters that say NOMINATED).

Or click here.  

(If unfamiliar, and want to email and nominate, the URL for this post is: http://jonathanmendelsohn.blogspot.com/2010/10/to-friend-or-not-to-friend-mark.html]

The Great Soul Healing, Heart Breaking Novels #7 - Haruki Murakami's "Dance Dance Dance" Part II

For Part I click the fun that is Haruki Murakami's "Dance Dance Dance"

PART II

When Your "Normal" Six-Figure Readership Explodes Into the Millions

In 1979 Haruki Murakami's debut novel won first prize in the only contest he entered. By the time he got to his third novel, A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), when the writer himself believes he found his voice, he was already a big name in Japan's literary world. It wasn't, however, until 1987 with Norwegian Wood - the only Murakami novel that has no overtly surreal moments - that the author's readership went into the stratosphere. As the Translator's Note at the back of my copy states:

Haruki Murakami was shocked and depressed to find his normal six-figure readership exploding into the millions when he published Norwegian Wood in 1987. Fame was one thing, superstardom another, and the craziness of it sent him back to the anonymity of Europe (he had written the book in Greece and Italy). In 1991 he moved on to the United States. Not until 1995 was he prepared to resume living in Japan ...

I bore you with all this bibliographic detail because Dance Dance Dance, published in 1988, is the novel that followed Norwegian Wood. Murakami's only totally realist work of fiction worked and worked well - c'mon, Jonny, say it: it's a masterpiece (Norwegian Wood is the first book on my heartbreaking, soul healing list and ranks up there with The Catcher in the Rye and East of Eden as an all-time favourite), but for Murakami-san it was only an experiment. With Dance Dance Dance he was joyously (maybe even dancingly) coming back to the comfort zone he established with Wild Sheep Chase, to a world that could involve both high-priced hookers and an alternate world on the 14th floor of a hotel. In returning to the voice he was now so firmly comfortable with, in a voice so uniquely his own - that veers between the surreal and the hyper-real, ie. the mundane (more on that in a sec) - Murakami is clearly flying here. What I mean is, he's in total command of his story. He's so in charge of his talents that he can truly take his characters anywhere, take the stories down rather dark and dangerous roads, but then veer back to the weird, the wacky and, in Murakami fashion, the gloriously mundane.

Master of the Quotidian Detail

No writer I've encountered can do what Murakami does with the usually dull and pedestrian stuff of our everyday lives. When his narrator isn't flying on airplanes with sharp-witted, if rather sullen, pre-teen girls, or sleeping with expensive call girls because his movie star ex-classmate from high school suggests and pays for it, the story's first-person 'I' works in his ho-hum job or he's cooking or just having a beer at a local pub. I can only take a stab and assume that it's the way Murakami puts the quotidian details of life in contrast with a character met in a near alternate universe named The Sheep Man that the mundane stands out and in fact glows the way it does.

Perhaps also there's a connection to Murakami's admiration of the great private detective writer, Raymond Chandler. Murakami has translated two of Chandler's novels into Japanese.

There is indeed something of the detective story structure to Dance Dance Dance. Because of the suspense created for the "mystery" to be solved, once suspense has been place in the reader, Murakami knows he can veer off on a tangent for a few pages, using the pull of the mystery to keep us page turning. Just as Chandler's detective/alter-ego Philip Marlowe could take a momentary break from his investigation to drink and think and brood with his bourbon at the bar or play chess alone at home, so too can Murakami's narrator retreat solitarily from the more plot-restrictive aspects of his story, at least momentarily. A lesser storyteller, in either case, would send us racing through these pages, bored and waiting for more action. The way Murakami and Chandler do it, however, those breaks in the action become perhaps the most pleasurable reading moments of all. 

Murakami has said of his writing that his goal is to achieve a kind of balance. After a moment of high drama (there may even be a murder in there somewhere) we return to the redundancy of life. In Murakami's world, though, as you flip the pages and live it, the mundane comes as pure pleasure, like a soft spot in a favourite symphony. The music analogy isn't chance, as Murakami, an inveterate jazz fanatic, has compared writing to making music. He's trying to find the Music of Words (the title of Murakami English translator (and Princeton professor) Jay Rubin's book on the famous novelist).

