Steve Jobs the movie, first look

I'm not, really. There's already been movies made about him. This one being written by Sorkin is really the only reason I'm even aware of it's existence (West Wing geek for life over here), but the number of people swayed by that alone is not enough to fully sell a big-budget movie. I definitely plan on seeing it (again, because Sorkin), but I can wait for it to be an Amazon rental (or Popcorn Time ) in a few months. I think the target audience for this kind of film is the kind that stopped going to movies regularly, due to ridiculous cost, annoying audiences, or whatever else. If they were ever going to attempt a new distribution method that simultaneously involved theater and home options, this would've been the flick to do it.

 

Is Steve Jobs over-rated?

 

The man or the movie? The man is kind of hard to over-rate because he did really accomplish a lot during his lifetime and he was sort of a legendary (albeit harsh and even at times childish) leader. It's like asking if Thomas Edison or George Washington or even Albert Einstein are overrated--obviously they had tons of help (and Edison and maybe Einstein surely stole ideas) but their impact on civilization is inescapable (for better or worse). If you mean the movie, I thought it was entertaining the way some of Aaron Sorkin's better work is entertaining--but it did fall short of being truly insightful or profound in my opinion. Just a satisfying movie that flew by for me, though it probably doesn't have the same compulsive watchability as say Social Network.

 

They initially wanted to shoot the film for $40M (with David Fincher directing and Leonardo DiCaprio starring), but Fincher wanted too much money and DiCaprio passed. I'm told they went through ten different actors before settling on Michael Fassbender. There's quite a few other actors that I think might have been better choices. A TV movie -- even an HBO movie -- would've had 1/4th of the budget and a C-list group of actors.

But it's true: we've seen this movie before, and I think everybody is aware that Steve Jobs was a difficult, temperamental, sometimes cruel man who was capable of creating great technology and could also be very loyal to the people he trusted. The problem is: do people want to see this movie? Apparently, the answer is no.

 

And it's his belief in fuzzy mystical ideas that probably killed him, as when he was initially diagnosed with cancer, he rejected medical treatment because he though he could defeat the desiese with positive thinking and other 'complementary' woodoo.

Which is why to this day a have a disdain for Apple - they want to control everything with their walled-garden philosopjy and usually go out of their way not to be compatible with wider standards, interfaces and interoperability.

No, not at all. User interface design is one thing (and a very big thing indeed), but they have always lagged behind in terms of adopting the latest cpus/memory/interfaces, etc, compared to their competitors. They eventually catch up (big mobiles finally), but the rest of the market, in h/w terms, is still ahead with more powerful devices costing much less.

Just a nitpick here. The notion of 'stealing ideas' is not one that belongs in science, only the corporate world, so I would not include Einstein in that group. Science is all about sharing ideas and building on the works of those that came before.

 

Henri Poincaré on line one.

 

Nobody said that his "eastern philosophy" wasn't delusional in some way--just that he took it seriously. If anything I would say it made him a hypocrite in the most extreme sense of the word because while he was eating vegan and meditating he was simultaneously exploiting, polluting, bullying, etc. In my opinion that just makes him all the more interesting because it draws all of the paradoxes he embodied into the general discussion.

The impact Apple products had on civilization in the first decade of the 2000s is easily discernible and whether or not you personally invest in their "philosophy" doesn't change their impact. Would you write off Plato if you didn't agree with his philosophy? Or would he still interest you as a "philosopher"? That's all I'm really saying about Jobs. He's a hugely idiosyncratic figure who left a very noticeable mark on civilization. Along with Bill Gates, Jobs is too important to trivialize. His louder personality, stubborn philosophy, flaws, etc, only make him better material for a movie or a myth.

Apple might fall very behind and fail to keep up and/or adapt, but the stamp it made in the first decade of the century is sort of irrefutable. It's like saying The Beatles don't matter because eventually all music caught up and surpassed their production methods. That doesn't make what they did any less vital or interesting. A prodigal son returned to the huge company that he founded and under his regime that company turned technology into an addictive, everyday thing with a highly noticeable effect on human behavior. That alone is the stuff of legend. Even it Apple fails to endure, whatever comes on its heels is in some way indebted to it.

If someone is free at will to take a formula or theory and appropriate it without fear of being sued, then we can call it "sharing". If one has to do the same thing but can get sued over it, now it's "stealing". But the actual process is the same--both men utilized other ideas and theories. Additionally, I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that Einstein or other important scientists lifted an idea and didn't credit the source here and there, or behaved abominably just like any other genius. It comes with the territory. Nevertheless, I definitely concede that Einstein is not really a good comparison. Steve Jobs is definitely more of the Walt Disney or Thomas Edison variety. I think I was just saying that Einstein (probably) had help just like anyone else, which means you could probably argue he was "overrated" as a singular harbinger of change, but on the other hand there was so much clear progress made under his watch that it's a waste of time to consider him as being "overrated".

