Sorkin's "The Newsroom" on HBO: final countdown

One exact month. While I'm currently following Mad Men and Boardwalk Empire on the drama type-machine, Aaron Sorkin's return to TV writing (after Studio on the Sunset Trip in 2006, already a tackle on journalism) is one of my most expected moments of the year.

Aaron Sorkin's "Network" (1976) ?

Taking a hindsight at Aaron Sorkin's career we may conjure up a set of precise concerns and thematic preferences that enwrap his character's worlds and bake the extent of his overall works. Politics, institutions and media. A Few Good Men (1992) is a military court drama that deals with the ethics of subordination and corruption in the light of law and the greater good; The American President (1995) and TV series West Wing (99-06) go on board of the White House; Charlie Wilson's War (2007) revolves around a Congressman and Afghanistan.

Sorkin has also created Sports Night (98-00) for ABC, Studio 60 on the Sunset Trip (06-07) for NBC and recently wrote The Social Network (2010) for David Fincher. He loves to write about what's behind the scenes, about the human dilemmas among social and institutional pressure and hypocrisy, underneath whatever that crosses screens every day and every night. Hierarchies, ethics, rates, information, emissions, make it stockholders, likes, friends - how much is too much when people depend part of their lives on fabricated platforms of indirect interaction with the world and between each other?

Isn't anything crossing your minds? Sorkin has stated many times that one of his favorite writers is the great Paddy Chayefsky and that one of his favorite films is the masterpiece Network (1976), directed by Sidney Lumet. He reveries about what could have been made of Mark Zuckerberg's life if penned by the visionary who created such a black-comic tragic treaty on the implications of media in the modern society.

Well, the Oscar and Emmy-winner screenwriter is back to TV and on TV. The trailer of new HBO series The Newsroom is out and stars Jeff Daniels, Sam Waterston and Emily Mortimer. And it's all there: politics, institutions and media. An amazing trailer that has me hooked at the 24th of June.

Moneyball (2011), just a taste

Just a taste because I'm planning to be back with Moneyball for a specific analysis to what I believe to be the brilliant work of powerhouse screenwriters Steve Zaillian & Aaron Sorkin. For now, let me stay with a general appreciation.

I seldom like sports movies. I find them particularly difficult to connect with, for sport breeds out of the immediacy of its single moments. The last hurdle, the last stroke, the last jump, the goal. The looming energy that powers collision between men and nature and between men themselves cannot be rehearsed and recorded sports events cannot fulfill us with the mystical satisfaction of physical conquering, if only a nostalgic flavor of it. Moneyball never tries to sell such moments as the ultimate arching goals of the story. Instead, it is driven by the backstage story of Billy Beaner while reforming baseball's management style as part of an unconscious life-examining quest. The main bases are the promising player he never became and the will and opportunity of never letting go an adorable twelve year old daughter. He is a logic cold-hearted business man as much of a temperamental intuitive heart-melted fan. He is the paradoxical faithful pragmatist and grabs Peter Brand to travel along into a journey much more about triumphing for their beliefs than storing loads of billions of dollars. We can connect with that. We take sports from the backstage all the time and during this film we're there with them. Actual footage transports us to an intermittent game precisely as Beaner deals with it. Exquisite sound editing bounces between his isolation and the cheering stadiums, as the green-yellow stripes and outfits wrap the space into a communion of a true team. I would be pleased to see Brad Pitt stepping to an Oscar and would consider the nomination for Jonah Hill and Seymour Hoffman. It is incredible the amount of masterfully held exposition we're thrown at without us even realizing it due to the sorkinesque snappy intelligent dialog, the depth of Beaner's character, the funny vein of some scenes and the wise camera and editing.

The phone call Aaron Sorkin never returned

« “Why don’t you come on up here and let me give you a tour of the place.”

I’d never met Steve Jobs but we’d begun a phone friendship. It began when I was quoted somewhere answering the question “Mac or PC?” and I said, “Everything I’ve ever written, I’ve written on a Mac.” He called me to say he appreciated the quote and said if there was ever anything he could do for me I should give him a ring. Then he would "call me from time to time to compliment me on an episode of television or a movie I’d written that he’d particularly liked.