Hunger, Housework and Humor
Hemingway may make us want to drink, but Murakami makes me want to iron. Seriously. (Though not literally.

Ai is stuck with ironing. I do wash the floors though, and derive the kind of calm Murakami gives me when his narrator does housework from my own Swiffer wet-mop action. Oh yeah!) Murakami just has this magic power that makes me want to clean or go out and have a beer with some eggs, or cook a simple Japanese meal. Writers go back to favourite books trying to undo the spell those books put on them, trying to unravel them, figure them out - how did they do it? But I fail every re-reading (this fall's re-reading of Dance Dance Dance in Japan, for this post, was my fourth go round). Each time he casts his spell on me and I can't help but let go and stop thinking and simply luxuriate in doing the relatively everyday with the narrator, for housework, or especially those things food related.

In quite a few Murakami novels the main character somehow or other, and usually because he is invited by a friend, winds up at a very fancy restaurant where everything is cooked to perfection. And really, who doesn't enjoy a gourmet meal once in a while, especially when you don't have to pay .

Presently our steaks and salads arrived. Beautiful steaks, Magazine-perfect medium rare.

Scenes of dialogue are that much more fun when a character has brought "a forkful of steak to his mouth and slowly savored the juiciness." Or the way Murakami has no trouble slowing his story to a near full stop to give us his spaghetti recipe. Stop. To take in the sizzle of garlic frying in olive oil before it browns and the peppers are added. Don't know about you but my mouth waters just paraphrasing the stuff.  

Probably best though and most Murakami-like of all is how frequently you find yourself amused.The book is filled with whimsy, with wonderful flights of fancy, but Murakami doesn't Wes Anderson capsize with it.OK, for a couple pages it does. But a couple pages does not a Life Aquatic dissapointment make. It is instead a breather from the story. Here, a taste:

In the end I decided to go up to the [hotel] lounge on the twenty-sixth floor. I nursed a martini while gazing out blankly at the flecks of white swirling through the void. I thought about the ancient Egyptians, tried to imagine what kind of lives they led. Who were the ones that joined the swim club? No doubt, it was the Pharaoh's clan ... trendy, jet-set ancient Egyptians. They probably had their own section of the Nile ...

Undress Me Nice and Slow - 
Finally, Those High-Priced Escorts

I don't know how he does it. Murakami's books are always, to quote Holden, sexy as hell, but without being pornographic or offensive to women. Believe you me, though, that there is always some of that old Japanese perversion. (I wish there were a better word for it than perversion, and all the Western judgment attached to the word -  spend a little time in Japan and the question of which is the repressed society sexually can get mighty confusing/interesting.) In a Murakami novel women are bound to get naked and the narrator never does worse than a hand job. What I can't figure out is how he gets away with portraying high-priced hookers without degrading or getting in trouble, at least not from the mass of female readers who adore the writer, my feminist (though ironing) wife included.  

The first thing that comes to mind is that he loves them. Women I mean. He treads, if you ask me, into far more dangerous territory than prostitution, but I'll leave that for a future date when I get round to recommending The Wind-Up bird Chronicle. 

But enough analysis, back to those hookers.

She was stunning. The sort of woman who'd linger in your memory even if she never spoke a word to you. Not glitter and glamor, but refinement. Under her coat she wore a green cashmere sweater and an ordinary wool skirt. Simple earrings, no other adornment. Very well-bred university girl.

Her scent was lovely. She was every man's, every boy's dream. The high school girl you'd always wanted, now come back years later.

'Undress me nice and slow,' she whispered into my ear. So I took off first her sweater, then her skirt, then her blouse and stockings. Out of reflex  I almost started to fold her things ... She in turn undressed me.

She stood before me in scanty bra and panties. 'Well, what do you think?' she asked with a smile.

And I didn't even include the dirty parts.

What's the Meaning of That Book, Anyhow?

The Maori of New Zealand have a name for a hill that translates as "The Place Where Tomatia, the Man with Big Knees, Who Slid, Climbed, and Swallowed Mountains,

Known As Land-Eater, Played on the Flute to His Love One." And that's rather like a novel. What's the name of that mountain? Well, it's this. To ask, What does that name mean? is meaningless ... the name is irreducible. So too are the novel and the short story, irreducible names. 

