#makemoviesgreatagain

[ericpapawashere]

Back In The NY Groove • • • #justgoshoot #igersofNYC #InstagramNYC #instanyc #instadaily #explore #EyesWideScouting #AlwaysBeExploring #exploremore #makemoviesgreatagain #TakeALookAround #locationscout #uws #upperwestside #madeinNY #FujiFilmX_US #Facadeoftheday #papatropolis #iwashere #backinthenygroove #w70th (at New York, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/CEhKPQmJpKa/?igshid=1hmni2zzgddsn

[djhype1983]

My type of movies.. #makemoviesgreatagain

[upchucktheater]

(via Eye for an Eye Episode 7)A truly awful faux Lifetime movie sees Keifer Sutherland and his quaff of hair killing Sally Fields’ daughter...and she’s mad as hell and the possibly the worst screen mother of all time.

[jed-thomas]

Steve Jobs

Monday Madness       Wednesday Wamble        FRESHday (or Friday)

                                                        Trailer

Director: Danny Boyle

Cinematography: Alwin H. Küchler

Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin

Score: Daniel Pemberton

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels

A sizzling biopic with a stellar cast, Steve Jobs tracks the rise of the titular innovator and his rotating ring of fraught relationships throughout the backstage preparations for three product launches (the Macintosh in 1984, the Black Cube in 1988 and the iMac in 1991).

Despite the obvious hagiographic aspect of Steve Jobs, Sorkin and Boyle work hard to find something less than likeable about the eccentric titular ‘genius.’ Fassbender’s Jobs comes across undoubtably endearing in a misguiding yet pleasurable performance as was deployed previously with the acid intelligence of Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. We all understand that nobody is capable of the intensity of speech wielded by the main characters in both The Social Network and Steve Jobs but whilst Sorkin’s versions of these men may not be the most realistic appropriations, they are supposedly the most truthful to their actual emotional state during their careers. In honesty, it seems impossible to believe that the goofiest billionaire of all time, Mark Zuckerberg, could be as vital and witty as Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of him yet in the motives and emotions of the character it seems clear that there would exist a connection between Zuckerberg and his cinematic analogue.

Therefore, it strikes me as important that we must deal with Steve Jobs as a movie, first and foremost, not as the cultural moment its creators desire it to be and, in turn, we must deal with Steve Jobs as the character portrayed by Michael Fassbender. To be swept up in its ‘importance’ is to disallow the film and its creators their fair time in court.

So — knock, knock — order!

Although David Fincher, who was in talks to direct Steve Jobs before Danny Boyle as an attempt to repeat the success of The Social Network, is perhaps the greater talent, Boyle, with great effort, manages to hold his own against the indisputable force of Sorkin’s writing. Where, in The Social Network, there was an obvious sharing of the creative load between Fincher and Sorkin, the original material of Steve Jobs gives limitations to visual scope and as such restricts the power of the director as overseer of visual storytelling.

Unfortunately, this whole charade seems to be a product of Sorkin’s ego. An intentional decision was made, no matter how effective it ultimately was, to construct Steve Jobs as a piece of theatre existing upon a singular stage with rotating decoration and driven by the verbal confrontation of characters. It is material which I perceived to be anti-cinematic. In an act of self-destructive selfishness, the boundaries were retracted so as to force the audience’s attention towards the script and Sorkin’s whip-cracking dialogue.

However, Danny Boyle, via his subtle cinematic mastery, seems to have dragged this potentially-unsalvageable material out of the darkness of Sorkin’s narcissism and into the light of brilliant collaborative filmmaking. In a resplendent display, Sorkin and Boyle have captured some of the most vital cinematic moments of recent years (disregarding all the cheesy and unpalatable dialogue which inevitable comes with a Sorkin drama). For Danny Boyle has turned Steve Jobs into a vibrant and hugely effective movie with some of the most subtle yet brilliant directing I have yet witnessed. As a testament to the masterful editing of Elliot Graham, the film possesses a rare kind of motion, aided by Sorkin’s invigoratingly speedy exchanges, which proves to be an utterly awesome cinematic experience. Steve Jobs is dazzling in a special if somewhat fraudulent way.

Despite its obvious cinematic drawbacks, the beauty of its unique structure is its clear anatomisation of the man Steve Jobs might have been. For Steve Jobs, to the credit of Sorkin, is a far shot from the toted hagiography of its press junket, exploring Jobs’s personal tensions and influences rather than the effect he had on the world - something that, interestingly, only Jobs addresses. Steve Jobs, as its title suggests, is about the man and not his machines. It is a thematic point that is stressed with skill and precision yet without optimism. This film exercises a thoroughly vicious assessment of Jobs’s personality without turning the audience completely against him or completely towards those he harms. Whether or not Sorkin’s conclusions are factually accurate is irrelevant, he has constructed truly three-dimensional characters containing brutally realistic mixtures of morality and amorality.

