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Why the second Steve Jobs movie is worth a watch

 Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet in Steve Jobs.

Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet in Steve Jobs.

steve jobs reviewDespite Hollywood’s love for remakes, many baulked at the announcement Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle would tackle a Steve Jobs movie merely three years after Ashton Kutcher filled the Apple founder’s trademark white runners.

The last version was panned for being an over-long, partly fabricated biopic that got too caught up in the mythology of Apple and failed to tell us anything we didn’t already know.

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To be fair, the same could be said about this latest effort – but at least it’s clever.

Sorkin’s hefty script has been separated into three “acts” centred around three major product launches conducted by Jobs and his inner circle.

While the product launches themselves are never shown, their theatrical build-ups provide the bulk of the movie.

As a result, the film’s construction is fairly gimmicky – there’s a clear delineation between each launch and each decade.

Boyle has even opted to have the film quality reflect this approach. He uses grainy 16mm for 1984, solid 35mm for 1988, and high-definition digital for 1998.

Basically, you feel as if you’re watching a mixture of a home video and a stage play. The resultant effect is unsettling, jarring and addictive.

The key players in this dialogue-heavy performance are Michael Fassbender as Jobs and Kate Winslet as his right-hand woman, Apple marketing executive Joanna Hoffman. Supporting them is Seth Rogen as loveable Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Jeff Daniels as Apple CEO John Sculley and Michael Stuhlbarg as computer developer Andy Hertzfeld.

Of all of them, Winslet is the absolute standout. She was the surprise winner of the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress, yet watching her deliver a flawless Polish-American accent (and all of those lines!) it makes perfect sense she would be lauded for her work.

This is essentially a film about Jobs and his relationships with the women in his life, punctuated by the occasional tech talk and corporate power play. As he contends with CEOs determined to control his explosive temperament and engineers sick of his domineering ego, Jobs must also manage an ex-girlfriend who needs his financial help to raise their daughter. A daughter he vehemently denies is his.

Mediating it all is Hoffman, and the effortless but captivating chemistry between Winslet and Fassbender is at the heart of the film – by far the most fascinating and bewildering on-screen pairing in recent years.

 Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet in Steve Jobs.

Michael Stuhlbarg, Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet in Steve Jobs.

Hoffman’s affinity for Jobs is particularly remarkable given that the movie portrays him as, well, kind of a big jerk.

He threatens his workers, refuses to take no for an answer and, most heartbreakingly, sidelines his curious, loving daughter for the better part of her formative years. And yet, you want to love him because he’s a genius.

As Jobs puts it at one point in the movie: “God sends us all on a suicide mission but we like him anyway because he made trees.”

Fassbender plays with this paradoxical persona perfectly. He is at once eminently likeable – a wisecracking, insouciant mastermind who we credit our greatest inventions to – and painfully frustrating – troubled, damaged, insular and completely lacking in empathy.

In one of the most powerful scenes in the film, Rogen’s Wozniak poses the question many have asked since Jobs’ emergence as one of the world’s leading minds: “What is it you do?”

Really, Steve Jobs was a marketing genius with an eye for innovation and a character destined for success.

How he was as a father and a friend is up to you to decide after seeing the film. The answer isn’t nearly as clean-cut as his iconic designs.

 

cheese 2, top stories feb 2 2016

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