I've often thought that if someone asked me what's the meaning of my novel Fair Warning, the only answer is: read it again.

-Pulitzer prize winner, Robert Olen Butler, in his book on writing "From Where You Dream," which is currently blowing my mind.
  

*Also, Part II of Dance Dance Dance is coming. Wednesday, hopefully. My editor's been on my ass about it all weekend. Ironically, he's not himself so timely when it comes to divvying up the old paycheques round here.

Desert Island Novel to Read and Read and Read Again #7 - Haruki Murakami's "Dance Dance Dance" (or "Dansu Dansu Dansu" in Japanese)

[For Desert Island Books to Read and read and read again # 6 click Ernest Hemingway's Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises]

PART I 

Surprise Ain't the Only Thing That Translates

At the New Yorker Festival talk Haruki Murakami gave a couple years back, describing the effort of writing books, I swear Japan's now most famous author must have told the audience that writing was "fun!" at least five times. And when I say "fun!" I  mean that he said it (I know, I was there) with a near shoulder-shrug, high-pitched ease, like the way your ten year-old nephew would nearly indifferently describe his gloriously perfect day at Canada's Wonderland. Murakami wasn't being obnoxious; he wasn't saying writing a novel like Dance Dance Dance was easy; he was just trying to say that he enjoyed the process as much as he did. Still, you're sitting there listening to your favourite writer, taking furious notes like the wonder-student you never were, hoping to learn a few things, and there he is shoulder-shrug, high-pitched saying, "It's fun!"

You think I wasn't jealous?

There's an expression popular amongst those of us with writerly aspirations: No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. If you've plotted and planned out every detail of your book you'll never truly throw your reader for a loop. If, however, on page 342, as you're finishing your first draft, you realize that - holy crap! - your heroine is going to commit suicide, chances are you'll be instilling a rather holy crap feeling in your reader as well. They never saw it coming and how could they? You didn't either.

This of course doesn't only apply to surprises. Joy also translates and that fun Murakami feels in the crafting of his stories is evident throughout his extensive body of work. There is, as I've said on this blog before, a lightness to his stories no matter the subject matter. I don't mean they're all airy-fairy popcorn (for airy-fairy popcorn see Banana Yoshimoto). They aren't. But even when death is a theme it manages not to veer into the hopeless or nihilistic. His stories can get sad; they just never seem hopeless. There is an acceptance there, an always calm acceptance of what life is, of what it will deal. In turn, there is always a light behind, beyond or just the other side of whatever darkness Murakami might present.

As the Kyoto born novelist has said, he is always looking for balance in his writing and thematically he is unparalleled at coupling light with dark, especially in his later works.

In none of his novels, however, is there anywhere near as much fun (and not all that much dark) nor as many flights of fancy - to my mind, at any rate - as with his sixth novel, Dance Dance Dance (1988), a book so much about the "advanced Capitalist" age we're in and how much of our lives are now spent killing time, or trying to figure out how to kill time. To be honest the novel does very little heart breaking, but I'll call it soul healing and it does (heal my soul) by dint of its glorious ability to take me to another world - that bedtime = story time thing we've forever asked of fiction, especially on cold, wet autumn eves.

Planes, (Bullet) Trains and Subarus

There's a movie about to be released in theatres about a guy stuck in a wooden coffin. That's the setting for the entire feature. A coffin. Sounds about as pleasurable as being ... well, stuck in a coffin, which I suppose is the film's claustrophobic point, but doesn't sound like any kind of entertainment I'd enjoy. In my stories I like movement. Even on stage I've always preferred if there could at least be a kitchen for a character to walk over to and pour a stiff drink, so that you're not always just stuck in that living room. People talking in one room for scenes on end makes me tired.

I am, I fear, the same way in life. My favourite kind of dinner party allows me to be at one table, then another and then outside with the smokers (I haven't smoked cigarettes in years but haven't stopped sympathizing with and understanding the break-away-from-group-need that is so much of what feeds the habit).

I love Dance Dance Dance for its sense of adventure - for the various journeys it takes you on. The story doesn't stay in one place or even one city or even one country, and crap, it turns out the limitations of my life are such that I can't hop on airplanes nor afford bullet trains and go on vacation on a monthly basis. A book ain't a bad alternative sometimes. 

