The Social Network

Facebook is a marvellous website for millions of users, and has made billions for its founder, but at what cost to integrity?

We watched the movie The Social Network a couple of days ago. It has a wonderful disclaimer at the end saying that it's basically fiction and any connection between real personalities and the dramatised characters is entirely coincidental.   I know this is the normal disclaimer, but it's a bit of a surprise on the end of this movie, which features the creator of Facebook, the creator of Napster and various other people who were involved, and calls them all by name.

All that aside, it's a marvellous movie, and has (West Wing's) Aaron Sorkin's scriptwriting hand all over it, from the opening scene in which Zuckerberg and his girlfriend (she is a fictional character, apparently) have a full-scale debate (at typical Sorkin speed) about their relationship, to the ongoing interruptions to the narrative which tell us what's going to happen further down the track and show the marginally more mature characters trying to deal with the financial wheeling and dealing they've been involved in: everyone's suing Zuckerberg, who just sits there making sarcastic comments and getting everyone's backs further up.

It's an extraordinary achievement to have brought all this together in a dramatised form so soon after the events, and the cast does a great job of presenting a bunch of characters who aren't particularly viewer-sympathetic: Zuckerberg especially.  Jesse Eisenberg makes a marvellous socially inept Facebook founder, and Justin Timberlake is obnoxious as the overweening Sean Parker, the originator of Napster.  It's ironic, that at the end of this movie, the creator of Facebook has so few real friends.

Defend and Betray

Having found that the various non-fiction books I've got on hand at the moment aren't inspiring me to read them, for a bit of a change I decided to grab something off the Public Library's fiction shelves. Wound up with Anne Perry's Defend and Betray, written back in 1992, and one of the earlier books involving her detective, Inspector Monk.

It has the benefit of being written by someone who knows how to use language, which is a plus - there are plenty of thrillers/detective stories out there that are abominably written. (Interestingly enough on page 138 of this copy some person has corrected Perry's - or the editor's - 'bare' to 'bear' in the sentence '...bear the social shame of it.')

But after a good start, the book has bogged down a bit in the middle as the three investigating characters, Hester, who worked in the Crimea with Florence Nightingale; Rathbone the lawyer, and Monk keep going over the same ground trying to find out why the character who has confessed to the murder either couldn't have done it or, if she did, must have had some so far unexplained motive.

Hopefully things will start to move forward again or it'll join the League of Books I've-read-quite-a-bit-of-but-never-finished.

Anne Perry, it turns out, is actually Juliet Hulme, who with her friend Pauline Parker, murdered Parker's mother in Christchurch in 1954. I find it a little odd while reading the book that Perry should write about murder, murderers and victims with an objectivity that must have been difficult to achieve after her notorious act as a teenager. Still, given the chance to move on in life, I guess she had to do something, and she's certainly been very successful as a novelist.

Update, 20.3.11.
I've now finished the book, and yes, it does pick up on page 252, when the trial of the woman who's murdered her husband starts. From this point on it moves forward at a good pace, and the trial scenes are well written.
Some of the character drawing throughout, however, is a bit puzzling. Her detective, Monk, and Hester and Rathbone are constantly portrayed in ways that seem to show them being in conflict with themselves, so that we never quite get to grips with them. The three get on well, and yet, Perry is always telling us something that makes it seem that they don't. This character approach is a bit odd, to me.
The sub-plot concerning Monk's previous murder investigations and his gradually recovery of memories about them is just annoying. It interrupts the flow of the main story, rather than adding to it, and I found myself skimming these sections again and again, because they broke into the forward movement. Further, in the end they contribute nothing to the main plot, and merely show more of Monk's seeming conflicts in himself. Since these aren't terribly relevant to what else goes on, they were another irritant for me.
I think Perry overwrites: in building up the 19th century London world around her characters she often adds two or three paragraphs of detail. Yes, it reminds us that these people exist in a time different to our own, but it's extraneous to the book's basic intention. We don't need to know about the hansom cabs and vehicles in the streets, just because someone is crossing a well-known London square. We don't need to know how the various jams and stuff were made. And so on. These things need to be integrated into the book more.
Further, she's always giving us characters' feelings, and yet these are often out of tune somehow with the mood of the scene, as though she wants us to know that none of the main characters is really the same underneath as they are on the surface. For a mystery, these are just excess.
IMHO.

Stardust

I read Stardust, by Neil Gaiman, two or three years ago, when I was ploughing through his books at a rate of knots (having only just discovered him). A friend lent me the DVD, and it only clicked that I knew the story when they started talking about the village of Wall. From then on in, it was pure enjoyment.
Roger Ebert is surprisingly fuddy-duddy about the movie. James Berardinelli much more equable. Furthermore it actually tells the story better than the book did, which must be highly unusual. I remember that the last stretches of the book were somewhat rushed, or underwritten, as though Gaiman had run out of time or energy. Here in the movie, they have room to breathe, and the climax is truly a climax.
I can’t say I’m overfussed about Robert de Niro’s turn as a gay Pirate ship captain; that’s definitely a departure from the book. But since Gaiman had considerable input into the movie, he must have been happy with it. And it works well enough in the context of a fantasy world where nothing is quite what it seems. I seem to remember too, that the last of the nasty brothers was despatched well before the end. Here he survives until the last scene, which is more appropriate.
Charlie Cox is an absolute delight in the main role of Tristan; he and the role are one. Clare Danes does an English accent pretty well, (and is wonderfully down to earth) as Gwyneth Paltrow has done in a couple of movies – in fact, there’s a considerable resemblance between the two. It was almost as if Paltrow had dubbed Danes’ voice – or maybe they both have the same person dubbing for them?
There are a host of other names in the cast, from Michelle Pfeiffer at her gorgeous nastiest to Peter O’Toole having a day in bed as the revolting old king. Ricky Gervais gets a double comeuppance, first having his voice turned into that of a chicken’s, and then being dealt to with a sword because he can’t speak properly. There might be certain customers who think both were appropriate! Cox gets turned into a mouse at one point, Kate Magowan is a bird as often as a woman, Jake Curran becomes a goat, then a woman and a goat becomes a man in the form of Mark Williams, who manages to retain a great degree of goatiness. This isn’t a world where you want to meet the wrong person.
Nathaniel Parker turns up briefly as the grown-up version of the young man we meet early in the piece – he’s played by Ben Barnes (Prince Caspian, for those who don’t recognise the name). Here he isn’t the handsome Narnian, just a good-looking young village boy, with a taste for adventure.
Berardinelli, for some reason, compares the movie unfavourably to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. They’re worlds apart: the humour is quite different, particular the black humour, and there’s a sense that anything could happen here, whereas LOTR has a much more focused logic about it. Perhaps it’s the old problem of Yanks not finding British humour quite so appealing. Ebert certainly seems to have had a bad lunch before he saw the movie.