JONAH HILL, from comedian to Oscar-Nominee with “MONEYBALL”

Moments after the Academy Award nominations were announced several weeks ago in Beverly Hills, “Moneyball” star Jonah Hill still seemed stunned upon learning of his Oscar nomination.

"I saw it on TV and started freaking out," Hill admitted. "My mom was the first to call and then [producer] Scott Rudin shortly after that. This whole thing... it doesn't feel real yet."

Nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Actor, Columbia Pictures’ sports-oriented film “Moneyball” is based on the true story of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) – once a would-be baseball superstar who, stung by the failure to live up to expectations on the field, turned his fiercely competitive nature to management.

Billy Beane’s radical revamping of his team, the Oakland A’s, was a collaborative effort, one that relied on his recruitment of a team of economic analysts who replaced baseball’s hunches and gut instincts with a fresh skew towards science. To capture the essence of the math brains who changed American sports, the screenwriters created a character: Peter Brand.

As played by Jonah Hill, Brand is an Ivy League economist turned unlikely baseball analyst – a guy who in any other field might be among the best and brightest, but in baseball has been relegated to outsider status. It is Brand who keys Beane into one of the main insights behind the “moneyball” concept: that the value of a baseball player isn’t something you can see or sense, but something you find lurking in the numbers. When Beane hires Brand away from the Cleveland Indians with the intention to put his stats-based approach front and center for the A’s – no matter the fallout -- he sets the two men on a collision course with baseball orthodoxy.

“Peter Brand is an outsider,” says director Bennett Miller. “He’s an Ivy League kid with a degree in economics and a perspective on the game that nobody in baseball could possibly have had. Billy plucks Pete from a cubicle in Cleveland and weaponizes him.”

Best known for his comedic performances, Hill welcomed the chance to sink his teeth into a subtle, dramatic performance. He approached the character as a baseball interloper driven by a true love of the game, and a man who grows on the job. “Peter Brand is the kind of guy who really should be a billionaire on Wall Street, except that he loves baseball,” observes Hill. “Because of his background, he judges players in a different way than the system supports. He’s all about the facts. He realizes it’s not about how a guy throws, how fast he runs or what he looks like. It’s about how often he gets on base.”

Yet what seems perfectly logical to Brand, comes across at first to the rest of the baseball world as a threat to a grand tradition. “It’s a natural reaction,” notes Hill. “Any time you try to change the way things are done, people from the previous generations are going to be upset, especially if you’re saying what they’re doing is unproductive. You can understand why they think ‘who is this kid using a computer to tell me who the players should be?’”

While Beane and Brand couldn’t be more divergent personalities, Hill says one attitude unites them. “For both men, it’s them versus the world,” Hill explains. “These are two guys with their backs against the wall who find the guts to fight for what they believe in.”

Opening soon across the Philippines, “Moneyball” is distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International. Visithttp://www.columbiapictures.com.ph for trailers, exclusive content and free downloads. Like us at www.Facebook.com/ColumbiaPicturesPH and join our fan contests.

Best Picture nominee “MONEYBALL” soon in Philippine cinemas

Nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Actor, Columbia Pictures’ critically acclaimed sports-oriented film “Moneyball” is based on the true story of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) – once a would-be baseball superstar who, stung by the failure to live up to expectations on the field, turned his fiercely competitive nature to management. 

Directed by Bennett Miller (“Capote”), “Moneyball” also bagged nominations for Best Supporting Actor (Jonah Hill), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing and Best Sound Mixing.

In 2003, former Salomon Brothers bond trader turned author Michael Lewis, at the time best known for such business and politics bestsellers as Liar’s Poker and The New New Thing, published a book about baseball. Only it wasn’t just about baseball. On the surface, it was about how the under-funded, underrated Oakland A’s took on an unfair system of big-money and powerhouse teams. But it was really about the fascinating mix of men behind a major cultural shift and how a risky vision, born from necessity, becomes reality, when a ragtag team of cast-offs rejected due to unfounded biases, get the chance to finally prove their potential.