When I revisit The Catcher in the Rye I always forget how long the opening chapters in Holden Cauflield's school, Pencey Prep, really are. In memory the story spends a few pages at the school and then we're off and running away from school in the night with this teenager, spending the few days and nights that follow round New York. Going back, though, I realize there's a significant and rather dense portion of text (and the time required to develop some truly memorable characters - pimple popping Ackley kid, any Salinger fanatics out there?) set in the school. I mention this here because if one of the funnest things great books do is take you on a journey, then the only way to do that is by firmly situating you someplace first.

With Dance Dance Dance Murakami situates us first in Saporro, on Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido, which has a lot in common, I'm told, with Canada. (Canadians visiting Japan don't always gravitate to those northerly locations with climates and snow falls and greenery simliar to home - go figure.)

The streets were covered in a thin layer of slush, and people trained their eyes carefully at their feet. The air was exhilarating. High school girls came bustling along, their rosy red cheeks puffing white breaths you could have written cartoon captions in. I continued my amble, taking in the sights of the town. It had been four and half years since I was in Sapporo.

And whilst there the narrator is staying at the Dolphin Hotel, a once shoddy place that has now been demolished, replaced by an over-branded five-star hotel. So there you are in the slush and snow, or in the hotel lounge watching the swirling snow while sipping your drink and then he has you - I mean the narrator - sort of fall in love with a woman who works at the hotel's front desk before you're flying to Tokyo with a rather precocious thirteen year-old girl (speaking of Holden, and this is not Murakami's only novel with such a character - did I mention that Murakami wasn't satisfied with the Japanese translation of The Catcher in the Rye and so did a new translation himself a few years back?). And then it's her story, the thirteen year-old's (Yuki's) and the story of her clueless mother, who is a great artist but a terrible mother (eg. leaves her thirteen year-old to fend for herself in Sapporo, when home is Tokyo).

So now you're in Tokyo where you'll meet a movie star you once knew in high school. In Tokyo, back in your apartment, with your little Subaru and your music and your kitchen where you can cook the dishes that'll make all your readers ravenous (more on that later).

But just as you've settled into a book set in Tokyo, a hundred pages later (give or take - I didn't count) and you're suddenly on a trip to Hawaii. And really, who doesn't like to take spontaneous trips to Hawaii? Who, for that matter, doesn't want to read a book that makes you hungry and horny and so much more?

For that you'll have to click on Murakami's "Dance Dance Dance" that makes me hungry and horny Part II.

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."

-Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood.

Apologies

That book I mentioned, that I was about to review, it's been late in coming.
First a rough draft went missing (argh in the extreme), then a major deadline for a big grant came up that I was and am not nearly prepared for but would be crazy not to apply for anyway. On top of that ... well, I won't bore you with my personal life. We're all busy. But if you find the time to read - the desire to read - I promise, I'll be back next week. With a book. For you. And you. And you.OK, maybe not all of you. But most of yous.

In the meantime, a picture of a delicious salad:

What? It's the best I can do. The picture, I mean. Not the salad. I make a decent salad, but not as good as what Terroni on Queen St can do. But then, when half your salad is a good salty cheese, it ain't all that hard to impress, is it? Is it?

Is this just a movie site or what?

I recommend books on this site too. I swear. It's just ... summer ends and with it the sequel-heavy, explosion-laden blockbuster season, then finally fall begins, and with it hope begins again, at least when it comes to Hollywood product  it does. Movies with half a brain and a smidge of soul start making money and getting played in the multiplexes with those plushy great seats and large, curved screens. It's exciting. It's fun. It's fun therefore I blog. But I love the book too. I do. And have I got a post for you. What has to be the funnest novel I know. And yet written by a literary superstar. That's next. A book recommendation. A novel first published in 1988 that includes a movie star, a one-armed man, a 12 year-old girl, a fancy hotel and a trip to Hawaii.