When someone’s making a courtesy call I like not to make them stay on the phone very long. So I never got a chance to tell Steve that he was making truly great American products that people wanted to buy. I never got to tell him about the experience of “opening the box” that so many of us are talking about this week. Or about how my young daughter can’t walk past an Apple store without going in. I never told him how I loved his sense of showmanship.

There’s a huge difference between a showman and huckster. A showman’s got the goods.

The second-to-last call I got from Steve came the day a television series of mine was canceled. “I just want to make sure you’re not discouraged,” he said. Why would an almost stranger take even 60 seconds out of his day to make that call? It had to have been because he was an awfully nice man. And that he knew what it felt like to blow it on a big stage.

But it’s his last call I’ll always remember. He wanted me to write a Pixar movie. I told him I loved Pixar movies, I’d seen all of them at least twice and felt they were small miracles, but that I didn’t think I’d be good at it.

STEVE: Why not?

ME: I just—I don’t think I can make inanimate objects talk.

STEVE: Once you make them talk they won’t be inanimate.

ME: The truth is I don’t know how to tell those stories. I have a young kid who loves Pixar movies and she’ll turn cartwheels if I tell her I’m writing one and I don’t want to disappoint her by writing the only bad movie in the history of Pixar.

(long silence)

STEVE: Jeez ... write about THAT.

ME: Steve—

STEVE: Why don’t you come up here and let me give you a tour of the place.

I told him I’d take him up on it and I never did. But I still keep thinking about that Pixar movie. And for me, that’s Steve’s legacy. That, and the fact that I wrote this on a Mac that I loved taking out of the box. »

From The Daily Beast.

The Social Network / A Rede Social (2010)

A minha crítica será muito curta, já que vou parafrasear João Samuel Neves, do nosso caro Dial P for Popcorn, com o qual concordo de tal maneira, que quis fazer das suas palavras as minhas. Acrescento algumas notas, no final.

"Há pessoas que são neutras. Nem demasiado boas nem demasiado más. Sem empolgarem mas também sem criarem ódios de estimação. Que passam e não são recordadas. The Social Network é um filme neutro. É um bom filme, um filme que vale os cinco euros dos bilhetes e que certamente levará ao rubro a disputa entre os três canais generalistas para o transmitir numa tarde de domingo. Mas não é, de perto, um grande filme. Eu gostei (melhor a segunda parte do que a primeira), mas não o coloco num altar nem tenho vontade de o rever. (...)"

Na verdade, A Rede Social abre com um diálogo brilhante, uma qualidade que vai pautar as restantes falas do filme. A personagem principal está extremamente bem desenvolvida e gostava de ver Eisenberg nos Óscares. A montagem fez um óptimo trabalho na captação do ritmo da acção, conjugando muito bem o rápido bater do teclado, a dicção acelerada dos empreendedores, o fulgor dos raciocínios. No entanto, apesar de reconhecer e sentir que os temas, ou, se houver, O Tema, estão lá (a amizade e lealdade contra a instrumentalidade da fama e da ganância; a integridade; a solidão intelectual e contemporânea, entre outros passíveis de interpretação), apesar de ver aqui um retrato cinematograficamente interessante do processo de gestão e marketing, no final, senti que pouco se tinha passado. Pareceu tudo de repente, despercebido, leve. Creio que, no meio de um conflito que vinha a ser bem construído, falta um climax que o complemente. E isso parece-me ser um problema de estrutura de argumento - as consequências de tudo o que se ia passando iam-nos sendo mostradas, em paralelo (o que, por si só, lhes tira impacto) e por diálogos, em vez de ser por imagens ou acções (tira-lhe encanto e mais impacto). Foi desvanecendo, o filme. É como se fossemos subindo, subindo, subindo e quando estamos mesmo a chegar lá cima, mandam-nos descer. Corre mal e é estranho. Não soa bem. É como diz o João, "neutro".