

What the Steve Jobs movie got right, and wrong - kaws
http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/15/tech/innovation/steve-jobs-movie/index.html?hpt=te_t1

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owenfi
From the trailers & preview material I was worried the movie might be
deceptive. Specifically the scenes with Woz and Jobs in the parking lot and
later in the office. In an interview Wozniak said the parking lot conversation
never took place and got the underlying feelings incorrect. That made me jump
to the conclusion that the preview's portrayal of the office scene where Woz
leaves Apple would be equally misleading. In context it is actually much more
believable.

I was surprised by the technical accuracy (ha, what do I know?) and so I feel
much better about recommending it to people who show interest.

There were parts that I enjoyed more than Pirates of Silicon valley, but also
times when it felt long. Music was used to okay effect, but also drawn out.

Movie Spoiler: There is no recent history portrayed in the film.

Edit: A couple more thoughts. Contrary to the inaccuracies between Jobs and
Wozniak mentioned above (and as noted in the linked article) the movie did
accurately give Wozniak credit for doing the engineering on Breakout (and
getting shortchanged in the process) which I felt was important.

The movie only really covers Jobs at Apple, a bit of University and family, so
if you are interested in NeXT/Pixar/etc. you may be disappointed.

~~~
smegel
Pirates of Silicon was great, not just Jobs/Woz, but the rivalry with Gates
and IBM. I felt it covered most bases pretty well, not sure I have much need
to watch this.

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piyush_soni
I haven't seen it, but I hope they show in the end that it is just not
important to be a successful entrepreneur, but a good human being as well,
which Steve Jobs failed miserably at.

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AlexanderDhoore
Something Larry Ellison seems to be failing at as well:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bj239x9aJ4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bj239x9aJ4)

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sfjailbird
Yes, I was not surprised to learn Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were good
friends.

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raverbashing
At least Jobs had taste.

One of them gave us Apple, the other, Oracle.

Not hard to pick a winner.

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WalterSear
Oracle is what it is, but your initial assertion is a matter of taste.

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wslh
Take it easy, but you can't negate the impact that Apple had in our field.

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piyush_soni
Yes, it also had a big impact (of course, negative) on the culture of 'healthy
competition' that once used to be the case in the pre-Apple era. Steve Jobs
ensured that someone, somewhere is always in a 'face-palm' position
reading/hearing about patents on "pinch to zoom", "slide to unlock", rounded
corners, icons in a grid, wedge shape, and many more, while they went on to
steal more.

~~~
wslh
I think in a different way. Beyond the negative aspects of Apple (and,
specifically, every public company in a powerful situation like Microsoft or
Google) I thank them for pushing the mobile state of the art forward. In a few
years we will have more options with that move.

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techbubble
Just got back from watching the movie. Kutcher does a really good job
channeling Jobs. A couple of scenes were over-dramatized, but overall it was a
very watchable movie. It got off to a slow start, but after that it was well-
paced and kept my interest. I enjoyed it and will probably see it again.

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TheBiv
Did anyone see an early or midnight showing on here? As I would love to hear
your reviews, bc right now, RottenTomatoes has this movie at a 25% rating

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owenfi
Most of the excerpts on RottenTomatoes seem reasonable, but that said I'm a
bit surprised the rating isn't higher.

Jack London in Oakland had about 30 people in attendance at the 9pm premiere.

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MaxScheiber
I saw an early screening of the movie. Here were my general thoughts:

1\. Kutcher did a fantastic job as Steve Jobs. I was extremely pleasantly
surprised by how well he portrayed the role and adopted Steve's mannerisms.
You can even see his gait and speech evolve over the course of the movie.

2\. My fundamental problem with the film was that it tried to cram so much
into two hours that a lot of scenes felt fake and over-simplified to the point
of being insulting. Extreme examples of this include the "I'm going to sue
Bill Gates" scene and the Jony Ive scene.

3\. The beginning is stupid and irrelevant. Also, Jobs's transition from
idealistic hippy acid-dropper to steely-eyed businessman is portrayed in a
manner of seconds and does not feel realistic whatsoever.

4\. I still enjoyed the movie and would watch it again if it were on
television. It certainly had emotionally moving scenes, and I wouldn't say it
was a poor movie.

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jongold
I'm looking forward to catching it. I know the history; I want to see it
dramatised. I mean, I even enjoyed Pirates of Silicon Valley…

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icantthinkofone
Pirates === Worst Movie Ever

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techbubble
Woz chimed in on Gizmodo's review of the movie: [http://gizmodo.com/i-saw-the-
movie-tonight-i-thought-the-act...](http://gizmodo.com/i-saw-the-movie-
tonight-i-thought-the-acting-throughou-1153306973)

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Bjoern
Are we going to have a movie about Norman Borlaug, Dennis Richie or Douglas
Engelbart as well? What made the movie industry pick Jobs as the topic? I
honestly don't understand it.

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solistice
Unless you can sell their stories in the time proven 127 minute, 2 peaks setup
and market them to a major studio, I doubt it will get any traction.

The only other option would be that the people who care about it fund it, but
even though that pool might seem large inside of the tech microcosmos, it's
comparitively small, and you'll have a low budget movie that has trouble being
shown in theaters.

Engelbart could actually make a movie character, given his obsession with
improving the human intellect through computers. It's questionable though
whether you can work his life into a movie script that has popular apeal
whilst respecting the work he has done.

Borlaugs work could be worked into a movie as well, but it suffers from the
same problems that making a movie about Engelbart has. It's tough creating an
accurate portrayal of his life whilst having a dramatic story arch in there.

That's part of the reason why the Social Network has such strange set of
priorities. I doubt that the court case and the unrequited love story were
integral parts in Facebook becomming Facebook, but they fit the story, and the
love story likely beat the film over the 2 demographics line.

So in any case, we're the best you can do is either a small film that
represents their life accurately (with all the nitpicking that will come with
it), or a huge film that twists their lives into 127 minutes screentime and
will likely irritate the very people that asked for it. Because if Universal
went out and made a biopic about Dennis Richie, there'd be a 1809 Comment
thread discussing how they didn't put enough focus on his work in kernel
design.

Were better off without a big movie about any of them, however much that may
hurt.

What really confuses me is why there isn't a major movie about Richard
Feynman. His life is a movie script. Worked on nuclear missles, had his wife,
and longtime love interest die of tuberculosis (granted, there is a movie
about that part), and so much other stuff that would just fit perfectly. But I
digress.

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Bjoern
Made a lot of sense, thanks for the writeup. Probably I am just silly for not
understanding why our society doesn't cherish people who had so much more
impact on our lives.

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rimantas
Well, you can spin it that way, but trying to say that Apple had no impact on
lives of many people would not be fair. And more importantly that impact was
quite recent. iPod and ITMS early 2000, iPhone 2007, iPad 2013. Another point
is, you can experience those products directly. You can see, touch and use
them. Joe User does not see and touch C. Yes, nobody denies the importance of
C. But honestly, can you say what Ritchie was working on for the last 25
years? The claim, that withous C we would be in the stone age of the computing
is as credible as the claim, that without Jobs we would not have web, because
it was developed on NeXT machine. And early Mac system was written in Pascal…

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Samuel_Michon
iPod came out in 2001, the iTunes Music Store was opened in 2003, iPad was
released in 2010. I would also add iMac (1998) and WebKit (2003) to the list,
as they too have had quite an impact on the market overall.