To Friend or Not to Friend (Mark Zuckerburg): David Fincher's "The Social Network" - A Movie to See. Twice. Part II

 PART II

Continued from To Friend or Not to Friend (Mark Zuckerburg) Part I

Tantric Sh*t
There's a famous notion in the financial world that's very simple to understand and exceptionally difficult to follow: when all are selling - buy; and when all are buying - sell. In much the same way, as Hollywood movies keep rushing faster, jumping higher, cutting faster, more often, with more showy kinds of camera tricks, Fincher goes right the hell the other way. He parks his ego at the station, takes the subway to work and allows the movie to be what it's meant to be, a movie about ideas, a movie about characters, a movie with dialogue at its core. Granted, it's all those things with Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails) doing the score and with visual touches and heightened Fincher moments that  no other director I can think of today could match. Computer hacking has never looked so exciting.

But best of all, like Sting at his love-making tantric best, Fincher's film doesn't rush to its climaxes. A movie that takes its time to start (though plodding this film ain't, so don't you worry) and pays off this big is always an even greater thrill the second time round. Why, cause the second time you revel in the details you missed the first watch, and can only then (like with a twist Usual Suspects type ending, or a Fight Club for that matter) enjoy them and see the build for what it is, and how much precision there was in the raising you up before having you fall.Or vice versa.

The details here, though, aren't clues to tell us who Keyser Soze or Tyler Durden are. We know how it ends. We're friends on Facebook. The ending here is not the point. The puzzle isn't always about the ending. It's not the only thing worth wrapping the old noggin around. The details here are the quality of the dialogue, Fincher (and Reznor's) use of music, the acting (more on Eisenberg's performance as Mark Zuckerburg, Facebook's founder in a bit), but most of all the ideas.

I'm not gonna tell you the story. I don't do want to bore you, or ruin it, and I think you know it anyway. At least you know it's about Facebook and that Facebook is a big deal and that this movie has something to do with the founding of something very big. I will say that the stat that 500 million people are on facebook doesn't sound nearly as astounding as when you translate it into a fraction and explain that 1 in 14 people on this planet have a facebook account. 1 in 14!

What It's About
This is a movie about us. Now. I'm astounded to name Peter Travers, Mr. Rolling Stone magazine movie critic himself, as for once (meaning for one time in his lame at best, and downright fraudulent at worst, movie critiquing career), the guy got it right. The updated ads for The Social Network - the billboards across my city, at any rate - have his words all over them.

The movie of the year that also brilliantly defines the decade.

He's right. It is and it does.

Because this is about the me generation. As Fight Club laid clear, in the modern Western world we have no real cause to fight for but ourselves, or at least that's what we've been duped to think. And if so, all we're left with is our own ambition. Win at all costs; winner takes all. Kindness has no value in a world run by business. But ruthless ambition does. When all you're ever taught to do is win that championship, how can you expect morality to come into the picture? Think steroids in sports. Think Bernie Madoffs in New York. Think Tigers with cocktail waitresses.

But for every moral moment that we with spit in disgust in Tiger Woods' general direction think back to all those championships, how regal the guy looked in his red Nike shirts. How much we were willing to kill for the guy to win just one more PGA title, or whatever (sorry, not a big golf guy).

Because it's confusing, ambition is. 

It almost sends chills, as early on in The Social Network you watch this skinny, nerdy guy* running awkwardly across Harvard campus in his grey Gap sweatshirt. No one notices him, no one cares and he certainly isn't getting invited to the cool kid parties. And there we get to sit, the audience, and experience a glorious bit of dramatic irony knowing as we do that this skinny nobody is about to become the most powerful twenty-something on earth. 

This is a movie about a character named Mark Zuckerburg played by a harmless looking actor named Jesse Eisenberg. The brilliance of the performance could easily be missed since most award-winning performances are of the showiest, most charismatic variety. "Great acting" involves much crying (Meryl Streep circa 1980-something) or yelling (Al Pacino circa 1990-present) or playing of mentally disabled characters (see Sean Penn, Leonardo DiCaprio et al.). Eisenberg has the enormous challenge of carrying a movie as a remarkably uncharismatic, introverted, calculating, determined, hugely ambitious nerd. It is hard to describe how much he does with so little. But even amidst the enormous arrogance, the seemingly unending sarcasm and callousness, you get glimpses of humanity, glimpses of regret, glimpses of a guy who's really (at 19) still just a kid. Eisenberg may look like that other well known harmless looking actor, Michael Cera, but he's of a different order entirely. There's nothing goofy, nor harmless about him. He's also a lot more than just funny, though he's sardonically hilarious. 

