Last Updated on November 11, 2010 November 12, 2010

Written by Michael Blair, Film Critic

In the Prep News’s recent remembrance of SLUH filmmaker George Hickenlooper, editor-in-chief Nick Fandos chews on a quote from Joe Schulte about the director’s interest in telling stories about people living on the outside of the world they populate, and trying to fight their way in. “In a way,” Fandos asserts, “that outsider was Hickenlooper.”

It seems strange then that the filmmaker’s most recent work, Casino Jack (which premiered at the Saint Louis International Film Festival last night) is through and through a Hollywood film. After all, it stars the bankable Kevin Spacey, and it boasts a deft, fast-paced script from studio sweetheart Norman Snider. More than anything, it appears to come out of a period of swiftly paced but grandly designed topical films like, say, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps or David Fincher’s The Social Network. Hollywood, it seems, has finally caught up with the wave of grimy, slimy events of the last decade. If the 2000s were about immediate indictments of failing systems in documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth and Fahrenheit 9/11, the 2010s appear to be about using those events as templates on which to construct tight, character-based narratives. Even this summer’s Will Ferrell comedy blockbuster, The Other Guys, built its story around cops who are out to bust money launderers instead of drug dealers. At first glance, Casino Jack is just one more Hollywood film made by, apparently, one more set of Hollywood insiders.

It’s also hard to immediately find the connection between Schulte’s outsider claim and Hickenlooper’s chosen subject: Washington super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. By all first impressions, Abramoff is nothing if not an insider. He shoots through back doors of the Capital and smiles while he hands senators corporate kickbacks. We quickly learn that these are the men who really make things happen in Washington. In one early scene, we travel through Jack’s office and see the framed photos of Abramoff alongside Republican mastermind Karl Rove and House Majority Leader Tom Delay. Soon we see the Ronald Reagan baseball cap that sits on a plaque by Abramoff’s desk and a thank-you note signed by President Bush. If anything, we’re thinking, this guy is the insider’s insider.

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Last Updated on October 14, 2010 October 15, 2010

Written by Michael Blair, Film Critic

The Social Network—David Fincher’s new film about the origins of Facebook and its whiz-kid founder, Mark Zuckerberg—begins in a bar. It’s an emblem of the old-guard social world—the one that Mark’s invention will eventually dismantle—that public house where our parents likely met to tell stories and break news to old friends and new ones alike. It’s also the only reliable place a college kid can get a few beers, which is what Zuckerberg’s interested in. He’s 19 and wiry—a normal Harvard kid out to share a drink with his girlfriend. For a moment, it’s a portrait of innocence as Mark shuffles around in his Gap hoodie, blue eyes bright in the dim pub.

That is until he opens his mouth—sputtering out facts about Chinese education and the difference between motivation and obsession. Mark speaks quickly and cynically, like he’s got a mean itch on his back, and he’s not quite willing to scratch it. When his girlfriend reaches out, he lashes back and starts calling her names. “I’m not speaking in codes,” Mark insists, but we start to know better. He’s clouded and confused and angry about it all. This guy’s moving much too fast for anyone to catch up, and not interested in slowing down to let anyone in. By the end of the night, Mark’s running back to Harvard’s campus alone, without the girlfriend he ran to meet a few hours before.

And so begins The Social Network, with a whole lotta Zuckerberg and very little Facebook. Soon the two will become married and the world will know Mark simply as the guy who founded the most important company of his generation. But what’s behind the guy behind the status update? Who’s the face of Facebook? These are the questions Fincher’s and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s film are concerned with. And ultimately, they are ones with sticky, incomplete answers.

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