Category: Justin Timberlake

TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE

By Marc S. Sanders

Roles for the “aging has been” who is either about to retire or refuses to retire seem reserved these days to Robert Redford or Clint Eastwood.

Back in 2012, Eastwood gave up his director’s chair to star in a little known film about an aging baseball scout in Trouble With The Curve. I’ve seen him play this kind of role many times before like In The Line Of Fire, or Grand Torino.

There’s nothing memorable about Trouble With The Curve, but it does feature some good scenes between Eastwood and Amy Adams as his tough as nails attorney/estranged daughter who forces herself upon his scouting trip to look after him when it seems his health, particularly his vision, is deteriorating. Adams is good as the underestimated baseball expert. She can recognize a 95 mph pitch and she can triumph over you in reciting RBI stats, batting averages, etc. Give her a bat and she can also cream a ball outta the park.

Justin Timberlake is the necessary pretty boy romantic interest for Adams, but he doesn’t offer much to the film in the way of humor or even sex appeal. This guy is a great actor beyond his music. (See The Social Network)

The movie belongs to Eastwood alone.

First time director and regular Eastwood crewman, Robert Lorenz does well with the baseball footage of young prospects and the end is satisfying as the argument weighs whether experience and instinct can still trump the power of technology.

Has baseball truly come to rely on what a computer says is the best first round draft pick? Wow…how sad.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

By Marc S. Sanders

Power and knowledge can be a dangerous thing for a kid who is not necessarily as mature as his IQ would suggest. Mark Zuckerberg reinvented the way an entire planet functions from his Harvard dorm room. In the process, he couldn’t have cared less about the antagonism he was generating.

David Fincher’s The Social Network, with a brilliant screenplay by Aaron Sorkin captures kids with too much opportunity to seize, and the hubris they carry when they discover money, jealously, pride, and greed through a winning societal experiment.

The film features one of the best casts ever assembled, at least definitely within the confines of the 21st Century. Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake (should’ve been nominated), Armie Hammer (one of the best twin brothers’ portrayals in film), Rooney Mara, Brenda Song, and of course Jesse Eisenberg. Sorkin wrote the dialogue. It’s another thing to deliver it.

These people talk before they think, and it’s likely what caused them the aggravations of their own success and discovery. Watch the first scene between Eisenberg and Mara, as Zuckerberg and his girlfriend, Erica. Zuckerberg is already too smart for his own good. His failure with dating Erica is destined to be his undoing. He’ll never recover from this moment. Never! This is a kid with his hand on the nuclear button and he can’t stop pushing it. The other characters are all the same. Harvard geniuses with so much to gain, but how much will they lose?

Mark Zuckerberg, Cameron & Tyler Winklevoss (the self-absorbed twins of prestige and legacy), and Sean Parker (inventor of Napster) are prophets of a bigger picture. They foresaw the basic human desire for attention. People’s needs to be noticed are the commodities to monetarily profit from. These kids knew that better than anyone else. Ironically, Zuckerberg’s best friend and financial partner, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), didn’t know it until he realized he was a large step behind. It cost a lot of money. Ironically, in the process of creating a new means of connecting with friends, it suffered the cost of a friendship, as well.

The Social Network will always be one of my ten favorite films. (Talk about huge Oscar upsets…excuse me The King’s Speech for Best Picture????) I’m always amazed at these kids with power. The knowledge they possess is bigger than anything within the confines of our historical governments, and yet they bicker and steal and betray like toddlers in a sandbox. Switch out “Facebook” for a Nerf football or a Barbie doll, and you can still apply this fast-paced wit of words. Sorkin pounced on that dichotomy. We’ve seen civil lawsuits on film with grand disputes and long speeches in front of arbitrators. We had yet to see college students dominate tables full of lawyers with crackling dialogue exchanged to prove their worth over one another. Amazingly enough, Sorkin used much of the dialogue from recorded transcripts he accessed. These guys actually spoke like this with each other. These technological pioneers gave the planet’s people the attention they wanted. Yet, what ultimately mattered to them was the credit for what they felt entitled to.

I’ll never tire of watching The Social Network, even if listening to Mark Zuckerberg is as exhausting as talking with a stair master.

One of best films ever made.