Aaron sorkin

Has anyone in human history inspired more visceral disgust than Mark Zuckerberg? Hard to imagine. I know I used to get a shudder down my spine every time I saw him on TV, being upbraided by some kind of congressional subcommittee. Look at this uncanny demon, white as death, covered in a thin liquid sheen, with his big watery eyes like an uncomprehending animal, his blank inhuman face, his halting and inarticulate speech, and his sinister, gangly form, which didn’t seem to stand up on its own feet so much as it drooped down from the neck, as if he were being hung up on invisible hooks. This is not a human being but an ungainly meat puppet, a shell for some slithering being. Which made sense, really.

The death of the director and actor Rob Reiner in violent and unexplained circumstances is one of the most horrific and surprising stories to have emerged from Hollywood in living memory. One of the reasons why its elites live in areas such as Reiner’s exclusive neighborhood of Brentwood in California is precisely so that they will not be subject to the possibility of random violence in a way that less wealthy Americans face daily. Yet if news reports are to be believed, Reiner and his wife Michele were the victims of intrafamilial strife: a situation that all the gated walls and security cameras in the world could not ameliorate.

If you’re a big Bruce Springsteen fan, then this weekend’s new release, Deliver Me from Nowhere, will be one of the year’s most eagerly awaited releases. But more-casual fans of the Boss – and I include myself in this category, despite a great admiration for a vast amount of the Springsteen recorded canon – may find the film, which focuses on the recording of his notoriously sparse Nebraska album in the early Eighties, a strange mixture of hard-going and unedifying.

Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 — don’t worry, you haven’t missed six earlier films — is a courtroom drama based on true events featuring a stellar cast: Mark Rylance, Frank Langella, Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Redmayne, Jeremy Strong. You may be wondering: hang on, no Michael Keaton? But he tips up too! What, no Joseph Gordon-Levitt? Don’t worry. He’s here. But while the performances are ace and the script is one of those Sorkin scripts where the dialogue is one zinger after another — zinger ping pong, I call it — it will leave you cold emotionally. This is a film to admire, in some respects, but it will never make you feel. I wasn’t bothered who did or didn’t go to prison in the end.