Some Fictional Character Named "Steve Jobs"

Steve Jobs was an asshole.  There’s no denying that.  I pity the gifted and talented people who worked with him and for him over the thirty-five years he raged across Silicon Valley.  There’s also no denying he helped change our world.  His vision drove those gifted and talented people to create things we had previously imagined only Dick Tracy or George Jetson could ever possess, and his genius led to ways of demonstrating to us how we couldn’t live without those things.  Any two-hour attempt to tell even a portion of the story of his life with any accuracy is doomed to failure, and it is with just this one caveat that I give Steve Jobs praise.

While the opening credits state the film is “based on the book by Walter Isaacson,” I wonder if anybody can get sued for such an arguably false statement, as there isn’t much more that book and this movie have in common than the title.  Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network, The American President, and gobs of episodes of "The West Wing") has crafted a fascinating three-act stage play depicting a character named “Steve Jobs” at three major events in Jobs’ life - the launch of the first Macintosh, the introduction of the NeXT workstation and the unveiling of the iMac.  His whip-smart, rapid-fire dialogue, combined with Danny Boyle’s (Slumdog Millionaire) deft direction and some world-class acting all combine into an incredibly gripping character study.

Despite Boyle’s not being the first choice to direct this film, it’s apparent he found the material fascinating, possibly appealing to his interest in theater direction.  His choice of utilizing different film formats (grainy 16-mm, standard 35-mm and crisp, high-def digital) for each of the movie’s three acts was brilliant, giving each period of time a distinctive look, evolving in quality over time, much as we hope the main character does.  He keeps his camera moving about his characters as they also move in the pre-opening curtain nervousness before these product unveilings, and keeps the movie’s rat-a-tat pace from ever feeling rushed.  

Sorkin’s screenplay doesn’t worry itself so much about any blow-by-blow depiction of actual events in Jobs’ life, instead using these three thirty-minute periods as the setting for showing how he interacted with the people in his life.  He omits Jobs’ acquisition and re-invention of Pixar Animation Studios, and how his transformation of that company became another of his contributions to our culture.  He omits Jobs’ happy marriage to Laurene Powell and their three children entirely.  He combines conversations from various times in Jobs’ career, reintroduces people whom he never saw again, and depicts the poor relationship Jobs had with his first daughter as lasting much longer than it actually did, all of these in the name of dramatic license.

Michael Fassbender gives a tour-de-force performance as this tortured egomaniac, struggling to balance his emotion, his vision and his ambition (his looking absolutely nothing like his subject actually helped me accept the movie as fiction). Kate Winslet is fantastic as Joanna Hoffman, Apple’s marketing head-honcho for so many years and, at least as depicted here, the only one who could herd Jobs in any direction, physical or emotional. Even Seth Rogen as the teddy-bear Steven Wozniak gives a strong performance of a character who was never as forceful in reality as he is depicted here (Wozniak has praised the movie, but admits that he and Jobs never had any conversation as confrontational as their final one shown in the third act; he wasn’t even present at the latter two events depicted in the movie).  

The emotional anchor of the story, however, is Jobs’ first daughter Lisa, played at three different ages by three wonderful young actresses (Makenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo and Perla Haney-Jardine).  Sorkin uses this relationship’s evolution as a parallel for Jobs’ own evolution into a man who can finally admit that he is “poorly-made,” a startling admission from someone who is obsessed with perfection in his products.

To their credit, both Sorkin and Boyle have stated to the press that this film is not a “bio-pic,” choosing to call it an “impressionistic painting” instead, trying to capture the essence of Jobs and how he changed in the intervals between these three events in his life.  Melding and mashing instances of numerous people entering and exiting Jobs’ life at various times into these three events makes for a never-dull, almost rapid-fire depiction of a personality, not a person.  Watching this Steve Jobs-character gave me the impression I was seeing an evolution along the same lines as watching that of Charles Foster Kane, but moving a hell of a lot faster and reaching a happier conclusion.

Do not take my concerns with the movie’s accuracy, or lack thereof, as any displeasure with the finished product.  Steve Jobs is a wonderful piece of filmed fiction.  Any issues I have with this movie’s playing fast-and-loose with actual events are my own, and yet I can still accept this movie as the entertainment it is intended to be.  If you enjoy seeing wonderful actors depicting smart people talking intelligently and emotionally about the problems they have with the world and with each other, then you should see this film.  It will almost certainly be a Best Picture contender, and more than one cast member will be eyeing Oscar gold come next February.

However, If you want to know more about what the real Steve Jobs was like, you owe it to yourself to read Isaacson’s book, and even some others, afterwards.

John Carter ("of Mars," damn it...)

