MemeMachineGo!

"Moneyball." Boring. A few good moments, some crisp dialogue, but Brad Pitt's character was the only one developed worth a damn. It's the only time I've seen Philip Seymour Hoffman uninteresting, which says much more about how little his character had to do in his 3 minutes or so of screen time than it does about Hoffman.

"The Social Network." This made me feel bad for Mark Zuckerberg, or as bad as I'm likely to feel for a billionaire in his twenties who's overseeing running roughshod over the privacy of hundreds of millions of people. I read The Accidental Billionaires afterwards, the book on which it's nominally based. Very little of the movie's portrayal of Zuckerberg could be found there, and the book itself has been accused of displaying an anti-Zuckerberg bias. Sorkin has stated in interviews his priority on a compelling story over the facts, and he succeeded by that metric. It was a good story. But I figure if you're making a movie about events just 7 years old, all of whose players are living, it'd be good form to pay a little attention to an honest portrayal. Or not to make it.

"Charlie Wilson's War." (Shortly after seeing it, I managed to misremember the title as "Charlie Parker's War." But Clint Eastwood already made that movie.) Moviegoing happiness is a scene between Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman scripted by Sorkin and directed by Mike Nichols. I've always felt pretty neutral about Hanks, but he was great here.