The true genius of this pursuit is exemplified in the film’s climax. It is almost spectacular in its ambiguity as it positions Jobs amidst a flurry of camera flashes, his visage blurry as if at last his ego has superseded the broken man behind it and he has become less a cohesive person than a collage of the various ways in which his enthralled audience perceive him. The achievement of the ending (as I seem to have just displayed) is that it forces those watching to assess Steve Jobs and his actions throughout the film by giving you the choice to decide what he is doing in those cryptic closing moments. Is he extending his hand towards his daughter to finally and publicly reckon with his feelings for her? Or is it a publicity stunt on the biggest night of his life thus far and his recent kindnesses towards her simply a manipulation to set this plan into motion? Or is he simply beginning the first stretch of his presentation paces and about to turn his back on his daughter in favour of his machines once again? The question ultimately becomes: Was Steve Jobs a good man?

The closing moments also afford Wozniak, portrayed in loveably simple fashion by Seth Rogen, a distinct deal of screen time and provides the audience with one of the most peculiarly affecting moments of the entire film, reenforcing the film’s (and Woz’s) key thesis about Steve Jobs via his ruined relationship with perhaps the most sympathetic character in the piece. Unlike many of the other characters in Steve Jobs, with the exception perhaps of Kate Winslet’s Joanna Hoffman, Steve Wozniak seems to be free of malice and narcissism (traits possessed in some form or another by the other characters). Woz remains Steve’s most loyal disciple despite the fact that he represented more technical genius than any other coder in America at that point and should, in fact, be the commander of his own legion of disciples. Many analysts of Jobs’s career find great sympathy for Wozniak as the man behind the man, the understated and humble pioneer of personal computing.

Steve Jobs goes further to draw out the torturous relationship between the two men, incorporating into the hectic final moment an oddly touching shot of Jobs and Wozniak in the garage (presumably after their fight over customisability shown earlier) in which only the word ‘Woz’ is audible, said by Jobs as he turns towards his friend accompanied by a shot of Wozniak as the dazzling flashes sent up in favour of Jobs dance upon his sullen face. As Jobs had revealed earlier during his outburst to John Scully about ‘putting Woz up to’ denouncing him after he left Apple, there existed a very tender and powerful relationship between the two men of the sort Jobs had trouble constructing elsewhere. Wozniak was, in a lot of ways, Jobs’s equal and, in his stoic humility, a healthy counterweight to his narcissism. He was, also, perhaps Jobs’s only true friend.

In the same way that Jobs blocks out his daughter as a good thing whose existence he had no initial desire for, Wozniak and the Apple II represented ‘something good…that [he] wasn’t in the room for’ and thus, in service of his ego, an irrelevance. Although the closing shot and the preceding dialogue scene between Jobs and his daughter may suggest a turning point in Steve’s engagement with his loved ones, Sorkin and Boyle are careful to remind us with the saddening images of Wozniak that Jobs was pathologically destructive towards the ones he needed and loved the most.

Steve Jobs may not be much more than an interesting exposé or an exercise in theatrical filmmaking but it carries with it a highly complex analysis of character and motivation disregarding its historical accuracy or even its subject. Sorkin, despite his own insistence as to the emotional accuracy of this film, seems in service of discovering a greater truth here and the ultimate conclusion is universal and prescient in our newly digitised age, a furthering of ideas explored in The Social Network: those who pursue gratification via the perfection of the machine, as an escape from the pain inherent in meaningful human relationships will find no solace or happiness only death.  

