Such a Tease

There was a time I used to be in love with movies. I still like them, but I used to think about nothing else other than movies all day long. Things are different now because I merely take an enthusiastic interest in films as opposed to ardent fanaticism. I'm more intrigued by the film business mechanisms that power the movie machine than the actual products it produces. This may be due to the fact that working in films has watered down my previous obsession, or perhaps it's a result of movies not being very good nowadays. I get more excited by watching well-crafted trailers for movies that are coming soon rather than the actual films themselves. Saying that, there are always one or two movies every year that I really get into and the last time that happened in a serious way was in 2008 when I saw Danny Boyle's excellent Slumdog Millionaire and David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Fincher has a special place in my heart because as far as I'm concerned he directed the greatest film of all time: Fight Club.

 I am anticipating Fincher's THE SOCIAL NETWORK which will be released Stateside on October 1^st 2010. (No UK release has yet been set by Sony.) A teaser trailer was officially launched today and it is truly only a teaser as other than sparse dialogue bites there is no actual film footage included. At a time when studios insist on basically condensing the movie into 2 minutes, the trailer for THE SOCIAL NETWORK totally avoids this. One can argue how successfully it manages to intrigue audiences into finding out more about the movie, but you've got to give credit for them doing something refreshingly anachronistic. Movie trailers in the 1970s were often intentionally opaque and still managed to open big. If anything, I believe that fans of Fincher's work will be even more psyched for THE SOCIAL NETWORK after having seen the teaser trailer. I'm lucky enough to have read Aaron Sorkin's screenplay for THE SOCIAL NETWORK, which is adapted from Ben Mezrich's non-fiction book The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal. I wasn't blown-away by Sorkin's script, but still want to see what Fincher does with material that on paper seems fairly ordinary. It is also the first project from Fincher that's totally about young people and features a talented young cast. Furthermore, with a production budget at $47 million, it's the most mid-budget movie he's made since Se7en, and a way modest amount than the $160 million he spent on Benjamin Button. Fincher, like Spike Jonze, is a filmmaker who cut his teeth on music videos for the burgeoning MTV generation. Much like Jonze, Fincher is now a part of Hollywood's filmmaking elite and his movies trade on the actuality they're made by him and not anyone else. He is one of the only directors who can challenge a studio into permitting the kind of teaser trailer he's just released for THE SOCIAL NETWORK. Fincher is prepping a seemingly pointless American remake of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, but in his inspired hands it'd be wise to hold judgement till we at least get a gander of the film's teaser trailer.