 As Dirk Calloway says to Rushmore's Max Fischer, "Oh yeah, and with friends like you who needs friends? 
This movie is about friendship, loyalty and betrayal, but most of all it is a movie about ambition, about its great heights and its almost unbearable limitations. The Social Network is a movie about power. Shakespeare doesn't come to mind by accident. It's not for nothing that Justin Timberlake got cast as Sean Parker, inventor of Napster, to spin spells with his charisma round Mark and the audience. To up the ante a great deal and to tell a hauntingly powerful story about the founding of Victoria Secrets that is the movie's message in a nutshell. But I don't want to ruin anything.

You watch Mark and his young Harvard roommates succeed, you watch the numbers grow, the "friends" pile up, and you can't help but caught up in it - it's thrilling, it's an adrenaline rush. Yet if the movie were just that it would be The Secret of My Success or whatever Michael J. Fox type 80s movie all over again. And that would be great pop. But that's all. That is if not for a truly complicated storyline revolving around not one but two law suits, and a moral side to an ambitious tale embodied in the character Sorkin based on Facebook's co-founder, Eduardo Saverin.
   
The character, played so heart-breakingly openly by a British actor named Andrew Garfield (new to me, but I just google- learned he's also currently on screen in Never Let Me Go and will be the next Spiderman), is the key to the whole film. Again I don't want to give anything away, but I have to say that if you didn't care about these characters so deeply - and his in particular - none of the film would resonate, nor would the audience feel nearly as conflicted.  

The Hamlet Finale
In my first draft of this I compared The Social Network to Hamlet. Then I had my wife read what I'd written for her critique. She said, no. I was wrong. The movie was not Hamlet. The Mark Zuckerburg character was no Hamlet. He wasn't conflicted enough to be Hamlet. She said: We ... we are Hamlet. (She probably said it less overly dramatically, though.)

In which we learn why my wife is much smarter than I am. Because of course! Because, as she helped explain to me, it's the audience that is kept in constant conflict. Why is this not pop? How is this different from The Town or other well-made, fun movies? It's certainly riveting, certainly funny, certainly a thrill ride. So why don't you get that high feeling after? Because you are in conflict. Because you just don't know how to feel about this guy, this most successful young man in history. Because just try not to get caught up in the ambition, in the excitement of the founding of a company that you know is about to obliterate all records that came before it.

Marylin Delpy: The site got 2200 hits within two hours?

Mark Zuckerburg: Thousand.

Marylin Delpy: I'm sorry.

Mark Zuckerburg: Twenty-two thousand.

A friend suggested I run a poll, curious to know what percentage of people in some way related to Mark as they watched. Said friend of course did, I did, my wife did and I figure we're far from alone. Cause one minute you really are envying hell out of this guy and his enormous ambition, but the next you absolutely despise the twerp. Take a step back, then, and you realize this is the very nature of ambition. The drive the drive the drive - all that excitement - and then the terrible costs that come with winning ...  at all costs. Like my old friend, Yair, who has split his life between New York and Toronto these last ten years said in a comment on this site about the Big Apple: It's the greatest city in the world, but the quality of life? Not so much.

Mark Zuckerburg is one of, if not, the richest twenty-something in the world, at the head of one of the biggest internet companies in the world. After the movie, you have to ask yourself: would you want to be him?

Then watch it again. And prepare to be more confused. 

Hamlet indeed.

To Friend or Not to Friend (Mark Zuckerburg): David Fincher's "The Social Network"

[This post was nominated for Best Post by the Movie 411 website.] 

 

P A R T   I

Pretty Potent Mix

You know that pop song you hear once and have to hear over and over again, the one that two months later you never want to listen to again? There's that kind of music and then there are works like Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue." Miles' most famous album was elevator music to me on first listen; it took five more goes, listening the whole way through, before it even began to register. Cut to ten years later and it is my favourite album of all time.

I preface with that not because you need to watch The Social Network five times to understand it's good, nor does jazz music have anything to do with it, but I'm going to argue that you may want to consider giving the film a second viewing - and this before you may have even seen the flick. But truly, I think it's got that much packed in. Cause you couple David Fincher's talent as a director pressing his immense brain against that of a screenwriter of Aaron Sorkin's (creator of TV's The West Wing) abilities and have the two of them come up with a story about the guy who started the biggest internet phenomenon since Google - you get a pretty potent mix and a lot to take in one shot.

