Charlotte HansonTHANKFULLY, down on the coast, there are a couple of cinemas that show films in the original version. However good your Spanish, it is nice to be entertained in your mother tongue from time to time. Once Autumn sets in and the days become shorter, we make more of an effort to keep an eye open for good films showing in either Puerto Banús or Fuengirola, so that we can spend a couple of hours relaxing, away from our computer screens, popcorn in one hand and fizzy pop in the other.
As a Facebook junkie, I thought it only right to go and see the film pertaining to be about how it all got started although I’d heard mixed reviews.
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, has made no secret of the fact that he has not authorised the film, nor authenticated the story (adapted from The Accidental Billionaires, a book by Ben Mezrich) and a quick skim around some relevant websites raises a few eyebrows as to the question of fact vs. fiction in the film.
But that doesn’t stop it from being an entertaining film, brilliantly cast.
The drama starts when Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, is dumped by his girlfriend. In retaliation, he hurriedly (and drunkenly) pulls together a website comparing the attractiveness of all the female students at Harvard, and initialises its distribution throughout the college.
Of course, the site awards him certain notoriety among his male peers and while serving his academic probation, he is approached by twin brothers from the college who have a great idea for a website, Harvard Connection, which they want him to program. Instead of working on this project, Zuckerberg ends up developing his own idea for a university social networking site called The Facebook which he intends to roll out to universities worldwide. Along the way he falls in with Sean Parker, the failed entrepreneur behind Napstar (superbly portrayed by Justin Timberlake) who influences him in directions that cause substantial concern to his business partner, but who persuades Zuckerberg to drop “The” from the site’s title and to simply name it “Facebook”. Genius.
The film continues to follow the story behind the development and growth of the site and centres around the ensuing lawsuits faced by Zuckerberg. And the rest, as they say, is history.
We all know that Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites in the world but what I found truly astounding is that it has around 500 million active users – that’s one person for every 14 in the world!
And as for Mr Zuckerberg? He’s still only 26 years old and reported to be worth 6.9 billion dollars. What in the world will he come up with next? I can’t wait to find out!
