BEFORE: This time it's Lukas Haas' turn to carry over from "Transcendence", where he had a cameo role, but in "Jobs" he has a larger role, that of early Apple Computers employee and Steve Jobs friend, Daniel Kottke.
There's also an obvious tech-related reason for putting this film right after "Transcendence", but the two films appear to be very different. One is about a man with a computer-based brain who tries to take over the world through technology. (And, as Craig Ferguson might say, the other film is "Transcendence". Cue rim-shot.)
THE PLOT: The story of Steve Jobs' ascension from college dropout into one of the most revered creative entrepreneurs of the 20th century.
AFTER: Early in this film we Steve Jobs in college, where he refuses to wear shoes - and then working for Atari, where he apparently refuses to shower. I realize it was 1974 and hippie culture was still in effect, but you have to figure a guy's got to learn a few social graces at some point. The early Jobs learns to work alone, late at night, or with his buddy Steve Wozniak, creating new video-games for Atari. This leads to one of the film's best gags, when they slave over the programming of a new video-game, only to have it revealed that the game is just a slight modification of Pong, but one that early gamers will no doubt be familiar with.
I entered into this film not knowing very much about Jobs the man - and wondering if anyone mistook this film for a documentary about unemployment in the U.S., based on the title alone. But I digress - I was an empty slate, looking to be filled with information about the man, the myth, the machine that was Steve Jobs.
If the film is to believed, the man was a creative thinker who tended to fail upwards, but someone who really felt that form should follow function. (I can get behind "Form should follow function", because I'm always saying that with regards to things like the San Diego trolley system or the way that Comic-Con is run.) But if you can figure out what the consumer is going to use the product for, and then deliver the product in a form that will enhance that experience, make things simpler, easier and more intuitive, the sales should follow, even if at the current moment the consumer doesn't even realize he or she needs that product yet.
That seems to be a viable concept - nobody knew they needed an iPod until there was one, no one even knew what digital music was at that point. At some point nobody knew they needed an iPhone or even a personal home computer, until someone invented them and told them about it. And now building an Apple Mac before there was even an internet seems a little like inventing the car and hoping that someone will eventually design roads for it. But that's what happened, I think.
Throughout the film, we see Jobs' position at the company founded change based on his successes and his failures - he was riding high after the Apple II, reduced to a mere employee after the LISA debacle, and then sort of clawed his way back with the success of the Macintosh. I presume his eventual rise to CEO coincided with some product like the iPod, but I'll have to check the timeline on that.
Jobs' interpersonal relationships seemed to be based on some variation of "Forgive, but don't forget". Or more accurately perhaps it was "Never forgive, never forget," because he eventually did take down everyone who disagreed with him or voted against him, even if it took years and several regime changes at Apple. In one notable scene he takes a designer to task for creating a word processing system that doesn't allow people to use different fonts - it's not the guy's fault, because most people didn't even seem to care about computer fonts at the time, because they just didn't know there were options. So yes, Steve, you were correct, but you didn't have to be a dick about it.
The whole film seems to take delight in pointing out Steve Jobs' sins and character flaws - parking in handicapped spaces, spending more time developing his LISA computer than with his daughter of the same name, firing people who didn't agree with his vision right on the spot, and storming through the Apple headquarters like a focused, determined Tasmanian Devil. He also denied paternity of his daughter for many years, but we're never sure if this is due to not wanting to be in a relationship, not wanting to share future profits of the computer company with a wife or daughter, or perhaps some other personal undisclosed reason.
I wish we could have seen more of a representation of how the computers worked - why the Apple II and the Macintosh were superior to their IBM and PC rivals, in a concrete way. I'm a big Mac supporter myself, and I know how important they've become to the creative and art-based industries, including filmmaking, but that information, that FEELING, is largely absent from the film. OK, maybe it's tough to get that to come across in a screenplay or in a narrative film, and would be better demonstrated in a documentary format, but couldn't someone at least make an attempt to convey that?
Because, as a result, this film breaks the "Show, don't tell" rule, again and again. It would be better, for example, to SHOW the audience why one computer interface works better than another, or why one design is brilliant, instead of having characters just SAYING that in design meetings. I shouldn't have to bring what I know about how computers work to the table to help make these points, I feel they should have been incorporated into the film in some way.
A shot of Steve Jobs lost in thought really doesn't show or tell me anything. And a scene where he taps his discman or throws out his headphones in frustration, prior to designing the iPod, almost feels like a cheat. They had a segment at the start of the film where Jobs introduced the iPod to America, claiming it would hold a person's entire music library, and be digital, and be portable, lightweight, convenient, etc. But again, that's just someone TELLING me things, not showing. Same thing with the famous "1984" commercial for Apple Computers - you have to reference it, I suppose, because it was a watershed moment for the company - but in the end it's just another talking point.
