ronnay_barkay

I have not reviewed a movie on IMDb in several years, and wasn't even sure if my account was still active.

I managed to remember my password and log in to write this review because this is the first movie I've seen in a while that had enough of an effect on me to write one. So here goes.

I'll start at the end. When I left the picture-house (cinema) after watching this movie, I felt elated. Not some kind of fake high but a real sense of euphoria of being me. For the sake of being me. A feeling of pride in myself and a feeling of tremendous self-worth.

Perhaps it's because the first movie I ever saw in a cinema was Michael Keaton's Batman as a 10-year old boy, and he rekindled something from deep in my past, or maybe because it was just a really f**king good movie.

I mean... I was just glued, it was beautiful and just enjoyable. It had everything. Witty characters, amazing cinematography, surprises, out-loud laughs, I felt like the actors who were in this movie must have been having a blast when making it and that transpired onto the screen. There was just so much positive energy in this movie, it was just...electric. Despite the fact that the characters were what some people might call "depressed"...trust me they weren't. Even if your life is in crisis you can still be very happy and that's what this movie proved.

It was cleverly made. The claustrophobic atmosphere of the theater and the first-person perspective moving through the corridors of the theater really made you believe you were there. On the big screen it looked amazing. Everything was so perfect it looked just...ordinary. Which was perfect. I'm not saying the movie was perfect, there's no such thing, and I'm not saying it's my favorite movie, there's no such thing either, but it's an entertaining movie that deserves your attention and theater ticket fee because God knows Hollywood doesn't make films like this very often anymore.

I watched about the first 45 minutes of this movie. I switched it off when Elijah Wood is forced to play in goal in a 5-a-side match with a group of children during their PE class. The PE teacher is a member of a football "Firm" called the GSE or Green Street Elite, named after the street on which Upton Park is situated, Upton Park being West Ham football club's home stadium.

Wood plays an American college student who visits his sister in London and soon becomes friends with a group of West Ham supporters who happen to be heavily involved in football violence. At first they don't accept this college-educated American outsider as one of their own, but once he convinces them that the Karate Kid movies are based on him, they treat him as one of their own.

Although he has never been in a fight before, Elijah beats the hell out of one guy from the Tottenham firm in his first ever fight. I found this pretty hard to believe. Not to mention other little things like the aftermath of a football riot outside Bank tube station. There are no football stadiums anywhere near Bank tube station, and on weekends this area is almost deserted because it's right in the middle of London's financial district.

The other thing I couldn't take seriously was the horrendous cockney accent of the other main character. It sounded like one of those South Park accents that are deliberately bad just for comic effect. Some people might think the accent isn't that important, but I think it is very important. No matter what he says he might as well be saying "I'm not a cockney and I'm just reading a script". It simply didn't work.

These days it seems harder and harder to go to the cinema and see a movie that isn't frankly rubbish. The Social Network is the best movie I've seen since the last century.

It portrays the beginnings of Facebook, probably the most famous and popular website ever, creating the youngest billionaire in history, Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg is played by Jesse Eisenberg who gives an incredible performance of a young man with vastly superior intelligence , desperate to make an impression and become "somebody". By pure chance he is asked to design a website for the college, which he agrees to, only at some point he decides that the site he's working on should belong to him, not them.

It's well known that a lot of this movie is fictitious but I believe the core emotions and events are very true to what actually happened. Zuckerberg fed off the thrill of playing people like pawns, gradually shedding his nerdy teenage persona and turning into a ruthless businessman.

The movie tells the story with atmosphere using dark, brooding, menacing music, it just all comes together and exudes some intangible quality that makes it seem hard to believe that this just happened a few years ago, you feel the gradualism of the build-up as Facebook gets bigger and bigger and how people quickly get left behind and how Zukerberg and Parker became perfect business partners to create something the world has never seen before.

It's very brave to make a movie about a true story so soon after it happened. If this movie was made 30 years after Facebook was invented it would have been very different. The residual emotion that was floating around after these events would have long since evaporated.

David Fincher did something bold and brave by making this movie. The fact that it upset Zuckerberg himself is an achievement in itself. He's been portrayed with more accuracy than he's willing to admit.