A frenzied portrait of Jobs as Slumdog Millionaire comes to Silicon Valley

Rating: 7/10 (24 November 2015)

JOBS BY BOYLE, viewed at Sony Center, BERLIN, FRI 13th Nov. 2015 — (The Night of the Allah Akbar attacks on Paris!) -- by Alex Deleon
Steve Jobs, the movie is not a film you like or dislike — it's more of a draining dramatic experience that leaves you wondering: "How close was this to the real Jobs and his entourage?" ~ should I despise him or feel sorry for him  Was he really a visionary or just a compulsive self-promoting monomaniac who needed to step all over people  Is this film worth the celluloid it's printed on? Dunno — still reflecting but it feels like "Slumdog millionaire comes to Silicon Valley" ~ and I hated Slumdog Millionaire. There is something about Danny Boyle films that always provokes thought, but leaves a bad aftertaste in your mouth.
Kate Winslett was unrecognizable as Joanna Hoffman, charter member of the Mackintosh marketing team and right-hand woman to jobs through thick and thin, the only person around not afraid to speak up to him and hard as nails in the role, but highly efficient as usual — we get just a hint at one point in the proceedings that while battling him every step of the way she was secretly in love with him all along -- Oscar Supporting-Role material. Side Note: Ms. Hoffman, now 60, is the daughter of one of the most famous of all Polish film directors, Jerzy Hoffman -- (Hoffman's "Fire and Sword", 1999, an historical extravaganza, was the highest earning Polish film ever)
Seth Rogen as Steve Wozniak was pathetically wimpish, claiming that he was treated all along like Ringo Starr when he was actually the John Lennon (the real brains) of the Apple team -- to which Jobs replies: "you played your instrument, I played the orchestra -- (comparing himself in megalomaniac style to Stravinsky). Wozniak, who actually designed the original PC, was never given full credit and pushed into the shadows by Jobs who saw himself as the true visionary genius of the original Apple team. Rogen, who is basically a comedian, was last seen at the beginning of the year as an inept would be assassin in "The Interview", a dreadfully unfunny comedy about an assassination attempt on the life of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Eun by a team of American TV talk show producers.
Jeff Daniels as John Scully, former Pepsi CEO and the guy who scuttled Steve -- got him fired for ineptness from his own company at one point, and was later himself released when Apple hired Jobs back -- is the only reality bastion in the movie, the one man who refuses to take Guff from Jobs and calmly tells it like it is every time he appears -- a role that sort of rings true to everybody else's over the top posturings in this frenetic Jobs portrait.
Fassbender has boundless negative charisma, is very handsome, maybe too handsome, and oddly short in the legs. Yet the story seems to jive with the real life riddle of the second most successful businessman of his generation (guess who's on first!) and the most successful company currently in the computer business.
The longest walkathon-talkathon in film history — Fassbender is always on the move as Winslett trails after him trying to inject doses of reality into his excessive demands behind the scenes of his latest new product presentation — a kind of running motor mouth pas-de-deux revealing Jobs to be the greatest self-promoter in the business if not Exactly the genius he has been cracked up to be elsewhere.
A leit motif all along is his tortured relationship with his daughter, Lisa Brennan. (age nine, then age nineteen later in the film) — not quite sure if he is her biological father and disgusted with her mother whom he considers a slut -- refusing to support them financially -- until the kid demonstrates her natural computer savvy by using an Apple Paint program to make skillful pictures, whereupon we see his one soft point as his attitude to her gradually begins to change. At the very end of the film the now full grown daughter is standing in the wings as Jobs, on stage doing his usual computer rock star presentation bit, approaches her with something resembling tenderness in his eyes. The estranged mother, Chrissann Brennan, played by English actress Katherine Waterston, keeps turning up like a bad penny in brief scenes painfully trying too prevail on jobs for child support and financial assistance commensurate with his extreme wealth. These scenes tend to show what a basically disturbed person Jobs was behind his façade of super bravura and outrageous self-confidence.
Overall this is an agonizing psychodrama –- but, at the end of the night worth the agony of sitting it out to understand why you bought your last Apple iPad, if nothing else. An interesting introduction to the film is a B/w sequence of rarely seen archival footage before the main titles in which we see the great English futurologist Arthur C. Clark talking about how computers will soon be changing the world. The same Clark on whose futuristic ideas Kubrick's Space Odyssey was based.
Tight script composed by Aaron Sorkin who also gave us another portrait of another eccentric billionaire entrepreneur, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, who also squeezed his co-founder out of the business -- in the film 'The Social Network', 2011.