lots of talking

Rating: 7/10 (22 February 2016)

Steve Jobs, starring Michael Fassbender, is the partial story of Apple Computers and the man behind it for much of the time: Steve Jobs.
Jobs is a control freak, quite possibly afflicted with Asperger's. In the movie this is all traced back to the fact that his biological mother gave him up for adoption.
Many people have a love/hate relationship with him, especially some of the other people at Apple: Steve Wozniak, John Scully, and Joanna Hoffman.
Jobs wasn't interested in people adapting his inventions, so what he invented was something that couldn't be used with anything else. He wasn't interested in what people wanted, he was interested in his vision.
He denies that his daughter Lisa is his and allows her and her mother to live on welfare and Lisa to sleep in a parka because her mother can't afford heat. Eventually some of this is resolved.
The film shows us the day he launched three products: 1984, the Macintosh computer, 1988 for the NeXT computer, after he was ousted from Apple, and in 1998 for the iMAC computer.
Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) sees Jobs as the broad picture man, while he is the nuts and bolts. The two are often at odds, and Wozniak doesn't feel that Steve respects him. Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet) is his head of marketing. She's not afraid to tell him off. Lastly, John Sculley (Jeff Daniels) who is interested basically in what the Board and shareholders want.
The main problem that I had with this film is that they never shut up I love a lot of dialogue in films, I'm from the old school, but the script just wasn't witty enough in my mind to support all the tech talk, the arguing, the yelling that went on.
The other problem I had was that Jobs is so unlikable one can't connect with him. You don't get to be Steve Jobs by being Mr. Nice Guy but on the other hand, do you have to be so awful to people? I can appreciate his brilliance, his vision, both of which we've seen play out over the years in incredible products, but he was pretty rotten.
Michael Fassbender is terrific as Jobs - self-absorbed, vain, arrogant, smart, and stubborn. It took me a while to realize I was looking at Kate Winslet as Joanna - she was terrific, creating a very in-depth character who had a complicated relationship with Jobs but is able to strike a chord with him regarding his family. Seth Rogen is perfect as Wozniak, a real geek, sweet, and exploding when needed. Jeff Daniels, a favorite of the writer, Aaron Sorkin's, is a shark sometimes and then other times a real friend.
I like both the work of Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle, the director, a lot of the time and then other times, I don't. I feel as if Sorkin sometimes does too much with scenes of people speaking over one another to the point of confusion, and Boyle - well, he can be totally off the wall. I'd put this one in the middle for both of them.
Great ensemble acting, a powerful story that could have been much more powerful with maybe a slightly different or opened up focus. But with such an unpleasant person, it probably wasn't worth it.