“The critics agree, which almost never happens. It’s sitting at 100 % on Rotten Tomatoes and in the high 90s on Metacritic. The AP gave it four stars out of four. Vulture’s Alison Willmore called it the movie of the year. Fielder himself told one screening audience that he’s still not sure what he experienced, and that he hopes people can “help me understand what I went through.”
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Hello again, friend!
I was born in 1984. I’m ashamed to say that I happen to share this birth year with two people who have had a disastrous impact on society… Elizabeth Holmes and Mark Elliot Zuckerberg. If you walk by a movie theatre this month, you’re bound to see their faces on giant posters. Go see these movies.
It’s a golden age for grifters and arseholes.
I saw Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning at Nighthawk last week, surrounded by people who checked their phones throughout the movie, and again once the lights came up.
Quick version: Mikey Madison plays Frances Haugen, the Facebook product manager who walked out with tens of thousands of internal documents. Jeremy Allen White plays Jeff Horwitz, the Wall Street Journal reporter she handed them to. Jeremy Strong (Kendall Roy from Succession) plays Mark Zuckerberg, mostly by being argued about in rooms he isn’t in.
The investigation half is good. Madison is probably the reason to go. She spends half the film insisting she loves Facebook and believes in the mission, and you believe her, which makes the rest of it so awkward to watch.
The number that does the damage is 64%: that’s how many of the people joining extremist groups on the platform got there because the algorithm recommended it. Another scene puts a 38%drop in misinformation against “just 1%” of engagement. Leadership picks the one per cent.
That’s. The whole. Movie.
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Then Sorkin does Sorkin. Everyone speaks in finished paragraphs (although, to his credit, they aren’t doing a walk-n-talk like usual.) Motifs come back like a sitcom catchphrase (”we’re playing with kerosene and matches” turns up so often I started counting). There’s a Cassandra speech, a Tale of Two Cities bit, and a Gilligan’s Island anecdote, all delivered by people who’d absolutely be fucking muted on a group chat.
Bill Burr is great as Charlie, the old mentor who keeps telling Zuck the truth and keeps getting thanked for it with a door. Strong’s Zuckerberg is… a choice. Cold, smug, occasionally funny when it isn’t meant to be. (Which, to be fair, is also the source material.) The ending is a pretty decent speech (He probably wrote this part first.)
Tobacco, cars, opioids: the government took action. But the film wants a victory lap for a problem that’s still very much in your pocket, which sits a bit oddly.
Go. Then delete Instagram.
(You won’t. Neither will I.)
Now, the REALLY Good One…
On Monday afternoon I saw You Can See Everything at Williamsburg Cinema, in a theatre so full that there was someone sitting in the stairwell, and the entire front row was full, despite it being mere millimetres from the screen.
It’s the new documentary from Nathan Fielder (Nathan for You, The Rehearsal) and Lance Oppenheim, and it follows the above-mentioned Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos founder, through the 34 days before she reported to federal prison in 2023. She let him move in. She let him film everything. Hence the title, which is a promise the movie spends three hours testing.
That’s all I’m telling you about what happens. Seriously. The filmmakers have asked people not to spoil it, and for once in my life I’m going to do as I’m told.
What I can tell you is what it does to you…
It runs 174 minutes, and I didn’t check my phone once. For a man with my attention span, that’s basically a medical event. (I did, however, scribble copious notes in my notepad because I was afraid I’d forget everything I was seeing once my brain dripped out onto my shoulder.)