Now, Lewis’s book has been adapted into a feature film, “Moneyball,” starring Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the A’s General Manager – the man who would have to think differently and reinvent the rules if his team was going to compete. “Moneyball is a classic underdog story,” says Pitt, who also serves as a producer of the project. “They go up against the system. How are they going to survive, how are they going to compete? Even if they do groom good talent, that talent gets poached by the big-market, big-money teams. And what these guys decided was, they couldn’t fight the other guy’s fight, or they were going to lose. They had to re-examine everything, to look for new knowledge, to find some kind of justice.”

At first glimpse, Lewis’ best-selling and groundbreaking book does not lend itself to a film adaptation. The book is a study of inefficiencies and oversights within the markets of the game of baseball and features case studies of undervalued items, (players, strategies, tactics), using analyses of statistics and theories. But at the center of it all is Billy Beane on a quixotic quest and as his story unfolds, something unexpected happens. His pursuit of a championship leads to something larger and more meaningful. The hallways and front offices of the Oakland Coliseum become an unlikely setting for inspiration and redemption. 

Lewis’ book sheds light on the hindrances of groupthink and how irrational intuition and conventional ‘wisdom’ have dominated institutions throughout history. Challenging a system invariably provokes a fight. The film Moneyball builds its foundation from the experience of one man who chooses to take on that fight. Piercing through the layers of statistics, the film finds the quieter, deeper, and more personal story of Billy Beane, which bristles with moments of self-doubt and real life courage.

“Whenever a book is adapted into a movie, there are two possibilities: either the filmmakers stick to the book, or they make up their own story,” says Michael Lewis. “With `Moneyball,’ frankly, I wondered how they were going to do it, because the book doesn’t necessarily have a single narrative or the kind of dramatic arc you usually see in a movie. So it was truly tough to crack the code and get it right and it was an extremely pleasant surprise to see that Bennett and the screenwriters did the impossible – not only did I love the movie, but I was stunned by how well it represents my book. It is honest and true to what happened with Billy and the A’s and what they achieved.”

Bennett Miller adds, “I wasn’t interested in the tropes of sports movies. I’d rather not end a film with a hero carried off on the shoulders of teammates in a stadium where fans are screaming their heads off, champagne corks flying, trophies, fireworks, and all of that. I prefer the quiet triumphs, that might not burn as bright but deeper and more lasting, where you see someone struggle internally and then come out the other side to realize something has changed within them.”

“Michael Lewis likes stories about unconventional thinkers,” says Miller. “That’s what Moneyball is – a story about a character whose past and whose circumstances lead him to and require him to think differently. I like that you have a character who takes a risk not just to make something of himself, but more so to understand something about himself. Billy is trying to do something more meaningful than simply win baseball games – only even he doesn’t really understand that until he starts to turn things around. All of a sudden this baseball season, which is a David versus Goliath story, becomes not just one competitive man’s desperate attempt to win games. It’s really a trial, an attempt to prove something that would, if proven true, explain in part why his life turned out the way it did, which is a thrilling idea.” 

Opening soon across the Philippines, “Moneyball” is distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International. Visithttp://www.columbiapictures.com.ph for trailers, exclusive content and free downloads. Like us at www.Facebook.com/ColumbiaPicturesPH and join our fan contests.

BRAD PITT wins BEST ACTOR for “MONEYBALL”

The New York Film Critics Circle (NYFC) has just chosen Brad Pitt as this year's Best Actor for his soul-searching performance in Columbia Pictures' baseball drama, “Moneyball.” The award catapults Pitt as a veritable contender for more acting trophies come awards season this coming February.

In his review of the film, critic Richard Corliss of Time Magazine, writes “Brad Pitt does sensational work... he exudes pure movie-star authority...His performance is a canny portrait of leadership — part genius, part crazy guts, part dumb luck — and worthy of moving Pitt up to the playoff round of Oscar finalists for Best Actor. We'd put money on it.”

