BuboBlog Reviews 'The Social Network'

(We went to see "The Social Network" this week — before I realized the movie is already out on DVD. D'oh. The screen we saw it on wasn't much bigger than a TV, but at least we got the experience of sitting near some old guy with a terrifying laugh.)

The problem with watching an Oscar front-runner so late is you can only really be satisfied with perfection. I had that issue with "The Hurt Locker," which didn't meet my expectations. In this case, the movie came very close to living up to the hype. It was nicely plotted, well-written and a delight to watch — with lots of great Aaron Sorkin zingers.

The film toggles back and forth between the founding of Facebook in a Harvard dorm room and the legal battles that occurred years later, when CEO Mark Zuckerberg was facing two lawsuits. The structure successfully maintains suspense, even without the courtroom theatrics that you'd typically see in a movie with so many lawyers.

Beware: The film isn't very accurate. One scene depicts a downpour in Palo Alto DURING THE SUMMER. No wonder Facebook called it a fictionalized account.

Watching anything penned by Sorkin is always a treat (I even enjoyed his short-lived show "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip"). But a few exchanges do occasionally feel overwritten. A character will make a witty aside, and then someone will comment on that, and then someone will comment on that. It was all enjoyable, so I hesitate to criticize. Perhaps instead of being too clever by half, it was only too clever by a quarter.

I found it funny that the only people who don't speak in the rapid-fire dialogue are the lawyers. (Aren't they supposed to be fast talkers?) It also was odd that Sorkin plagiarized from himself. In one scene, Zuckerberg says he could buy Harvard's Phoenix Club and "turn it into my ping-pong room." In "Studio 60," a character tells his father he could buy his house four times over and "turn it into my ping-pong room." Did Sorkin figure no one actually watched that show so it was safe to pillage from it?

I'm giving "The Social Network" my highest rating, even if I don't think it deserves the best-picture Oscar. In my estimation, nothing last year matched the ambition or execution of Christopher Nolan's "Inception."

Of course, that film is a long shot for best picture. Critical consensus has turned against it in recent months (it was snubbed in a lot of top-10 lists), perhaps in part because of how commercially successful it was. Many people also found it to be baroque and vacuous. I get that, even if I totally disagree. It's worth noting that Nolan's "Memento," which I consider the best film of the past decade, wasn't even nominated in 2001.

With that said, we're lucky to have several films this year that are perfectly respectable choices. "The Social Network," "The King's Speech" and "Toy Story 3" were all exceptional movies — and those are just the ones I've seen.

BuboBlog Rating: 4 asterisks (out of 4).