Jobs

Steve Jobs isn't a nice guy... he uses people like they are toilet paper... and he is a taker. It's a great set-up for a slammin' movie. Unfortunitely, this movie seems incomplete and without heart. More accurately, most of the scenes seem incomplete, disjointed and pointless. It all adds up to nothing.

Problem #1) You don't care for Jobs and you leave the theater not knowing Jobs. There are few emotional moments in the movie - except when you want to spit on him. Fire this person unnecessarily; deny that loyal employee well-earned benefit; use your wealth to destabilize the company... it all describes someone you are glad you don't know personally or professionally.

Problem #2) The movie is paced slower than my Aunt Minnie in a walker. I've seen paint dry faster.

Problem #3) The acting... maybe I should say the affectations. Kutcher over-emphasized Jobs odd gate and stance as if it meant something. But why distract us with an antalgic back, hyper-extension of the knees, increased lordosis and anterior propulsion? It distracted from the story and took me out of the movie every time.

Problem #4) The editing was horrible. Scenes would start and finish randomly - with no emotional content. Many scenes had no relationship to the structure of the movie - taking valuable time and adding little to nothing; disjointed would be too nice of a word.

Problem #5) The strange arc of the story-line ended before it began in earnest. The writing didn't explain how the apple II was able to sustain the many, many years of subsequent failures. Do corporations really build stockholders via "image", not performance? Metaphysically, I know that untalented a-holes who use, abuse and throw people away deserve to suffer. But we didn't see suffering. We see a fabulously wealthy person, whose emotional system was M.I.A, slide through life on the efforts of others.

There is no teaching moment in this movie. There is no emotional content. There are no memorable lines or moments. This isn't a movie; it feels more like revenge, cold and pointless.

Steve Jobs (Ashton Kutcher) is shown starting from his college drop out years in 1974 to working at Atari in 1976. He joins up with Steve Wozniak (Josh Gad) bringing Woz's computer to Homebrew. With Woz, they start Apple in his garage. Former Intel guy Mike Markkula (Dermot Mulroney) becomes their investor.

I'm sure Steve Jobs fans have a thousand mistakes they like to point out and a thousand more complaints about his douchie portrayal. I have a more simpler complaint. This is no more than a simple made-for-TV movie. Ashton Kutcher is doing more mimicry than actually taking on the persona. I actually put most of this on the shoulders of director Joshua Michael Stern. There are too many Jobs speeches and pontifications. It's an easy way to copy Steve. Maybe it's too easy. It needs to go deeper.

Steve Jobs(R.I.P) October,5th,2011.

jOBS is not a biography movie like Citizen Kane, Gandhi, The Last Emperor, The Last King of Scotland, Malcolm X, and Gladiator. But it takes all the genre clichés from these movies, while following the same story structure of Social Network.

Since I mentioned David Fincher's movie Social Network, I will start my review with the major problem in jOBS: Considering Social Network was an aptly marketed everyone's hero style of an average business-drama movie, in order to market a Steve Jobs life story appropriately, this wasn't the right choice. The cause of this marketing errors are the trailer, the poster with Ashton Kutcher on it, and the movie itself with Ashton Kutcher starring in it.

Then what is jOBS about? jOBS is just a simple telling of a person's epoch-making achievement like Schindler's List, Spartacus, Raging Bull, Braveheart, Papillon, The Pianist, and even David Lnych's The Straight Story. jOBS has more than a few things in common with those movies including the pain of sacrificing your beloved ones in order to succeed in your career, including similar character traits, similar ethical beliefs, similar moral decisions. jOBS is only a brief telling of what Steve Jobs gave to the Macintosh computers, just like what Oscar Schindler gave to Jews, and what Braveheart gave to Scotland. You can't expect to see the birth and death of Steve Jobs in this movie. This is not a biopic, instead it's a drama, poorly marketed good business-drama.

There are both strong and weak points in the technical side of jOBS. As a start, having no narration is a strong point, yet having not explained why Steve Jobs dropped out from college is crucially a weak point. Ashton Kutcher takes his girlfriend and goes behind bushes in the country and smokes weed. Then we get to figure it out that Steve Jobs has dropped out from college because he smoked weed and got his girlfriend pregnant. Refusing the birth of his first child due to his busy work schedules, Steve Jobs character has been made more weaker and weaker minute after minute. There is certainly a rule of character growth followed in this film, but none of this film's audiences have really bought that character growing incidents.

This is an average business-drama movie, set in the world of entrepreneurial minds. You're lonely, you always keep a positive mind but always looking for a person to trust, you are goal-oriented, you take maximum risks for every little achievements in your life, you are a reliable friend to your colleagues but they are always afraid of you, and you see every step in your life as a competition with someone else's steps in their lives...

This is a strong premise that killed the sense of making a Steve Jobs movie to honor his memory. This movie should have been made in 1997, when Steve Jobs have become the de facto chief CEO of Macintosh. And this movie could have been titled "Think Differently" as this is what it is only about. If this has been a movie called "Think Differently" made in 1997, then it could earn some recognition. Now people would come to you and ask "What did Steve Jobs do for the last 14 years of his life as a CEO in Apple?"

Let's see, well it was worth seeing for me; however, I wished I had waited till is came out on television -- Because it was really a "movie of the week"... do they still have those? To say this movie was weak on facts would imply they got it ALL wrong - Yes, they made some things up doing the "hollywood thing" but they didn't even attempt half the history so they couldn't have gotten it ALL wrong! Parts of his life missing were glaring!

They glossed over years -- Heck decades at points, concentrating on Apple more than Steve Jobs in my opinion... maybe a better name would have been "Apple & jobs - Some of the Years"!

Wait for the movie to hit your TV and know you will still be missing more than half the story!

It must be difficult for an actor to convincingly portray a world famous person whose death only two years before means that his image is still relatively fresh in the public consciousness. It must also be pretty tough for filmmakers to portray the life of an iconic figure in the space of two hours. I give "Jobs" (PG-13, 2:02) credit for accomplishing one of those two tasks. (In addition, there was the pressure of knowing that another version of the film was being written by the highly-esteemed Aaron Sorkin.) When it comes to portraying the legend who co-founded Apple computers, Ashton Kutcher does an excellent… Jobs. The actor uses his natural resemblance to the computer genius and adds just enough of Steve Jobs' voice, mannerisms and walk to help us (mostly) forget that we're watching Ashton Kutcher, but he doesn't overdo it by trying to do a perfect impression which could have crossed over into caricature. This film represents some of Kutcher's best work to date, but not quite award worthy.

Unfortunately, the script isn't strong enough to give us the whole picture of Steve Jobs' remarkable life. As the film traces the rise, the fall, and then the beginning of the resurrection of Apple the computer brand, the focus is divided too much between the company and the man. If you know more about the life of Steve Jobs, you'll be disappointed when you realize you're not getting to see the full arc of his life. The film would have been better off calling itself "Apple", but even then, I would have found it lacking.

This film reminded me of "The Social Network", but without the same level of entertainment in its storytelling. The supporting actors, including Josh Gad as Apple's other founder, Steve Wozniak, Dermot Mulroney, as initial Apple financier and eventual CEO Mike Markkula, and Matthew Modine as John Scully, Markkula's successor as CEO, show the passion that those closest to the company have for Apple, but the film is supposedly about Steve Jobs. While the script does touch on some of Jobs' personal life, it seems much more concerned with the company that he helped start. "Jobs" may give us a measure of the man, but doesn't do the best job at telling his STORY. Doing the best job I can as a reviewer (while still doing my other… jobs), I give this one a "B".