The NYFC also gave Best Screenplay honors to writers Aaron Sorkin (“The Social Network”) and Steven Zaillian (“Schindler's List”) for their work on “Moneyball” which they adapted from the non-fiction book by Michael Lewis.

“Moneyball” is based on the true story of Billy Beane (Pitt) – once a would-be baseball superstar who, stung by the failure to live up to expectations on the field, turned his fiercely competitive nature to management. Heading into the 2002 season, Billy faces a dismal situation: his small-market Oakland A’s have lost their star players to big market clubs and is left to rebuild his team and compete with a third of their payroll. Driven to win, Billy takes on the system by challenging the fundamental tenants of the game. Ultimately this experiment will lead not only to a change in the way the game is played, but to an outcome that would leave Billy with a new understanding that transcends the game and delivers him to a new place.

Manohla Dargis of The New York Times is all-praises for the actor, writing “Brad Pitt gives the quintessential Brad Pitt performance. It’s hard to imagine anyone but him in the role. He’s relaxed yet edgy and sometimes unsettling, bristling with tamped-down fury...”

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly, describes Pitt as an actor who “has aged like a fine wine...beneath his funny, exhilarating, tossed-off strut of a performance, he gives Billy a deep river of self-doubt, as well as a need to prove himself that never quite comes out and shows itself.”

Finally, Kenneth Turan of Los Angeles Times, affirms “Pitt does wonders with a role of a good guy in a tough space, a man who combines the confidence and charisma of the former professional athlete but with an unexpected questioning nature. This is low-key star power at its best.”

Opening soon across the Philippines, “Moneyball” is distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International. Visit http://www.columbiapictures.com.ph for trailers, exclusive content and free downloads. Like us at www.Facebook.com/ColumbiaPicturesPH and join our fan contests.

Moneyball (Bennett Miller, 2011)

"It's hard not to be romantic about baseball," Oakland As GM Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) sighs near the end of Moneyball. Clearly we've never chatted. Based on the bestseller that revolutionized America's pastime, Moneyball deals with the As' 2002 season and how Beane, along with a handful of statistical whizzes, evened the playing field by taking a team they barely scraped together with a paltry budget and broke the record for most consecutive wins in a season. It is also a film that captures the spirit of baseball as I see it, meaning that it is arduously drawn-out and involves far more math than I ever want to do when eating junk food and becoming, in theory, emotionally invested in the grab-assing of 'roided-up men.

Moneyball opens with footage of the 2001 American League elimination game between the As and the New York Yankees, the richest team in baseball. Intertitles contrast the teams not by score or stats but budgets, positing baseball as a metaphor for class warfare that seems especially apt in the current economic climate. Still, it's hard to see the As as underdogs when 25 people split $40 million a year to play a game. So as director Bennett Miller is trying to make me shake my head at the unfairness of it all, I was already so uninterested that the one thing that drew my eye was how incredibly old TV footage from exactly one decade ago looks.

The problem with Moneyball is that it reads as if Aaron Sorkin just took The Social Network screenplay and used a find-and-replace to swap out "Facebook" for "baseball" without bothering to dramatize the backroom dealings of this new subject. In fact, had anyone else but Sorkin (along with co-writer Steve Zaillian) written this then Sorkin would be in court with that person right now suing for IP infringement. When Beane, desperate to put together a team after richer franchises gut him for his only capable players, starts using statistics to find the best players he can afford, he faces not one obsolete Eduardo Saverin but a sea of naysayers. Zuckerberg's Asbergian alienation becomes Beane's managing isularity. And the constant flashbacks to Billy's own youth of being courted by the big leagues takes every previously thin allusion to Citizen Kane and makes them so overt I kept craning my head around young Billy Beane to see if I could spot a sled in the background.

