The MacGuffin

Another MacGuffin Film Podcast Top 5′s segment. This time Ed and Ben give the nerd rebuttal to the top 5 Sci-Fi films picked by Brandi and Allen.

Spencer and John share their top 10 films for 2010, before closing the show out with their DVD picks of the week.

Based on a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, directed by Mark Romanek, the new film Never Let Me Go is a strange and tightly drawn character study about Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, three kids who start out in the same boarding school in the English countryside. Their destinies are spelled out for them from birth.  A love triangle develops as children. Kathy fancies Tommy, so the calculating Ruth moves in on Tommy mainly because her friend wants him.  The title of the film comes from a smoky, old fashioned song from a fictional recording star that young Kathy listens to repeatedly while imagining her unfulfilled romance with Tommy.  They all come of age emotionally and physically together.  What it all means to them is integral to their story.

There are two films being released this year that deal with the current aspects of American prosperity and greed. While one of them appears to be outwardly critical, perhaps even slightly cynical, in its approach to addressing the modern day financial quandaries, the other is more obsequious in its outlook, and yet definitively deliberate in its’ presentation. The first film I speak of is Oliver Stone’s WALL STREET – MONEY NEVER SLEEPS which hits theaters a week before the other film, David Fincher’s THE SOCIAL NETWORK. Stone appears to be taking a direct swipe at Wall Street and the upper class’ views on how economics in American society should be run. Meanwhile, at the heart of Fincher’s film is the story of, loosely based on actual events, Mark Zuckerberg and the situations surrounding his creation of the website, Facebook, and rise to being the youngest billionaire in the world.

A reminder – this review contains spoilers. If you would like to check out our spoiler-free reviews, they are available from Allen and from Brandi.

We can agree that none of us thought a Facebook movie sounded like a great idea when it first surfaced, right? I personally had a flash of some sort of emo You’ve Got Mail. (No offense to You’ve Got Mail.) But once it was clear that the intention was to tell a story not just using Facebook as a marketable backdrop, but to really comment on one of the specific phenomena of the 2000s, my interest was piqued. When the director and writer turned out to be David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin, I knew that whatever we got, brilliant or failure, would be worth talking about.

We open with a guy and a girl sitting at a restaurant having drinks.  They are smart, confident, and intellectual.  The guy tells the girl of his desire to do something significant, to gain the attention of the college clubs.  The girl asks why he so desperately wants to be a part of these organizations.  He responds almost surprisingly, the clubs are exclusive, they’re cool, and they can lead to a better life.  He offends her for even questioning their validity, and she calls him an asshole.  It is here where the birth of the website Facebook is born, the subject of the new David Fincher film, The Social Network (2010).