COMING ATTRACTIONS: DELIGHT AND CONFUSION

The fine folks at tor.com have been kind enough to hire me to follow The Hollywood Reporter's Twitter feed and find stuff to geek out about (which is to say, what I do anyway), with this fine piece of concise snark being the first of hopefully many. I'm very pleased with this situation, and charmed by the extremely nice way they asked me to get by with "50% less swear words." Out of gratitude, I countered with an offer to do without them at all. Because I don't fucking need to curse.

Now, onto that hazy, poorly-defined, less interesting part of the world that isn't all about me: this weekend, this comes out:

It may be a while before I get to actually see it, but I'm extremely interested to see what David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin have managed to with this. Not to put too fine a point on it, but when I first heard someone was making a movie about Facebook, I reacted about the same as I did when I heard that Ridley Scott was making a movie out of Monopoly: "What the fuck are you talking about? If you're kidding, that's not funny, and if you're not kidding, I wish to acquire surplus Russian nuclear warheads."

The punchline is, people are coming back from screenings comparing this picture to fucking Citizen Kane, and calling it and the Colin Firth thing where he plays George VI the two Oscar frontrunners. Now I've been hangin' around this here Internet for a long time, long enough to know how to spot a troll a mile away. And I wouldn't put it past someone like [name of group redacted] who hang out on [name of messageboard redacted], the most popular board on [name of website redacted] (Ed. Note: redactions mandated due to Rules 1&2 of the Internet; if you don't know what they are, look them up. Behind seven proxies) to have cooked this up, much like they did the Scientology protests, in a diverting bit of IRL trolling. But no. These people talking up The Social Network are fucking serious. Voices as diverse as Roger Ebert and my old buddy Hudak are united in bestowing four stars (out of four) on it. So there's that.

I, personally, am in shock that this movie exists. What makes this startup different from all other startups? I'm going to go in to see it with an open mind, and fully willing to accept it as good. But seriously. You didn't make the Scooby-Doo "who farted" face the first time you heard this movie was good? You be lyin', byetch.