Pitt plays Beane with a detachment he wants to make sympathetic, but the character doesn't support the lionizing portrait he's given. Armed with Yale graduate Peter Brand (Jonah Hill, playing a composite of various people who worked with the GM), Beane made his team better by ruthlessly cutting and undermining people who understandably hated an approach that invalidated their entire professional lives. For all his talk of baseball's romanticism, Beane sure has little issue with dispensing with whatever humanity the sport has to focus solely on numbers. When he gives second chances to washed-up pitcher with a shot elbow (the always endearing Chris Pratt) or a fading star so old the Yankees actually pay the As to take him off their hands, he does so not as a show of giving neglected and undervalued players a chance but a cynical measuring of their affordable worth. And when this gambit pays off, Beane wastes no time wheeling and dealing to get better players with his newfound clout, forcing some of the injured and overlooked players to be traded or even sent to the minors to make room for more solid athletes. For a movie that places so much weight on the idea of Beane being the person to rejuvenate baseball and get it back to the spirit of the game instead of focusing all on money, it neglects to point out that "moneyball" refers to the kind of game he plays.

The film's strongest yet least utilized element concerns the war of wills between Beane and his team manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who views Beane's strategy of betting on misfits and has-beens based on calculated strengths in esoteric fields like on-base averages as insanity and career suicide. Hoffman, with a shaved head and a mounting look of pure fear as Beane's gamble proves intially disastrous, brilliantly channels his put-upon loser skill into the coach, shaking his wristwatch in agitation as he walks away from an unsuccessful contract renegotiation and looking like a dethroned monarch when Beane trades his favorite players to prove a point. Though focusing more fully on this conflict might have reduced the story's more far-reaching implications to a two-man battle, Hoffman and Pitt are so compelling and vicious together that I wish the whole film had revolved around their petty power plays. I also greatly enjoyed Hill, who plays against his usual frantic type to be the collected, shyly nervous foil to Beane's brash behavior, routinely stealing scenes from Pitt's furrowed brow and arrogant confidence.

But so much about this film is not merely extraneous and "Hollywood" but depressingly predictable and occasionally troubling. Talking heads constantly overlap on the soundtrack to put the pressure on the team to succeed, and the baseball scenes occur in chiaroscuro abstraction, placing a batter or a pitcher against black voids and cutting out all the noise until it becomes a crutch and a gimmick. When the As prepare for their first game with a cloud of doubt over them, a local TV reporters comes and behaves in a manner that honestly makes me unable to describe her without using a highly offensive and sexist word. Local sports journalists conduct themselves with a thirst for hard-hitting answers roughly comparable to the people who cover awards show red carpets. For her to viciously hammer these players for not being good enough is a flight of fancy that only gives more ammo to those shooting down Sorkin's rep as a feminist. We also get a portrait of masculine weakness in the form of Beane's ex-wife's new hubby, who knows nothing about sports and even speaks in airy, effeminate voice.

Moneyball's syrupy, downbeat underdog ending uses all kinds of tricks to lure the audience into sentimental bliss, from exploiting the emotional pull of a child (a singing child, no less) to validating Beane while still positioning him as a humble victor. But the true tenor of the film's ending and what it means for baseball is not one of rebirth but "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." The same was true of The Social Network, but there it was the somber punchline, not the victorious dénouement.

The Social Network

David Fincher's growth as a filmmaker has been both nuanced and startling. His initial pictures are confrontational, reliant upon his experience as a music video director that make pictures like Se7en and Fight Club draining exercises in style. Far from a nihilist, Fincher crafted himself into a deep pessimist who nevertheless fought to find the good in life. He brought an old detective out of despair by ironically plunging him into the heart of darkness. He ruthlessly mocked the fascistic conformity of the emasculated male even as they supposedly rebelled against a false image, but Fincher managed to spare some sympathy for those who felt a sense of cultural disconnect.