If I may pause for a split sentence and state -the obvious - that this is not just a movie about technology; as Fincher said in a press conference, they aren't trying to make The Net part II.

I can't know what I'll think of The Social Network in ten years, but I can say I'm pretty excited as I type these words.Whatever Oscar thinks (and it will) this flick's got legs. At least I certainly hope it does. Why? Because I. Cannot. Stop. Thinking. About. It.

The Stanley Kubrick of Our Time?

A lot of us knew it that first time we saw Fight Club (1999), that first time David Fincher made our jaws drop open - from the opening visuals against the Dust Brothers jarring and perfect score to the recognition that it was a gun that we were seeing and that it was in Edward Norton's mouth, but so much more so when Fincher had the camera drop some thirty storeys through the building to the basement so we could see the plastique, the explosives - explode. We knew we'd stumbled on something as exciting as Radiohead's Ok Computer or Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I also have to say that it was David Fincher that has forever poisoned me when I'm on an airplane. Norton's Narrator in Fight Club imagining his plane being crashed into by another is one of the most visually arresting - albeit disturbing - moments I've seen since A Clockwork Orange, and that's only one of how many visually mind-blowing moments in what was Fincher's fourth film. But beyond the sheer riveting and visually arresting and often terrifying entertainments that were Se7en (1995) and The Game (1997) you could tell with Fight Club that Fincher was a thinker. With Zodiac (2007) you got an unparalleled depth of thought, but what you also got, in the care with which the director would light a room (Kubrick, anyone?), or the unbelievable attention to detail in the gorgeous design of that 1970s San Fransisco Chronicle newsroom, not to mention the prettiest yet most ominous opening for a film I'd seen in years (destroyed Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" for me forever), you could tell the guy was an artist.

Yet it seems hardly anyone went to see Zodiac. I used to get all hot and bothered about this - the fact that yet another great flick had gone under the radar. Till now. Till Mr. Phenomenal Director decided to make a movie with Mr. Dialogue himself, Aaron Sorkin, whose gloriously whip-smart, super fast and funny, funny dialogue that the cast of actors is lucky enough to speak is only a single slice of a phenomenally satisfying pie.

When Fincher cast Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo and Chloe Sevigny in Zodiac we understood he knew something about acting. Having the balls to cast such a young bunch of actors in The Social Network, many of whom I'd never seen or heard of (Andrew Garfield?) and pulling the performances out of them that he does .... phew! Thing a beauty, boy. Thing. A. Beauty.

The Thinking Person's Thrill Ride

What makes The Social Network so powerful is that you'll find yourself thinking about it days later. Such is not the case with The Town, which I only just blogged about (about how great it was, please note) or many other movies I sincerely enjoy. For perspective, how much thought did you give Avatar four hours after?

And that's fine! I like pop as much as the next kid. Believe me (says the bloke who saw the latest Karate Kid in theatres this summer, and enjoyed it!). There are those movies that are zippy amusement park thrill rides (which I love) and those movies that have depth (which I love). And then there are those movies that do both. I think Fincher's latest is a masterpiece because it is so funny and so beautifully - and subtly - constructed. Love Fight Club as I did, this is a different Fincher, a more mature Fincher. Three movies later and a Fincher movie is nearing the levels of a Kubrick film; "One of his movies is like ten of someone else's," as Scorsese put it in a documentary about the late master filmmaker.

Nearing fifty, and with quite the resume now, Fincher no longer needs to resort to visual gimmicks at every turn to keep us tuned in. Perhaps that's why one viewing of the film isn't enough. I say this because I didn't initially come out with quite the high you expect from a great big movie. But I suspect I know why. I find the more formulaic the picture the greater the chance of getting that instant high feeling. It was the utter familiarity of Avatar's story arch that made it such a fun ride to follow and that gave us that quick-jolt, easy lift after. When, however, you see something as original as The Social Network, the high can take a bit of time to hit. Or, in my case, can require a second viewing.

What got me going back was the way the film stayed with me. I went back because of the movie's powerful ideas, for its heartbreaking characters, for its Shakespearean themes (but more on Will later).