Similarly, how important is it, really, to have scenes that are just people talking about who's getting stock options and who isn't, or people being recruited and then shown the door at various times. Isn't what they DO at the company more important than when they got hired or fired? Another key moment in the film is Jobs accusing Bill Gates of stealing his Mac interfaces to create Microsoft Windows, but this conversation takes place over the PHONE - that's hardly cinematic. Same goes for introducing characters - everyone from Apple's history has to be introduced by name, and that's another non-visual thing that just bogs everything down.
NITPICK POINT: There's a scene where the Apple II computer is introduced at an electronics fair, and Jobs is very eloquent in describing what the computer would do, and how it would revolutionize the industry. (Again, it's just someone TALKING, how frustrating...) When he's done, the audience bursts into applause - but I call B.S. on this one. Maybe it went down like this and maybe it didn't - but I tend to doubt it, because if the computer was that revolutionary, the first audience to see it probably wouldn't have properly understood it, right? Or was the point that Jobs was do dynamic of a speaker that they were cheering his words, his concepts, rather than the computer itself?
NITPICK POINT #2: Steve Jobs parked in a handicapped spot EVERY SINGLE TIME that he drove his car to Apple HQ? Really? The man who touted form should follow function also had no regards for the law, or the proper way that a parking lot should work? If what the film has told me about the man's personality is true, it seems to me that doing things over and over the "wrong" way would have just eaten at his very core - at the very least he would have yelled at someone to get that parking space that he pulled into every day marked with a sign reading "Reserved for Steve Jobs" and then had the space next to it re-designated as the handicapped spot. Because that would have been much more efficient.
Despite my best advice, and beyond all rational comprehension, there is going to be a SECOND narrative film based on the life of Steve Jobs, due to be released this October. Did someone feel that this 2013 film was a hack-job, or somehow didn't get the details right? Or did some studio hear about another's Steve Jobs project and start one of their own? Was there a race to be the first film to market with the final product - gee, that would be ironic, almost as if one film studio was Apple and the other was IBM....
Look, I don't have a dog in this fight, but jeez, at least in addition to the man's years of birth and death, would it have killed someone to put a small statement at the end about the impact the man had on technology? Something simple, like "Steve Jobs' passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing." I just cribbed that from Wikipedia, it took all of 5 seconds - how hard was that? And I did it on a Macintosh.
Also starring Ashton Kutcher (last seen in "No Strings Attached"), Josh Gad (last heard in "Frozen"), Dermot Mulroney (last seen in "Copycat"), Matthew Modine (last seen in "Notting Hill"), J.K. Simmons (last heard in "Young Adult"), Ron Eldard (last seen in "Super 8"), Victor Rasuk, Nelson Franklin (last seen in "Argo"), Eddie Hassell, Kevin Dunn (last seen in "Snake Eyes"), Elden Henson, Brett Gelman, Robert Pine, John Getz, Brad William Henke, with cameos from Lesley Ann Warren, James Woods (last seen in "Eyewitness", Masi Oka, Samm Levine, Joel Murray (last heard in "Monsters University"), William Mapother.
RATING: 5 out of 10 circuit boards
Steve Jobs was a very strange person. He parked in handicapped spots for the same reason why any rational person who doesn't give a **** would park in a handicapped spot: they're right close to the front door and "nobody ever uses them."
ReplyDeleteHe also drove a car with no license plates. It's the easiest thing in the world to register a car, and if was concerned about privacy there are also easy and legal ways to register the car to an address other than one's residence. But he didn't want plates on his car, so his staff found a loophole in the law that he could exploit.
(When I read about how this worked, I thought "This sounds like something that John would have come up with, by reading every page of the relevant ordinances, no matter how many hours that required, and counting on finding something.")
"Jobs" was a bad movie. And that's not because it was such a flawed portrait of Steve Jobs (which it totally was) and historically inaccurate (ditto). It was melodramatic, it was confused, it bobbed and weaved to avoid revealing Steve Jobs as an actual character and instead got bogged down in milestones and procedures.
Any valid portrayal of Steve Jobs would reveal a deeply complex and contradictory person, whose foibles orbited around a core ability to fixate on "the right idea" once it was presented to him and then to organize and motivate the right people who could make it all real.
I myself had a single, fifteen minute personal encounter with Steve Jobs and despite the short span of time it helped me to understand every story I'd ever heard about him and every story I was going to hear about him after the fact.
These two biopics ("Jobs" and the Andrew Sorkin movie to come) are interesting experiences for me. I have lots of personal knowledge of what went on in so many of these scenes, in many cases because I'm friends with people who were in the room when it happened.
And that means I might not be the right person to offer opinions on those movies. I'm easily distracted by big whoppers of revisionism and keenly aware when the story steps straight over a bag of pure gold (in the form of an incident or a period of Jobs' life that says so much about the man) and obsesses over an explanation of where he got his dry cleaning done.
But I've got my fingers crossed for Sorkin. The previews so far have left me...uh, hoping for a clearer picture once there's more footage.