Man of Vision

Rating: 9/10 (24 February 2016)

"Steve Jobs," is one of the important films of the 2015-2016 season.
The Aaron Sorkin script has (2) premises to go along with the (2) story lines: The A-story, or intellectual story, covers the public life of Steve Jobs as the visionary marketing genius who runs Apple Corp., thereby changing the world. The B-story, or emotional story, covers the private life of Steve Jobs as the prodigiously gifted, deeply flawed man who walks the boundary line between shadow & light.
The premise of the A-story boils down to Jobs' answer to Apple Corp. co-founder Woz's pivotal question: "What do you do?" Answer: "I play the orchestra." The Apple Corp. staff are great instrumentalists, and Jobs plays them to the futuristic tune of a new millennium.
The premise of the B-story boils down to Woz's answer to Jobs as he walks out of Jobs' life: "It's not binary. You can have talent and also be decent." The nugget of Jobs' vision is his understanding that the new millennium of technology consists of machines that don't look like or feel like machines, but rather like extensions of the human identity, which is mostly cerebral.
In the heart of the world's staunchest bastion of anti-intellectualism, the United States, Jobs made cerebration fun.
In "Horatio's Drive," documentarian Ken Burns tells the fascinating story of how the auto was sold to the public via the first cross-country auto race that saw the drivers met by cheering crowds in small towns across the continent in 1903. Before the big race, whether or not the auto would replace horses was an unsettled question. Some little time later, Henry Ford started mass producing Fords.
In a parallel, before Steve Jobs, whether or not the computer would replace pen and paper was an unsettled question. Jobs was, foremost, a salesman. He was the Henry Ford of computing.