Tantric Sh*t 

There's a famous notion in the financial world ... that I'll tell you about in the Part II, when I complete my minor dissertation on The Social Network. The Hamlet reference will make sense by then too. Promise.Oh and those ideas I keep referring to, I'll mention those too. The word ambition will come up, that it is the theme of our time - this blogging tweeting fame-hungry generation of ours. The thrills and spills of our ambitions. And those of a nerdy guy named Mark.
But less about him and more about me. I have a blog. I am special. So very special ...

Click To Friend or Not to Friend (Mark Zuckerburg) II for the sequel to this review.

www.twitter.com/mendelsohnjon

I mean even "The Social Network's" bloody preview is cool as cats. They got rights to a Radiohead tune? And what a cover of Creep.

Fun, Smart Caper Flick: Ben Affleck's "The Town"

Ben! Benny! Buddy! Where you been all my life? Well, I mean, I know you been starring in some kind of movies and such and that you even directed one before, but you know, I just wasn't so sure, you understand. Gigli and all that...

I mean, don't get me wrong, I always knew, or at least I had my suspectifications about you. But thems theys out there - you know who they are - they always thought it was Damon what was behind that Good Will Hunting thing. Me?! I knew it, Benny-boy. Oh I knew. I alway- OK. I'll come clean. I didn't know squat. Not a hint of a clue, my friend. But then, can you blame me? I mean, Damon was the Bourne frickin Identity - he could do anything. Spielberg, Scorsese. They all wanted to work with the kid. Meanwhiles there you are doin Pearl Harbor, no offence. But I'll shut my trap now, boy, and say all is forgiven. Cause believe me - if they didn't before, they get it now. Kid's got talent. I guarantee you that's what every producer in Hollywood is sayin now. They ain't doubtin who was behind that Oscar any more, no sir. Fact, I can't help wonderin how much that Damon kid really contributed. I mean, he starred in the thing - but you ... well I don't want to blow too much sunshine up your you know where...

Anyhoo I just wanted to tell you this Town movie. What a piece of work! You had me spillin my freakin popcorn all over the goddamn place, what with the tensions and the dramas and the whole thing had this great Boston authentification about it.  Really. You had this mood thing happenin and the cops and robbers and the whole thing. It was great,

just great. Alright, maybe you overdid it a little with the city patriotizing my nation thing. One less shirt with a big-honkin B for Boston on it, Benny, mighta been alright. But then Bruins jerseys always get me creased. (Go Leafs!) But otherwise ... Baby, you got it going on.

God bless your big old Affleck - nothin like a good bank robber flick that actually has a bit of the drama stuff to it. Even the frickin car chase scene! And they usually bore the crap out of me. It was exciting and it didn't go on too long or nothin! Oh and that leading lady of yours! Boy oh boy, Flecky, you sure know how to pick em. I'm tellin you, if they ever let me direct a flick I'd pull the same moves. The same moves. Gettin together the cast of cats you got. The guy from that Mad Men show to be the FBI guy, and then get that loony-crazy guy from The Hurt Locker to play a loony-crazy cause who knows what the hell that guy's capable. And then you pull that frickin rabbit out the old hat and go and get yourself that lovely girl we never knew till we saw that Vicky Cristina Barcelona movie, that girl that was so good I wasn't even watching Scarlett Johansson she was so good, that English girl. Rebecca something. Rebecca Hall (I got me an internet; I'm no dummy; I know IMDB), with those freckles. And that soap and water pretty face of hers and that clean honest, sweet thing that she is. Tell me, what guy wouldn't want to protect that for days! And can she act! My word! She's so good when she cried I was frickin crying all over the goddamn seats and my old lady's gettin all embarrassed and pullin out the kleenexs and all that. And then you - this guy - you you go setting yourself up to do them love scenes with her, and you've all buffed out and you got that pull-up scene. I myself, I seen better days but if I was every gonna star myself in a movie like yours, boy I'd get me into some real 80s action star sort of shape too. Oh you better believe it. I'm be fightin lean too.

I'm shakin my head at you, Benny-boy, shakin it good I am so impressed.You Affleck boys.

For a minute there I thought it might just be your kid brother. 

Regards and all that jazz,
JonnyM

PS Do me a favour? Don't do any more Michael Bay movies, alright?