Awesome Things in the Movie The Social Network

- California UberAlles by Dead Kennedys makes an appearance after intern hack fest

- Sound editing in nightclub scene between Mark and Sean — only a true sound master can hit a final product that sounds exactly like barely being able to hear the dialogue between the characters sitting in a loud club with house music at 110 decibels… but allow you to still hear every word in a rapidfire conversation

- Mark dashing out of computer lab into the snow, in his flipflops and shorts on a snowy winter day… Lame directors would closeup on his flips so you’d be sure to get the “this guy is such a geek he wears adidas soccer flipflops with socks in the winter” joke, masters like Fincher show you him missing a step in the snow from 20 feet away through the glassplate front of the building, and he gives you the audience the credit for being smart enough to notice the costume designers detail

- Set designers choice of the rental house in Palo Alto where team thefacebook.com starts the project in Cali — I swear that is the same house where I rented a room in Palo Alto one summer on a summer internship, and anyone who knows the area west of Stanford near Avenida De Las Pulgas will instantly recognize that location choice as spot-on

- Jesse Eisenberg’s performance throughout. His slightly pinched, non-plussed portrayal of a combination of intellectual arrogance and consuming inadequacy is rattling throughout… I don’t know if that’s how the Zuck really is, but that’s how millions will now forever think of him, for better or (probably) worse

- Twins being played by one guy. Never noticable, despite what must have been crazy blocking and post-production CGI editing hassles throughout. (Again, ferw but Fincher could cast it this way and know he would be able to pull it off seamlessly)

- Saverin’s PC-hucking meltdown and “You better lawyer up” tirade against Zuck when he finds out he was shenanigan’ed out of all his equity… If there were ever a scene where his character earned the admiration of the audience at the expense of basically everyone else involved in the debacle, that was it. Even his one-gesture, one-line dressing down of Sean Parker at the end of it is perfect.

- Crew race as metaphor for Twins too-little, too-late strategy of handling the known threat of Zuck’s first mover advantage over them — complete with fish-eye lens cinematography and hazy soundtrack (courtesy Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, who gets the music landscape basically perfect throughout (See DK’s reference above…)

- Zuck’s endless refreshes waiting for a Friend Request accept from his former flame as the last scene in the film… The perfect metaphor for the whole internal ball of wax driving “Zuckerberg the character’s” motivation, and perfect device to serve as book-end to the machine-gunned dialogue with aforementioned flame in the opening scene

And a couple (forgivable) UnAwesome things, just for balance…

- Justin Timberlake is just too slick and too ‘perfect’ in a weird way as Sean’s character, its sort of like George Clooney and all of his characters, if you know he’s actually one of the coolest guys ever in real life its hard not to have that color his character and erase just a touch of the smarminess everything else in his dialogue suggests about that character

- Final club scenes at Harvard and the Larry Summers character/confrontation scene are just a little too cheeky (for my taste)

- Not everyone in real life is as attractive, well-spoken, and graceful as basically everyone is in this movie… But perhaps that’s a good reminder that this wasn’t intended to be a documentary, but instead a dramatization based on a book written by the guy that wrote Bringing Down the House, so everything perhaps was played just a bit glamorous and just a bit dramatic to kind of create just enough distance from ‘real life’ (such as whatever that really is surrounding this whole story) so that Sorkin, Fincher, and the rest can forever defensibly say “Look, this is a movie kind of about this stuff not a documentary so don’t believe everything we put in there”…

- Too many uses of the line “He’s wired in…” to describe dudes so immersed in code-world as to be oblivious to whatever else is going on around them. Call me a skeptic, but even dedicated code monkeys would probably be a little distracted if teenagers were doing 6-foot bong hits all around them or their former best friend and business partner had just flown in to get massively, irreperably bamboozled in a glass-walled conference room 10 feet away

- The entire character whose name rhymes with Zark Muckerberg, throughout. Whew, it is heavy emotional work trying to find a shred of something redeeming in the values of that character, which as an audience member is usually asked of you in living with any protaganist for a couple hours on the big screen. No quarter given by either Sorkin, Fincher, or Eisenberg from start to finish in this regard.

All in all, having given it 24 hours to brew in my mind, my main takeaway is that The Social Network is a sharp and merciless movie where everyone comes out emotionally damaged in one way or the other. I tend to agree that it will stand up as the Wall Street biz flick of our digital / Internet / social media era, and I don’t think I’d have gone to sleep any faster last night after watching it even if I weren’t currently engaged in the social media phenomenon for my own chosen career. Say what you will about how ‘accurate’ or not the story, characters, and conclusions actually are… Its a cautionary tale suggesting that no business endeavor that turns out with wild success on one side can do so without some kind of treason, chicanery, or outright failure lurking in the less-frequently-told story on the flipside of the Win.

If you’re one of the 500 Million++ who’ve been participating in the ‘Mark Zuckerberg Production’ during the last few years – and I suspect anyone who’s found their way through the magical interweb tubes to this post probably is – then its worth seeing this movie, if only to remember that there really is no such thing as a Free Lunch, for any of us.