I should also add that what's disappointing to me is not that no one cares about the new Steve Jobs movie, but that no one cares about the new Danny Boyle/Aaron Sorkin movie. Good mid-range films are so rare these days and it saddens me that the notion of these two creatives working together doesn't get more people excited, especially when Sorkin recently wrote The Social Network.

 

Jobs doesn't wear a cape, he can't fly, so todays movie audience is not interested.

 

Fair enough, that may be of interest to some. Me, not so much. I despise cognitive dissonance and open hypocrisy. The primaries are killing me!

I agree, and I never said that Apple didn't have this impact. It's just that everyone caught up soon after and exceeded them in the areas I identified in my previous post.

In fact, I personally recognized the usefulness of their early innovation when I bought my first (and still only) Apple product - iPhone 3GS. There was nothing like it on the market at the time; it head great features and UI and could double as a music player. That's why I got it.

However, by the time it came to update, Apple no longer looked so attractive and many things about the experience bugged me (like the crapware iTunes software for PC based systems), so I bought a nice big Samsung Note II which had a much bigger screen, USB access to the filesystem where I could drag and drop files from the PC over a standard interface (no need for iTunes crapware middleman), play any media file, have a removable and replaceable battery, memory expansion via memory-card) and it was cheaper.

If his philosophy was particularly unpalatable, then I wouldn't want to see a movie about him either.

Not really. One can enjoy a Beatles tune any time - decades after they were made. You can't do the same with tech products that become obsolete in a couple of years. Also, the comparisons are qualitatively different.

But, I'm sure this 'philosophical' discussion is not entirely relevant to the movie itself!

 

You're definitely taking me to task here. The point I was making was more in regards to the fact there is sort of a "before and after" that applies to bands like The Beatles and shows like The Sopranos and even people like Einstein or Freud. I was simply drawing the comparison to Apple, which wasn't to suggest that their products can still be enjoyed long after they've become outdated or obsolete, rather that the impact of those products changed the cultural landscape and plenty of products still coming out today are designed/launched with Apple's success in mind.

I would never have taken you for someone who would want to watch a movie strictly based on the "likability" of its subject matter. Whether I agree or disagree with someone like Plato's (or Steve Jobs' or John Lennon's) philosophy/vision/art would have no bearing on whether I saw a movie about him as long as I thought the movie might be interesting. I'd see a movie about Stalin or Hitler or Ayn Rand if the people making it were talented--it doesn't mean I have to like those people or believe in what they believed in.

 

I think it would have done better with someone who looked and was like Steve Jobs. Even to the casual person, Jobs had a distinct personality and look. Having someone just "play" him doesn't really get the job done for a lot of people.

 

That being said, I'm in awe that there were three films released about the guy in three years. Is there any other public figure we can say that for? I've never seen it happen.

 

That is correct, I'm not that guy, but when it comes to Jobs, I have absolutely no interest in seeing this movie. As an IT guy who grew up with (home) computers as they were emerging and as someone who's lived and breathed the culture for a long, long time, I'm all too aware of the history and the people behind it already, so the incentive to see the movie was already at a minimum.

I was simply giving voice to my reasons for not wanting to see the movie, as the question was asked as to why it tanked at the box office, given that people who saw it say it wasn't bad.

 

My theory:
"Computer people" don't want to see this movie because it's rife with pure fiction and dramatic inaccuracies. (And from what I've heard in a very corny way.)

"Normal" folks don't want to see it because the character in the film is a cruel robot who treats his out-of-wedlock daughter poorly.

And both groups would have rather seen a story that included the iPhone and the iPod.

It's like if The Social Network was about Mark Zuckerberg's junior high school computer programming homework assignments.

 

Was wondering how long it would take for someone to say that. I think it is failing because most of the movie is a story...much of it didn't happen and the director and writer said as much in their interview with Charlie Rose. I would be up for a fairly realistic movie about his life, but this is what it is....a "movie" taking three real products and then creating what they had hoped would be an entertaining story about the guy who was at the helm. But all the dialogue is made up....its fiction. That is why so many people close to Steve tried to get it stopped, and why they have nothing good to say about it. It isn't because it depicts Steve as a mean guy, it's because it is mainly fiction and they are afraid people will actually think Steve was as he is depicted, and that it is basically a biography. It isn't. I think people found out about it and figured, what's the point in seeing something like that? If you want to learn about Steve, that isn't the goal of this work of fiction. So those people don't want to see it. And if you aren't interested in Steve, why would you see it anyway. There was no way this film was going to succeed after the writer and director basically told people that most of it was not based on fact. They never should have given interviews! It probably would have continued to do well had that not got out...I would have seen it myself, but not after that interview!

