FILM REVIEW: The Social Network

I was really looking forward to watching "The Social Network," the very right now insider movie about the birth of Facebook and accompanying rise of its curmudgeonly genius founder, Harvard University undergrad Mark Zuckerberg. Despite being an "aging boomer," I actually like Facebook and find it a useful tool and a fun way to stay in touch with distant friends. Plus, the movie has been hyped to death as UNBELIEVABLY FANTASTIC by all who have seen it, including reviewers. So last night we settled in front of the TV with a rented DVD from Blockbuster, expecting a damn good time.

Instead, we got lots of mumbled, ultra-wordy dialog, hard enough to follow even if you could hear it over the too-loud, annoying soundtrack of throbbing music. Worse was the stunningly bad acting, making one ache for the young Dustin Hoffman or even a younger-than-today Ben Stiller in the leading role. Cutting back and forth between then and now and sometime in-between, we see the young, anti-social Zuckerberg and the older, successful but still anti-social Zuckerberg, along with lawyers and best friends and ex-best-friends, not to mention some blonde lady from the university who seems to have wandered onto the set from "Judgment at Nuremberg," asking all the hard questions of who stole what from whom, and when.

On the plus side, male voyeurs will enjoy the steamy bathroom-stall sex scene and all the nice college girls stripping for all the nice Harvard boys at drinking parties. Thrown in for some gut-wrenching realism, we see future leaders of industry vomiting in the snow, ostensibly to gain access to secret societies for people with high SAT scores.

Bottom line: This movie is just too hard to follow to be any fun at all. Besides, any film featuring Justin Timberlake in a non-singing role has got to be kidding.