2 posts categorized "Technology"

April 09, 2013

DISCONNECT

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Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.ColeSmithey.comThis ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel. Punk heart still beating.

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ColeSmithey.comMenaces in the Machine —
The Modern Age Isn’t What It’s Cracked Up to Be

In an age where people obsess over their cellphones to the exclusion of the physical world around them, a dystopian malady takes over. Identity theft, online bullying, and interactive porn sites each play a part in a problematic digital social landscape that “Disconnect” examines in a razor-sharp triptych narrative.

Every character gets in over their head via pervasive technology. The thought-provoking movie is seamless in plaiting together the lives of its scrupulously credible characters. The effect is haunting.

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The subject of shrouded online identities, and their ability to infiltrate and damage the lives of their victims, may sound like old news to some but the threat is constant. The recent spam wars that slowed internet traffic to a crawl for millions of users is just one more in a long line of reminders about how vulnerable anyone who uses a computer or cellphone is.

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Andrea Riseborough’s quick-witted television journalist Nina carries on a webcam conversation with Kyle (Max Thieriot), an Internet sex worker for an underage sex site. Self-assured Kyle enjoys his work. He makes good money showing off his nubile bod and the erotic tricks it can do. Nina earns his trust, but all she really wants is to break a juicy story that will put a feather in her cap at the TV station she works for — not that she isn’t susceptible to Kyle’s very direct charms.

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Ben (Jonah Bobo) is a sensitive teenage loner. He writes plaintive songs on piano when he gets home from high school. Ben hides behind a swath of long hair that hangs down over his eyes. The fragile son of a successful attorney (well played by Jason Bateman), Ben takes the bait when a “girl” from his school professes her attraction in the form of Facebook instant messages. Unknown to Ben, her online identity is comprised of a couple of bullying classmates — one of whom is the son of Mike, an internet-crime investigator and former cop (Frank Grillo).

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Mike works on a case of identity theft that has devastated the lives of Derek (Alexander Skarsgard) and Cindy (Paula Patton), a married couple whose relationship was already in crisis due to the death of their child. Derek, a former Marine, imagines doling out some personal justice on the person who ruined his life.

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Director Alex Rubin (“Murderball”) embellishes the visuals with an inventive use of bold graphic design for the instant message dialogue that takes place between characters. Voyeurism becomes an interactive-like encounter for the viewer. An image system involving the camera viewing its subjects at various distances through windows and fences adds to a suspenseful sense of constant surveillance. In addition, cinematographer Ken Seng (“Quarantine”) uses a combination of documentary and straight narrative camera techniques to keep the viewer on edge.

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Rubin advances debut feature screenwriter Andrew Stern’s dynamic source material with an insistent rhythm of emotional counterpoint that culminates in an artistically composed crescendo of synchronized climaxes. When the slow-motion sequence occurs, it gives the audience time to ruminate on the physical and emotional forces that led up to it. Your cellphone can’t help you.

Rated R. 115 mins.

4 Stars

Cozy Cole

Cole Smithey on Patreon

September 26, 2010

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

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ColeSmithey.com

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does. This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel. Punk heart still beating.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

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Fincher's Tech-Wave Feast:
A Movie More Entertaining Than Facebook
By Cole Smithey

ColeSmithey.comBoy tech geeks won't be able to prevent themselves from outbursts of clapping, laughter, and bladder leaks while watching David Fincher's fast-paced drama about the meteoric rise of Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook.

Zuckerberg has, of course, famously derided this quasi-biopic as a piece of fiction. Perhaps he needn't worry. Napster co-founder Sean Parker (played dynamically by Justin Timberlake) comes across as a much bigger genius-idiot-douchebag than Zuckerberg does in the film.

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Jesse Eisenberg does a better job than expected as Zuckerberg, portraying him as an acid-tongued, fast-twitch cyberpunk who wilts every lesser intellect around him. The movie kicks off with Zuckerberg on a stormy date with girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara). The future mogul confronts, condescends, accuses, and changes subjects like an ADD/OCD speed junkie on a tear.

After Erica hands him his walking papers Zuckerberg rushes back to his Harvard dorm room to get drunk and blog about Erica's intimate failings. Then he cobbles together a which-girl-is-hotter comparison website called "Facemash" that invites every frat house tool to humiliate their female classmates by rating their attractiveness (or lack thereof). One hour and 20,000 viewers later, the site crashes Harvard's mainframe — and turns Zuckerberg into a big man on campus.

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Rowing crew twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss approach the genius coder to build them a Harvard social network site. Zuckerberg agrees, only to blow them off for the next six –weeks. Instead he cooks up his own soon-to-be-spectacularly-popular networking site with the help of best friend and newly appointed CFO Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield).

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Aaron Sorkin's dazzling script toggles between knee-slapping law office depositions of Zuckerberg and the litigious Winklevoss twins (who are out to sue him), and flashback sequences that tell the back story. Eduardo Saverin is also there, demanding 600 million dollars in punitive damages. Context and tone are everything in this pitch-perfect drama, anchored in the mishandled friendship between the cold-blooded Zuckerberg and his disrespected business partner Eduardo.

"The Social Network" arrives at an unprecedented time in modern history when the inertia of the internet zeitgeist can be encapsulated in one word, Facebook.

The filmmakers wisely stay away from explicating how people use Facebook or in any nitty-gritty details about the application itself. Fincher and Sorkin utilize a compressed communicative shorthand to tap into a coded tempo of frenzied energy that people use when engaging on Facebook. These are characters that think and talk fast. Very fast. The way the filmmakers and actors grab the audience by the lapels and pull you up to speed with them, is more than a little arresting. 

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It's telling that we're introduced to Sean Parker in the bed of an impossibly nubile Stanford college student in the morning after a night of sex. She is as shocked to discover his affluent identity as he is to be introduced to Facebook for the first time.

Sean Parker recognizes the "coolness" element that makes Facebook a much sexier medium than something like Craigslist. Zuckerberg's execution of "taking the entire social experience of college and putting it all online" is an iceberg tip that the narcissistic and "paranoid" Parker appreciates as just the thing to turbo charge the economically flagging silicon valley region of Palo Alto.  

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Some critics have fallen all over themselves comparing "The Social Network" to "Citizen Kane" for their thematic similarities of emotionally slighted young media mavericks who took advantage of the people closest to them to accomplish their macro-macro goals. But it's a quicksand trap to make such a comparison. Critics panned "Citizen Kane" when it came out as a "labyrinth without a center."

ColeSmithey.com

However, it's clear that the economic center that has made Zuckerberg the youngest billionaire in history is a young-minded public of internet users hungry for attention and safe interaction. There's an undercurrent of sadness to the film's scale and techo-laced musical score that recognizes its subject's frat boy logic and sorority girl gamesmanship. The tragedy here isn't personal; it's public.

Rated R. 120 mins.

5 Stars

Cozy Cole

Cole Smithey on Patreon

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