I think I can safely say that The Social Network is not the feel-good movie of the year – certainly not for Mark Zuckerberg, or for the dozens of exceptionally talented men and women who created Facebook. They were, and are, brilliant, hardworking and imaginative people who, mostly by design and occasionally by lucky accident, managed to survive the uniquely fraught early moments of an online start-up and the more established dangers of real-world Valley venture capital. It was a swirl alright, but not the way the film would have you think. There are, of course, exceptions to the exceptional: Eduardo Saverin and the Winklevii. (The goofy name that Zuckerberg stamped on the preternaturally entitled Winklevoss twins appears to be true. It delighted the audience.) The movie was based on Ben Mezrich’s book, The Accidental Billionaire, an entertaining read that was so breezily fictional that Janet Maslin of The New York Times skewered it: “The Accidental Billionaire is so obviously dramatized, and so clearly unreliable, that there’s no mistaking it for a serious document.” I’d read the script for the movie earlier this year and winced.
Check the
Fast Company article out here.
NEW YORK -- By the time I got around to going to "The Social Network," four days after its $25-million nationwide opening, I'd read half a dozen blockbuster reviews and columns dissecting the film and its portrayal of Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. It was impossible to go to the movie with a fresh eye and an open mind. What if I didn't like it? Well, I did. It's terrific. So let me dispatch quickly with all the issues surrounding the film that the critics (who adore the movie) and the social pundits have probed, held up for inspection, and looked at from all sides now. David Carr suggested in his column in The New York Times on Monday that there might be a generational split in moviegoers' response to the Zuckerberg character, a real-life boy genius tagged as the youngest billionaire in the world. He's 26. The young generation will cheer Zuckerberg, his duplicity and betrayals while grabbing a chance and running with it all the way to world domination. The older generation will see the movie as a story of an insensitive young man who betrays friends and partners and values for the sake of fame and money.
Read the full review here. See also:
The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal
,
The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World
,
Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era
