Part of our CINEMA IN THE TIME OF CORONAVIRUS series. Saturday, June 13, 2020 @ 8p, Netflix Streaming Service: THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010 , Netflix, dir by David Fincher, streaming, 121mns)
HOW TO: While we all work to be socially responsible during the age of coronavirus, Secret Movie Club is experimenting with news ways we can all come together as a community and watch great movies.
We want to keep this very reasonable since folks have to have Netflix to start with. So donate whatever works for you. $1 is fine with us.
Just make sure you download NETFLIX PARTY on a Chrome Browser. You'll see the initials NP in the upper right hand corner of browser after a succesful download.
Secret Movie Club will email the link for the Netflix Party at 30 minutes before showtime using the email you provide here. Click that link then click the NP in upper right hand corner. This will synch you to our screening. We will start the movie at exactly 5 minutes after the hour.
There will be a chat function that allows everyone to comment as we go.
The Secret Movie Club team will be offering trivia, history, insights, articles, deep dives throughout the movie(s). We're going to work to make this as rich a feast as possible utilizing the technology at hand.
Then we'll want your feedback immediately on how we can improve/make it better! This also will allow Secret Movie Clubbers from all over the world to join in on a virtual screening!
This week we screen David Fincher’s dynamite THE SOCIAL NETWORK with a dynamite script by Aaron Sorkin and dynamite performances from Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, & Armie Hammer, all about Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook.
Recently, Quentin Tarantino called this the best movie of the decade. That got us to thinking. How hard is it to make a movie about a topic that is searingly white hot and current in the public eye and have it age well?
Certainly other moviemakers have done it. Alan J. Pakula did it with ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN (a movie about Watergate made just a few years after the events). And more recently Kathryn Bigelow made a pair of movies, THE HURT LOCKER and ZERO DARK THIRTY, that astutely tackled the Iraq War and our War on Terror almost in real time.
The interesting thing about Facebook and THE SOCIAL NETWORK of course is that the topic is still evolving. What Facebook meant and was in 2010 (when the movie is made) already seems quaint compared to what Facebook means and is in 2020.
What there’s no denying is that David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin were ably up to the task of making a movie about a topic that many at the time thought unfilmmable: the meteoric rise of a communication tool where everything happens online.
The way they did it was ingeniously simple: they focused on the story behind the scenes. Of course the Mark Zuckerberg portrayed here (played with a strangely caustic yet socially maladroit brilliance by Eisenberg) may have little in common with the actual Mark Zuckerberg. But that’s not really the point of the movie. The point of the movie appears, in large measure, to really examine the whole culture of these young folks who created the online tools that made them billionaires and changed society in a matter of a few years.
Filmmakers like Fincher when they’re at their daring best seem to love a cinematic challenge. Like Hitchcock, Fincher seems to revel in proving folks wrong when they say a book, a topic, a theme can’t be made into a movie.
Join us to see what you think about how Fincher and Sorkin did.