 

True... but bear in mind that the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs (on which this film was based) was the #1 non-fiction best seller of the year.

I don't think that had anything to do with it. The film Social Network (also written by Sorkin) was also highly dramatized and deviated greatly from certain facts. For example, the point of the entire film was that in this version, Zuckerberg basically created Facebook to impress a girl who had dumped him. The ending of the film showed him shadowing the girl online, trying to see what she was saying in her own Facebook account. Only... in real life, Zuckerberg dated the same woman for many years, including his time at Harvard, and wound up marrying her. But that didn't fit the narrative of the drama. (I think the main stuff in Social Network about Zuckerberg betraying several of his business partners is absolutely true.)

Dramatic films and plays are not documentaries, and they only tell a version of the truth. Bear in mind that Steve Wozniak has heartily endorsed the film, as have quite a few people who no longer work for Apple and are not related to Jobs.

http://www.theguardian.com/film/201...s-trailer-accuracy-second-entertainment-apple

I think you can frame a famous person's life in drama and still hit all the bullet points and essentially tell the truth. In the case of Steve Jobs, there's no way all those events just "happened" to occur in the same day. In fact, I think there was so much security around Jobs, it wouldn't be possible for his estranged girlfriend, his daughter, his former boss, and other people to slip in minutes before he was going to give press conferences and have ten-minute conversations with him. But it works for the film, and I think the personalities and attitudes come true.

Look at it this way: in all the historical movies ever made, nobody really knows what was said. Nobody really knows what went through T.J. Lawrence's head in Lawrence of Arabia; Salieri wasn't quite the monster depicted in Mozart; the kid in Empire of the Sun was never without his parents in the concentration camp, but the movie shows him alone. So there are many, many highly-regarded critical films that veered quite a bit from the facts in order to tell a dramatic story, sometimes compressing events just to tell a complex story in a couple of hours.

 

Very loosely based is what I gleemed from watching Charlie Rose. I was hoping for a movie where the script was very close to the excellent (imo) book you mentioned. The writer went to great lengths to inform us he wrote the script to entertain, not to tell a bio. That is where he lost me. Why not just make up random name then? I see no point to this film...and I am a huge fan of Jobs! Would have loved to have seen a film version of the Isaacson book.

 

This is now the fourth movie released about Steve Jobs. Sheesh, enough already!

 

Maybe they should do a movie about Steve's Job.

 

I read the biography by Isaacson and saw the movie and thought both were good.

Jobs has always been a fascinating person to me.

 

The Isaacson book goes into detail about how his wealthy tech friends all told him to get a security detail and he refused. There's even a reference to this in the film when Scully sneaks up on him in 1988 and says, "I told you that you need to get security." But your point is well taken, I think Sorkin just needed a framing device to make these recurring conversations happen.

I was a big fan of the book and saw the film last week (coincidentally in Cupertino as I was on business there). I would have preferred someone who looked and spoked more like Jobs to take the lead, but that aside Fassbender did a great job. If you're looking for a "Ray" or "Walk The Line"-style biopic, this isn't that film. What this film is is an exciting, fast-paced thought piece on Jobs' influence on the personal lives of so many people despite lacking the ability to make personal connections with the people in his life.

 

All valid points of course. But still, if you really want to learn about the real Jobs, this isn't the movie. People who were close to Woz and Jobs, or that know Woz, are curious as to why Woz is endorsing this film. I enjoyed The Social Network but knew nothing about the principles or the real story, so I must confess I swallowed the film as fact. Guess I need to be more careful.

 

But Scully was depicted as being far more involved with Steve than he actually was, and that is the type of artist liberty I don't want to see if it isn't true. The writer did say this is supposed to be a movie for entertainment, and for you it did what it was supposed to do. I absolutely loved the book! I just wish the book itself had been turned into the movie.

 

So his life and career wasn't interesting enough without embellishment?

 

Not to nitpick, but I think the broader "thesis" of Social Network is that Zuckerberg envied and/or resented the Harvard clubs that he couldn't get into and so he formed his own "club" instead, stealing the idea from the exact kind of people he envied/resented. It was Facemash that he created to get back at the girl who dumped him (not Facebook), and even though he was supposedly dating the girl he's married to now, to my knowledge his blog entry about the girl in the movie did actually exist so there might be more to the "true" story than we know. I think the message at the end of the film (with Zuckerberg obsessively checking the friend request of the girl) has more to do with his inherent status as a loner/outcast/loser no matter how much power he reaps or how big his "club" gets than it does his desire to see what's on her Facebook page. I think in general the girl in the movie is sort of symbolic of a world Zuckerberg can't penetrate no matter how successful he is.