Steve Jobs “is somebody I followed closely for much of my career, even spending a week in the mid-1980s embedded at NeXT, the company Jobs founded after being tossed out of Apple in 1985,” Joe Nocera writes for The New York Times. “And although ‘Steve Jobs,’ the movie, which opened in a handful of theaters on Friday, is highly entertaining, what struck me most was how little it had to do with the flesh and blood Steve Jobs.”
“Sorkin has arranged the movie like a three-act play, building it around three product launches, for the Macintosh computer in 1984, the NeXT computer in 1988 and the iMac in 1998, after Jobs returned to Apple,” Nocera writes. “Although this structure necessitates inventing virtually every moment in the film out of whole cloth, that’s not the real problem. The structure would be fine if, within its contours, it had conveyed the complicated reality of Steve Jobs.”
“But it doesn’t. In ways both large and small, Sorkin — as well as Michael Fassbender, the actor who plays Jobs — has failed to capture him in any meaningful sense,” Nocera writes. “There are moments in the film, like the big “reconciliation” scene with his out-of-wedlock daughter, Lisa, that are almost offensively in opposition to the truth… More important, the film simply doesn’t understand who he was and why he was successful.”
“As it turns out, Sorkin is quite proud of his disregard for facts. ‘What is the big deal about accuracy purely for accuracy’s sake?’ he told New York magazine around the time ‘The Social Network’ came out,” Nocera writes. “The problem is that Steve Jobs isn’t just a ‘character’; he was a real person who lived a real life… Sorkin and his fellow moviemakers are taking advantage of the feelings people have for the real Steve Jobs to sell tickets, yet the Steve Jobs he created is a complete figment of his imagination. It’s a con.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: And this is from a the guy Steve Jobs famously called a “slime bucket.”
Accuracy doesn’t matter — until you find yourself renaming rivers in order to match Hollywood concoctions.
Lie: “The graphical user interface was stolen from Xerox PARC.” Repeat a lie often enough, like on thousands of movie screens and countless upcoming downloads around the world, and it becomes “fact.”
And, BTW, Jobs’ NeXT, Sorkin’s “single biggest failure in the history of personal computing” as inserted into the mouth of a fictional “Woz,” is the basis for the Mac’s OS X, the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch’s iOS, and stands as the root of all of the success that Apple, the world’s most valuable company, enjoys today. If that’s a “failure,” we’d like to see Sorkin’s idea of “success.”
Can’t we just get someone who actually understands Steve Jobs, Apple, and what really happened to write the book and the movie? Is that really so hard?
SEE ALSO:
Paid consultant Woz on ‘Steve Jobs’ movie claims accuracy doesn’t matter – October 13, 2015
Universal releases new 2:20-minute scene from ‘Steve Jobs’ – October 9, 2015
The Steve Jobs in ‘Steve Jobs’ is a fictional character invented by Aaron Sorkin – October 8, 2015
Jony Ive joins chorus of insiders’ complaints about new ‘Steve Jobs’ movie – October 8, 2015
The Strange Saga of ‘Steve Jobs’: A widow’s threats, high-powered spats and the Sony hack – October 7, 2015
‘Steve Jobs’ director Danny Boyle warns of ‘tremendous, terrifying power’ of tech giants like Apple – October 7, 2015
Forbes reviews ‘Steve Jobs’: ‘An electrifying interpretive dance of abstract biographical cinema’ – October 7, 2015
Steve Jobs’ daughter Lisa skips movie screening, but parties with cast – October 7, 2015
Philip Elmer-DeWitt reviews ‘Steve Jobs’ movie: ‘I loved it’ – October 7, 2015
Aaron Sorkin: Steve Jobs just wanted to be loved – October 6, 2015
The ‘Steve Jobs’ movie that Sony, DiCaprio, and Bale didn’t want is now an Oscar favorite – October 6, 2015
Michael Fassbender already the odds-on favorite to win an Oscar for ‘Steve Jobs’ – October 5, 2015
Steve Jobs’ widow and friends take aim at Hollywood over ‘Steve Jobs’ biopic – October 5, 2015
‘Steve Jobs’ biopic too nasty to win Best Picture award – October 2, 2015
Andy Hertzfeld: ‘Steve Jobs’ movie ‘deviates from reality everywhere’ but ‘aspires to explore and expose the deeper truths’ – October 2, 2015
Aaron Sorkin blasts Apple’s Tim Cook over ‘Steve Jobs’ critique: ‘You’ve got a lot of nerve’ – September 25, 2015
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Arline M.” for the heads up.]
