The Social Network review + advance review of Katherine Heigl's movie "Life As We Know It"

Yesterday I went to an advance screening of Katherine Heigl's (27 Dresses, Roswell) movie "Life As We Know It" at the AMC on Broadway and 68th St. I had seen 27 Dresses before, because James Marsden (Disturbing Behavior, Superman Returns) was in it. This movie follows the tradition of the classic romantic comedies of the 1990's. Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel (Transformers, The Romantics) play the leads who inherit their best friends' baby Sophie - even though the two of them are not married and didn't usually get along! The task of raising a child hadn't occurred to them before but they both realized this baby needed to be raised by someone who was already like family to her, so they decided to both move into their best friends' house and raise the baby together.

At first there is serious tension between them and they are not getting along. Josh Lucas (Poseidon, Sweet Home Alabama) plays a doctor who Katherine has been wanting to ask out on a date for a long time. She is so busy taking care of Sophie that she barely has time to meet up with Josh. They do get to go on one date to a nice restaurant. Josh Dumhamel also is having trouble with his past tradition of meeting hot girls and taking them home after one date. Eventually Katherine and Josh Duhammel spend more time together and begin doing things together and Katherine destroys Josh's motorcycle by accident and he says not to worry about it, a sign of how close they are getting. One night they decide to make marijuana brownies together and eat them, and they get high and end up in bed together. Trouble ensues when Josh Duhamel gets a job offer in another city, and Katherine gets angry when she finds out and she believes their whole relationship was a lie. Initally Josh moves and takes the new job, but after a fight on Thanksgiving, Katherine goes to the airport to stop Josh from leaving. Josh takes his car from the airport back home and waits for Katherine, and when she does he tells her his feelings and they live happily ever after.

The website for the movie is
http://lifeasweknowitmovie.warnerbros.com

The trailer is here:


After seeing Life As We Know It, I went downstairs and got a ticket for the Social Network, which I had been meaning to see. Jesse Eisenberg (Adventueland, Some Boys Don't Leave) plays Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook. The other co-founder, Eduardo Saverin, who started as the company's CFO, was played by Andrew Garfield (Lions For Lambs, Spider Man Reboot). Justin Timberlake plays Sean Parker, the founder of Napster who also played a major role in Facebook's transformation from a college dorm room project into a major corporation. A fact of interest is that Natalie Portman made significant contributions to the script of this movie, being that she too attended Harvard, the school where Facebook was founded.

The movie begins with scenes from mediation meetings between the lawyers of Cameron & Tyler Winklevoss, two Harvard Students who had asked Zuckerberg to build an elite dating website for Harvard Students. Instead Zuckerberg created Facebook, a social networking site intended to compel students to spend time checking out their friend's pages and sending emails to their friends asking them to join. Zuckerberg got the startup money from Saverin, who laid out $1,000 of his own money initially, and later contributed $19,000 while the company was supposed to be looking for advertisers and find funding. When Zuckerberg met Parker, Parker helps him expand Facebook to all 50 States, and gets him an additional investment worth $500,000, enough to expand Facebook to other continents. When they do this, they call Saverin, who has been in New York courting advertisers, to California. Zuckerberg and Parker fool him into signing contracts which take away his power at Facebook, and then later call him back to California asking him to sign more documents, which he then decides to read - and the contracts would've totally eliminated his shares in Facebook. This is when he decides to sue Zuckerberg. Soon after, there is an incident with Parker, who was throwing a party with interns from Facebook, where the police barge into the party to break it up and finds girls under 21 drinking with Parker who is also caught with cocaine. It is questioned in the movie whether Zuckerberg called the police to set the incident up, and it's also questioned whether Zuckerberg was involved with a media piece on Saverin accusing him of torturing chickens because he fed chicken meat to a chicken he was taking care of as a college fraternity ritual. There is no definitive answer in the movie as to whether Zuckerberg staged the bad press incidents with Saverin and Parker to push them out of the company. Andrew Garfield was at his usual best in the movie playing a compelling character who the audience sympathizes with. Eisenberg and Timberlake were excellent too. This is definitely one of the best movies I've seen in a while.

For more on The Social Network visit:
http://www.thesocialnetwork-movie.com

For the trailer: