A few years back, Aaron Sorkin wrote a wildly one-sided account of Mark Zuckerberg’s rise to riches and infamy as the founder of Facebook, The Social Network. Now he’s (theoretically, at least) adapted Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs for another tale of a socially malformed but market-prescient innovator. It’s more even-handed about its subject, to a degree, but somehow far less interesting.
Steve Jobs is already playing in limited release and opens wider this week. My review is at PopMatters:
What Steve Jobs leaves us with isn’t a genius or even a particularly innovative business manager. One after the other, aggrieved former colleagues or family come for some kind of reconciliation or passive-aggressive score-settling, only to be hit with the paranoid, megalomaniacal verbal assaults [former Apple CEO John] Sculley calls the “Steve Jobs revenge machine”. On the surface this looks like an attempt to puncture the bubble of Jobs’s self-created genius mystique and show his seedy underbelly. But the film’s heart isn’t in it. Each time, Jobs gets the upper hand…
Just one of this year’s post-apocalyptic mega-budget sci-fi projects, Oblivion is a somewhat ambitious piece of work that doesn’t ultimately know what to do with itself. In part, that could result from the ever-amped presence of Tom Cruise, who doesn’t ever seem able to tamp down the Maverick long enough to register any true doubt in his own abilities to save the world. Again.
Oblivion hits Blu-ray and DVD today. My review is at Short Ends & Leader; here’s part:
Oblivion starts as some blissed-out spread in a post-apocalyptic edition ofArchitecture Digest before moving into Big Revelation science fiction. Tom Cruise plays Jack, a happy-go-lucky tech who’s one of two humans left on the Earth’s surface in the year 2077. Jack and his partner Victoria (Andrea Riseborough, lithe and ghostly) live in a gorgeously sleek pod of a place elevated hundreds of feet off the blasted landscape. It’s like one of those moderne postwar glass bungalows in the hills overlooking Los Angeles, only it floats above the clouds and is packed with all manner of gadgetry that would make an Apple fetishist’s heart beat dangerously fast…
Chris Barsanti 
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