Howard Marks – Mosher'sUnimaginativelyEntitledBlog

Just for a change, I headed into the Glasgow city centre Cineworld as I had most of Sunday to kill before Bowling For Soup came on stage.

By some bizarre coincidence, both films I saw today were “true stories” based on biographies.

Mr. Nice

Plot-in-a-nutshell: Smart Welsh boy goes to Oxford, figures out that dealing drugs is far more profitable than teaching and ends up living the life of crime.

I’ve seen the book Mr. Nice kicking around so much recently, mainly in hostels. It seems that pretty much every 20-something thinks Howards Marks was the coolest guy ever because he sold shitloads of dope and stood up for the whole “it’s a silly law so it doesn’t count” school of thought.

Either way, the story is well known. I even vaguely remember bits of it from when I was a kid and the story appearing on the news – but I won’t go into detail for those of you who are trying to avoid any spoilers!

It’s a good story, too, although given it’s based on Marks’ own viewpoint it’s obvious that there may be a little bit of embellishment somewhere along the lines. Rhys Ifans is perfectly cast and bears more than just a passing resemblance to Marks himself.

From his early beginnings as the school nerd right up to the current day, Marks is played by Ifans. It seems a bit unusual putting him into a school uniform, but it works given that those early years are just brushed over in about ten minutes.

Marks ran the rocky road from college boy to kingpin, dealt with the IRA, arms suppliers, and MI6. Regardless of your moral views on what he did, he led one hell of an interesting life. Shoehorned into 120 minutes, it never gets a chance to get boring.

The Social Network

“The internet’s not written in pencil, Mark. It’s written in ink.”

Plot-in-a-nutshell: Harvard Freshman comes up with an idea for a website (or steals it) called “The Facebook“. Legal action ensues.

What happens when you mix the verbal genius of The West Wing with the world of computer geekery? The answer is contained in this two-hour internet-driven legal office drama.

In short – Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is a freshman at Harvard, one of the US “Ivy League” universities. That is, all the “best” students go there. Zuckerberg is, shall we say, a little socially awkward. He has a couple of friends, an immense intellect and really can’t handle other people at all. The view we get in the film is that he finds them of little consequence, perhaps not worthy of his time. Eisenberg plays this part perfectly.

After crashing the school’s network as part of a revenge plot against a recent girlfriend who just dumped him, he is invited to help program a website by two brothers and their business partner. He agrees, but instead spends his time on “The Facebook”. It may have escaped your attention, but the resulting website is slightly popular and was recently valued at around $25 billion.

Needless to say, as soon as money of those amounts is bandied around, people get lawyers involved.

The film is roughly split into three parts, all of which play over each other as the viewpoint jumps around. There are two legal cases plus the back story upon which they are both based. This can make it a little hard to follow in places, but not too much so.

Even if you don’t have an interest in the internet and computers, if you remotely enjoyed The West Wing for its dialogue – and let’s face it, that was a thing of utter beauty – you’ll love this film. Aaron Sorkin‘s work on the script shines as brightly as it did for 154 episodes of the TV show and there’s barely a minute or two without some gem or other being uttered.

The Social Network is a clever, witty, fast-paced legal drama which is hugely enjoyable. If David Fincher ever needed to redeem himself for Alien3, this wipes the slate clean. You know, just in case Se7en, Fight Club and Zodiac don’t prove that the studio execs who kicked him off the third Alien film didn’t have a clue what they were doing.