In recent years, Fincher has not drastically altered his course so much as punched through to the other side of his bleakness. His stories are no longer stomach-churning but atmospheric and chilling, but the hearts of Zodiac and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button are essentially no different than that of Se7en: they are stories about people who are ultimately doomed but soldier on, because the alternative is even more terrifying. With The Social Network, "Fincher 2.0" develops this thread even further, and the greatest kick of the film comes from watching the preconceived notions of its two auteurs -- Fincher and West Wing maestro Aaron Sorkin -- completely invert. Here, Fincher is, for the first time, nakedly sympathetic to the ambition of a morally dubious man (though he's as critical as ever of Mark's actions), while the ever-optimistic Sorkin pens a critique of the entire idea of social networking. In fact, were a director without Fincher's confidence and commitment to his own vision attached to the project, The Social Network likely would have ended up as nothing more than the ramblings of a curmudgeon woefully behind the times.

The contrast brings out the best in both the script and the direction. Sorkin's pessimism checks Fincher's willingness to excuse some of Mark Zuckerberg's behavior, while Fincher's atmospheric direction adds layers of complexity to Sorkin's style, which relies upon people who speak like playwrights to make characters who are both abhorrently unrealistic yet bizarrely plausible and believable. His overly verbose style lends itself well to the Harvard boys who invent and squabble over Facebook: all of them put on airs, exploit family connections and ready themselves for lucrative futures that they pretend to work hard for so it doesn't look embarrassing when their trust funds mature. They believe themselves to already be the superior of everyone their age, yet they behave like the frat boys they are.

Fincher and Sorkin even manage to trace Facebook back to a childish, misogynistic stunt. We meet Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) on a date with a young woman named Erica from Boston University. Mark monopolizes the conversation, fixating on the reputable clubs that he wants to get into because the most powerful people in the world joined them in their college days. He talks so much and speaks so condescendingly to Erica that she finally calls him an asshole and leaves. In a huff, Mark returns home, drunkenly blogs about the breakup and subsequently hacks into the photo databases of Harvard's various dorms and creates a site where male students vote on the hotness of Harvard women. At four in the morning, the site gets so many hits that the university's servers crash.

The Social Network is structured around two separate lawsuits over the ownership of Facebook. One pits Mark against Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both Armie Hammer), wealthy, Olympic-level rowers who came to Zuckerberg after his stunt with an idea to create a social networking site for Harvard students. They intended it as a casual dating site, but Mark went home and set about making not "Match.com for Harvard" but a place that allows him to take all of collegiate socializing and place it on the Internet. A month later, Mark tells the Winklevoss brothers he cannot complete the assignment, shortly before he launches The Facebook in its infancy.

The other lawsuit finds Mark being sued by his best friend and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield, looking uncannily like a young Jean-Pierre Léaud), who alleges that Mark cut him out of the profits even though he provided 100% of the start-up capital. The Winklevoss lawsuit pits two forces of equal arrogance against each other, but Eduardo's indignation during deposition meetings comes from a sense of personal harm.

Even so, none of these young men is any moral example. The Winklevoss twins come off as the sort of smug rich boys who will get cushy jobs in their father's law firm. When Mark launches Facebook, they pull strings to get an audience with the Harvard president to demand that the school shut down the site and expel Zuckerberg. When the president calls them out on their absurd sense of entitlement, the brothers looked shocked, as if anyone can bring a petty squabble to the head of the university. Saverin never shuts up about his own well-connected father, and his lawsuit for a portion of Facebook's profits seem less a matter of money than an attempt to win back his dad's approval. Saverin gets edged out of the picture by Napster founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), whose smooth-talking victim complex suggests the late stages of a cocaine-induced breakdown.

Then, there's Mark. Fincher always keeps Eisenberg separate from others, and the actor never looks comfortable when forced to deal with people. His site opens up socializing, to the point that anyone has access to everyone, and young men and women begin behaving irrationally over the transparency of their lives. The irony of his own ability to connect with anyone should be lost on no one.