7/10

[ericpapawashere]

Opening Day Coming Soon!!! • • • #justgoshoot #igersofNYC #InstagramNYC #instanyc #instadaily #explore #EyesWideScouting #AlwaysBeExploring #exploremore #makemoviesgreatagain #TakeALookAround #locationscout #papatropolis #iwashere #nobscotthill #chateaukiefer #quarantinedliving #coronavirusviews #poolseason #lockdownextension (at Nobscot Hill) https://www.instagram.com/p/B_DzwVzpykq/?igshid=g7vqcpx959bx

[ericpapawashere]

Gotcha • • • #justgoshoot #igersofNYC #InstagramNYC #instanyc #instadaily #explore #EyesWideScouting #AlwaysBeExploring #exploremore #makemoviesgreatagain #TakeALookAround #locationscout #madeinNY #papatropolis #iwashere (at White Plains, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/CM0dTfpBtW5/?igshid=1p337lkwfmec2

[ericpapawashere]

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[ericpapawashere]

NY FOR EVER • • • #justgoshoot #igersofNYC #InstagramNYC #instanyc #instadaily #explore #EyesWideScouting #AlwaysBeExploring #exploremore #makemoviesgreatagain #TakeALookAround #locationscout #madeinNY #FujiFilmX_US #Sadiesundays #papatropolis #iwashere #mallrat #nyc #oculusnyc (at The Oculus NYC) https://www.instagram.com/p/CMCh3QUhssz/?igshid=hxv5yc2gh1ec

[ericpapawashere]

If You Know, You Know (PRNews) • • • #justgoshoot #igersofNYC #InstagramNYC #instanyc #instadaily #explore #EyesWideScouting #AlwaysBeExploring #exploremore #makemoviesgreatagain #TakeALookAround #locationscout #madeinNY #papatropolis #iwashere #ishootfujifilm #prnewswire #810seventhavenue #prn (at New York, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/CMAFJyYh1tW/?igshid=biv83i43mvju

[ericpapawashere]

Papatropolis • • • #justgoshoot #igersofNYC #InstagramNYC #instanyc #instadaily #explore #metropolis #EyesWideScouting #AlwaysBeExploring #exploremore #makemoviesgreatagain #ues #TakeALookAround #locationscout #madeinNY #papatropolis #iwashere #thepierre #ispy (at New York, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/CL-peRABnh5/?igshid=diygq3izh155

[ericpapawashere]

Papatropolis • • • #justgoshoot #igersofNYC #InstagramNYC #instanyc #instadaily #explore #metropolis #EyesWideScouting #AlwaysBeExploring #exploremore #makemoviesgreatagain #ues #TakeALookAround #locationscout #madeinNY #papatropolis #iwashere #thepierre #ispy (at New York, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/CL-peRABnh5/?igshid=diygq3izh155

[ericpapawashere]

Don’t Look Around • • • #justgoshoot #igersofNYC #InstagramNYC #instanyc #instadaily #explore #EyesWideScouting #AlwaysBeExploring #exploremore #makemoviesgreatagain #TakeALookAround #locationscout #madeinNY #Elevatorshaft #papatropolis #iwashere #dontlookaround (at New York Marriott Marquis) https://www.instagram.com/p/CL97mG5B87m/?igshid=15x9d9mxvhiht

[ericpapawashere]

Don’t Look Down • • • #justgoshoot #igersofNYC #InstagramNYC #instanyc #instadaily #explore #EyesWideScouting #AlwaysBeExploring #exploremore #makemoviesgreatagain #TakeALookAround #locationscout #madeinNY #Elevatorshaft #papatropolis #iwashere #dontlookdown (at New York Marriott Marquis) https://www.instagram.com/p/CL97GWiBNRq/?igshid=6iuawnu3w9du

[ericpapawashere]

Radio City, U.S.A. • • • #justgoshoot #igersofNYC #InstagramNYC #instanyc #instadaily #explore #concretewaves #EyesWideScouting #AlwaysBeExploring #exploremore #makemoviesgreatagain #TakeALookAround #locationscout #madeinNY #papatropolis #iwashere #radiocity #usa #nyc (at Radio City Music Hall) https://www.instagram.com/p/CL1eIgchu0b/?igshid=1uexmsgwdua56

[ericpapawashere]

A Tree Grows Here • • • #justgoshoot #igersofNYC #InstagramNYC #instanyc #instadaily #explore #atreeinside #EyesWideScouting #AlwaysBeExploring #exploremore #makemoviesgreatagain #TakeALookAround #locationscout #madeinNY #papatropolis #iwashere #marriottmarquis (at New York Marriott Marquis) https://www.instagram.com/p/CLfYFUnhYPK/?igshid=20qrcx9kw7pj

[ericpapawashere]

Nightlight • • • #justgoshoot #igersofNYC #InstagramNYC #instanyc #instadaily #explore #EyesWideScouting #AlwaysBeExploring #exploremore #makemoviesgreatagain #TakeALookAround #locationscout #madeinNY #papatropolis #iwashere #perfectlyaligned #brooklynbridge #nyc #nightlight (at New York, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/CLW3UR2BUWh/?igshid=j7a7b15l6a0l