Steve Jobs

Excellent conversation film with a frenetic pace. I had to really exert a lot of energy and attention to fully catch everything. Otherwise, I generally love these biographical works from the pen of Aaron Sorkin. Who knows, maybe after Zuckerberg and Jobs, Gates will be next. It's also worth noting the uncovering of Steve Jobs' legacy, which shows that far more than an innovator, he was a design and marketing genius. It's also worth mentioning Jobs’ destructive egomania, where he often had no problem overlooking the key colleagues without whom the whole Apple rocket ship would never have gone as far. On the other hand, this is probably not terribly surprising, because every extremely intelligent person is strange in his or her own way. But it's undeniable that Steve Jobs’ legacy is substantial, and his gradual journey to becoming one of the most successful IT businessmen of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is quite interesting, to say the least. (02/06/2018)

It's not about Jobs's many successes (failures) in Atari, Apple, NeXT or Pixar, so it's not a movie an about a visionary who without doubt influenced the Western world in many ways by them. It is a little more about Jobs, however it is not mainly focused on him, as an extremely interesting person, who combines a capable (willing to do what it takes) and in many respects genius and very intelligent "leader" who was able to sell his innovative vision like no other, with undeniable business skills and charming personality, as well as an arrogant and often unreasonably cruel and emotionally unstable manipulator suffering from a narcissistic personality disorder who does not hesitate to go over dead bodies even of those who are close to him. And that's the nicer side of his dark side. But by far the most it is about the simple relationship of a complicated personality to the world, colleagues, friends and above all about finding a way in life and about an unwanted daughter. It's typically "Sorkinian-style" movie. No doubt about that. However, this time he managed to avoid a frequent weak point of his movies in a very smart way; namely, that his characters theatrically recite and do not speak like real people. And so he immediately captured it as a kind of stylized theatrical performance based on fiction inspired by the reality showed in three acts and returning visits à la Dickens's Christmas Carol. What Honor did well is that, apart from the period format of the individual acts, he stays away from his habits and he completely relies on the frantic pace of Sorkin's energetic dialogs and excellent actors, which is far from just a hymn to the Fassbender-Winslet-Rogen trio. (11/12/2015)

Sorkin and Boyle are like left and right hands that have long since been stitched to a body to create a Frankensteinian monster that fundamentally vindicates the argument that wisdom and beauty cannot be in permanent opposition. Which, by the way, I have been proving with my own existence for some time now. The seemingly theatrical three-act plot, with its relentless deadlines stomped out by unkempt hamsters who can't wait to find out what useless, unmodifiable junk they'll let themselves get fleeced by Mac for this year, is instead a constant reminder that we're watching a movie. And not just with the fairly unnecessary format changes over the years, but above all Boyle-style editing or minimal repetition of shots. On the contrary, the characters are constantly moving and interacting with their surroundings. Themes are carried over from location to location. The characters' exalted dialogues are interspersed with those of the same characters in flashbacks, achieving, among other things, a double continuous gradation of the same theme (and the cynic may already be thinking Sorkin is overdoing it here). What’s more, when compared to Zuckerberg, for whom the screenwriter had rather a soft spot, given his zero-to-hero development in the world of the privileged, there seeps an undeniable contempt for the narcissistic sociopath who has won a grand mastery of promoting mediocrity through mere form. And with biopics, which mostly suffer from Stockholm Syndrome, that automatically warms the cockles. (03/07/2016)

A couple of years ago we had Jobs starring Ashton Kutcher, so Danny Boyle had to bet on other certainties besides the theme, and in my opinion that was mainly the well-chosen cast. Michael Fassbender gives a truly above-average convincing performance in the lead role, while his second Kate Winslet only confirms her strong acting qualities, of which we have been aware for two decades. The first half is rather slower and less intense, but in the second half everything starts to build up and the highlights are the heated dialogues between Fassbender, Winslet and Jeff Daniels. In short, it's more of a conversational drama revealing more facts around the myth of Steve Jobs. (02/01/2016)

Aaron Sorkin's vividly deft dialogue passages are great, as are the minimum of showy gestures and the absence of unnecessary overload of pathetic emotions in a story about a brilliant man who worked with them like a god and expressed them very sporadically (or sophistically). However, the subliminal wisecracks and subtle business hints in this "live" staged story are monstrously spoiled by the fact that there's terribly little of the broader story, and virtually nothing much going on. If this were a 10-minute cut from the trailer for the first Mac, the narrative value would be quite similar and the experience even more intense than watching a similar variation for 122 minutes. (11/14/2015)