Facebook Movie

I've gotten a ton of emails today about awesomeness of The Social Network trailer.

This movie will really be a test of my mettle. On the one hand, I hold David Fincher in high regard and from all reports, the script "is awesome." Great director and great script - in my opinion - difficult to screw up the movie.

On the other hand, there is the "idea" of the movie. While it is easy to make a bad or subpar movie out of a great idea, it is nearly impossible make a good movie about a bad idea*.

Most would argue, the facebook origin story is a good idea. They are all wrong. I loathe facebook and all it stands for in our culture. I cannot take a film seriously about an unserious subject.

*There are so many caveats to this, I can barely start. Of course no one thinks their movie is a bad idea, so there is subjectivity involved here. The one movie that comes to mind is The Queen. At first I thought - seriously? A movie about Queen Elizabeth and Diana and Tony Blair. That, in my opinion, is a bad idea. But it was a great movie - because Stephen Frears made it thematically about a certain generation of British women - women like his mother, I imagine, a eulogy for a type of very specific type of person who is dying out and becoming extinct. In that way, it was almost like a Western.

So what you have is a question - what is the core element of filmmaking? The idea** or the director?

Bad or uneven filmmakers have made good movies. Great filmmakers have made bad movies. This is an ongoing dilemma and I doubt it will ever be resolved.

**idea can also mean "story," but it means a little more than that because I would say it also incorporates theme and style.

Terminator Salvation was a good "idea." Make a war movie out of the Terminator franchise. And I liked the first half of the movie, but ultimately, it was still a McG movie.

Tough questions, these.