Upon seeing the first promotional materials for Disney’s John Carter almost nine months ago, and with each trailer, TV spot or web clip of the flick I’ve seen since, the first phrase to cross my mind each time has been “Dear Lord, I hope it does not suck…”  Let’s face it – a story that was written a hundred years ago?  If it held any appeal at all, then SURELY it would’ve been filmed by somebody at some point, right? (well, it was filmed by somebody before, a mere three years ago, but that crap was direct-to-DVD, and had Traci Lords in it, and DID suck, and was never seriously intended for wide audiences, and… but I digress…)

Anyway, I’ve been scared for this film’s fate since I first heard about it going into production more than two years ago.  Most sci-fi/fantasy nerds (such as myself) have read the John Carter books, and given my affection for them, I wanted the movie-going public to share my fondness for these stories.  However, knowing casual movie audiences as I do, I knew it would take skilled filmmakers and skilled marketing to get Joe Moviegoer to give this movie a chance.  C’mon, you can hear the questions, can’t you?  A Civil War veteran magically transported to Mars?  There’s breathable air on Mars?  Mars has people on it?  Some of those people have four arms?  What the heck is a “Thark?” Swordplay?  Loincloths?  Giant blind apes?  Yeah, surely the same audiences who long for the next Will Ferrell masterpiece or post-pubescent vampire sexual fantasy will beat down the doors to see this…  Of course, Disney didn’t help themselves one bit with their awful marketing of this movie.  Andrew Stanton’s resume was never used as a selling point, and why not??? Surely mentioning Finding Nemo and Wall-E could only have helped a potential audience gain some sort of affinity for the director’s newest work.  Not once did any of the advertising play up the fish-out-of-water theme of the movie (which is a shame, as Carter’s initial disorientation with Mars’ lesser gravity is one of the movie’s funnier moments), instead focusing on making it seem a pure action movie.  Their abysmal failure with last year’s multi-million dollar boondoggle Mars Needs Moms was almost certainly the driving factor in dropping the “…of Mars” moniker from this movie’s title (although Stanton himself denies this), leaving potential audience members who are most likely unfamiliar with the source material to wonder just what the heck a flick titled John Carter would be about.

Oh, sorry - all that being said, I suppose I really should talk about the movie a bit – John Carter is a not-entirely-literal adaptation of “A Princess of Mars,” the very first published work of author Edgar Rice Burroughs, better known as the creator/author of “Tarzan.”  The title character is a Civil War veteran (played by Taylor Kitsch, of TV’s “Friday Night Lights”) who is searching for gold in New Mexico territory and upon stumbling into a cave, is mysteriously transported to a strange land where he finds himself to have superhuman strength.  This world, called “Barsoom” by the natives, but known to us as Mars, is inhabited by strange peoples and beasts with even stranger names and titles, yet he becomes involved in their politics and wars, falls in love with a native princess and helps to save their world from the evil machinations of a god-like race.  Pretty simple stuff, for sure, but it’s pure classic pulp-fiction fun.  For Pete’s sake, who DOESN’T love a rousing yarn about reluctant heroes and princesses in danger and shady evil-doers and magic and swordfights and…?

The stories were first published in 1912, and numerous filmmakers have tried to get them to the screen in some form or another for the next hundred years, but it took $250 million of Disney’s money to finally get it done.  It’s the first live-action film from director Andrew Stanton, who, as mentioned above, brought us two of Pixar’s most beloved films and was involved in the creation of all three Toy Story films as well.  One could argue this is also an “animated” film, as there’s so much CGI involved that one wonders how anyone other than an animator could have brought such an other-worldly vision to the screen.  This movie passes the first test ANY movie must pass – it’s nice to look at.  Movies are a first and foremost a visual experience, and before anything else, they must be (in SOME sense) pleasant to see.  The costumes are fantastic, the locations and sets are incredibly detailed, the photography is first-rate and the CGI is so wonderfully done as to be almost indistinguishable from “reality,” so Stanton must be praised for that much.

Did I find fault with it?  Well, I admit to finding myself comparing John Carter to the source material as I was watching it and feeling another tinge of fear as I heard Martian (Barsoomian?) names and other information being hurled at the audience with such rapid-fire dialogue that I worried those unfamiliar with the books would miss important information, but my movie-going companion that evening had never read the books, and she assured me that she never felt left behind, so perhaps that fear is unfounded (or she’s a frickin’ genius, which is entirely possible).

For those of us who ARE familiar with the books, however, we don’t have much reason to be disappointed.  Are the characters a bit one-dimensional? Yes, but I don’t mind that in this sort of material.  Edgar Rice Burroughs was fantastic at what he did, and Ernest Hemmingway was fantastic at what he did, but they didn’t do the same thing, after all.  Burroughs, who inserted himself as a character in his Barsoom stories, is probably the character with whom we would most identify, despite his relatively minor involvement.  Stanton makes sure that we see young Burroughs’ amazement as he learns just how factual those bedtime stories his “Uncle Jack” told him actually were, but while the rest of the cast of characters aren’t very relatable, I don’t feel that they’re meant to be.  This ain’t “Macbeth” – it’s Saturday morning cartoons, and it works splendidly on that level.

In the end, I enjoyed John Carter.  I’d have enjoyed it more if Disney had marketed the movie better and not caused me such angst in the year leading up to my finally seeing it, but I suppose one could argue that this is my problem, and not Disney’s.  That said, the fears I feel from their lousy marketing job continues, as the resulting negative press (and resulting lack of box office) may prevent Stanton from being allowed to produce the next two chapters in the Barsoom saga that he has planned, and that’s a dang shame, given how well he pulled off this one.