vrijdag 13 december 2013

jOBS (2013)

Genre : Biography/Drama
Country : USA

Cast :
Ashton Kutcher : Steve Jobs
Dermot Mulroney : Mike Markkula
Josh Gad : Steve Wozniak

Director :
Matt Whiteley

Summary
The true story about one of the most famous and largest American entrepreneurs in history. JOBS tells the impressive story of thirty inspiring years in the life of Steve Jobs.

My opinion
I expected "jOBS" to be a long stretched commercial for Apple, instead of a sketch of the founder of this quirky product. This wasn't entirely true, but it was close. I wonder how much input Jobs himself had in this film. Or was the script drafted without consultation of himself?

The disadvantage of a biography is that if the person portrayed is not part of your interest, you're probably going to find this a bland and boring movie. If I would watch a biographical movie about the driving force behind the Tupperware story, I 'd probably fall asleep and look at it disinterested. Obviously since I'm working in the IT sector, "Jobs " kept me in its grip. I saw the rise of the famous PC. I've been through it all : programming with a punch card machine, Winchester disks, C64 and C128, using floppy disks with, looking at the current standards, terribly little capacity and only used nowadays as a Frisbee, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Tandy TRS-80, the 286/386/486 DOS machines,.... And when I started my career in the world of the IT, the person who was about to offer me a job, asked me if I knew anything about Macintosh. I wholeheartedly said I did and the next day I was attending a course about DBase II and asked if they could tell me what the hell a Macintosh was. I was allowed to have a Mac Plus and for the first time I held a mouse (I thought it was bloody inconvenient) in my hand and I learned about dragging files and throwing it in the garbage bin. Nobody can imagine how groundbreaking and shocking this was for people who were used to work in a DOS environment and struggling with "CD" and "DIR" commands. A whole new world revealed itself thanks to Apple. Deep down, I still adore everything that has to do with Apple.

What did I miss in this film ? The technical side of the origin of the idea of this thought out product. We see the Apple II passing by. Lisa is mentioned. And then there is the creation of the Macintosh what leads to the seperation of Jobs and the Apple company. The Next passes and before you know it we look at the design of the iMac. That's it. No digression about the creation of the graphical interface. Who the hell got the brilliant idea of that mouse design ? Ultimately, the film is a self-glorification of the individual Jobs. We actually get to see a tyrannical person without any feelings. To be honest I think he was an arrogant bastard with no mercy. The people who started with him were put aside after a while and didn't share in the profit at the time it became a success. A programmer who showed no enthusiasm is fired on the spot. There's a child that he completely ignores and doesn't accept as his child. He sells his shares to destabilize the company. The debacle over alleged copying of Macintosh software by Microsoft (And I'm convinced it was a copy) is just a flash in the whole movie . They could have gone a bit further with this item. But it's undeniable ! He was a visionary with strong opinions about what the computer would mean in our ordinary life. It's also obvious that he turned out to be a sociopathic bully.

Aston Kutcher actually did a very fine job (What a quibble !) in portraying Jobs. The attitude, the wandering gaze and enthusiasm seemed sincere. Likewise, this can be said about the actors who formed the gang of computer nerds that stood at the cradle of Macintosh. A movie that won't make a deep impression on most people. I found it an enjoyable film that briefly allowed us to look at a product that is central in our lives, but in a different way.