Imagine being such a distinct storyteller that your last name is synonymous with a whole language of film-making. It’s a privilege reserved exclusively for directors: Tarantino-esque, Spielbergian, Lynchian. But Aaron Sorkin is a screenwriter solely responsible for the cinema of ‘Sorkinisms’: a style of dialogue and atmosphere where humans speak faster than they think, flaunt intellectual credibility, exchange smug repartee without a single stutter, do deadpan jokes in a hurry, react without listening, unleash crowd-pleasing one-liners, and demonstrate robotic comfort with one another.
Sorkinisms keep the viewer entertained by jousting with them and challenging them to keep up — it’s not the plot that’s moving fast, it’s the people within it. It’s exhausting and enjoyable at once. Even when it gets on your nerves, it’s part of the plan. Think Amelia Dimoldenberg interviewing Jesse Eisenberg on Chicken Shop Date, but as an entire movie. Every (American) character is socially awkward, and sounds like a preprogrammed wit-bot or sadness-bot or monologue-bot or argument-bot. So it’s quite the irony that The Social Reckoning, written and directed by Sorkin, is centered on manipulative algorithms.
A follow-up to the fabled friendship-in-the-time-of-Silicon-Valley drama The Social Network (2010), The Social Reckoning is based on the inflection point of Facebook — and the beginning of its lengthy end. The heady days are over, the platform is in the crossheirs of the Congress,...
After a weekend of demonstrations culminated in France’s most violent night of unrest, the mood in the country remained tense on Monday (October 19) as the government announced partial curfews in ...