In telling Mark's story, Fincher clearly draws from Orson Welles' great Citizen Kane, the story of a young media mogul who grows old and dies alone. Like Charles Foster Kane, Zuckerberg is indisputably a prodigy, a man of ambition and focus who builds upon the suggestions of his guides until he no longer has to stand on their shoulders. And like Kane, he cannot find true happiness in his work. Eisenberg occasionally breaks off all attention from the world to stare into space, and his utter lack of social skills hint that Mark may have Asperger's. But social discomfort does not fully explain the open arrogance in Mark's dark smirk. When a lawyer suggests that Mark's behavior toward the wronged parties stems from his resentment of never being invited to join one of the big-time Harvard clubs, Mark snidely replies that he currently has enough money to buy them and make them into game rooms.

The empire Mark builds doesn't have the grandeur of Kane's newspaper supremacy, but its influence runs far deeper. Groupies line up to sleep with the founder of Facebook, and we see how quickly Facebook becomes a part of people's lives. Within weeks, "Facebook me" has entered into Harvard's lexicon, and couples devolve into major, terrifying arguments over how often a page is updated to match a relationship status. Fincher seems to draw from his own Fight Club at times, portraying Facebook as something that sets off a cultural revolution that cannot be contained. Not even Project Mayhem is as widespread as the site where everyone -- including yours truly -- goes to post menial BS that can be taken for so much more. With businesses willing to terminate or not hire someone based on photos posted online, the issues of privacy that Zuckerberg casually steamrolls over to be popular carry a weight he does not or cannot contemplate.

The more social networking links people, the bigger the barriers, physical and mental, are formed in the real world. When Mark moves out to Palo Alto on Parker's advice, Eduardo heads to New York to work as a finance intern and seek advertisers from traditional routes. The 3,000 miles between them enhances the schism between them, with Saverin pursuing a business model that's proven but won't maximize profits for this kind of venture and Zuckerberg falling further and further into Parker's clutches. The two friends share an awkward exchange when Saverin finally comes out to California, and though the subject is not directly broached at the time, they both know that Eduardo is out, and the fleeting moment of friendship between them won't reverse what's coming. The irony of Mark's disconnect is compounded by the workers he hires when Facebook grows rapidly: anyone updating the site for better usability and interaction is described as being "wired in" and cannot be spoken to as if in stasis. The levels of impersonality between people mere feet away is bewildering even though we're living in this changed world now.

Fincher and Sorkin make tension out of the ostensibly banal subject of website programming by depicting how empty it all is. Mark, Saverin, the Winklevosses, not one of them has enough personality to hang a hat on. These are the people who created a way for all of us to fit our background, current statuses and interests onto a single page, as if Facebook was just a way for everyone to look as dull as them. The twins host raunchy parties while Mark decides to find an intern by holding an elaborate drinking game where the player who codes properly while hammered gets the job. These are just boys, yet they play with levels of money most of us cannot fathom. Couched in the vicious fights for intellectual supremacy is the suggestion that these are the sort of people who control all the money, spoiled kids and broadly unethical wunderkinds who receive respect for breaking numerous laws simply because they look cool in the process. When Saverin jealously prods Parker for losing to the courts on Napster, Parker still claims victory. "You wanna buy a Tower Records, Eduardo?" implying that he unleashed peer-to-peer file sharing to destroy the industry that would not work with him and recognize his talents.

Yellow-green dominates the color palette, as if someone finally got so sick with envy at the accomplishments of another that he finally vomited. The electronic/industrial score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross throbs and hums like a migraine headache, occasionally fading but never disappearing. Ominous without being ornate, the score captures the emotion of the film perfectly: cold but searching. It keeps looking for an outlet and finds none, always trapped by the insular attitudes of the characters, who only become lonelier as the film wears on. Its vaguely 8-bit sound deepens into more expressive tones, returning to motifs that suggest not just a thematic continuity but a personal stagnation on the part of young men who refuse to start acting like adults. Paranoia flecks their isolation, from Parker's obsessiveness over those who shut him down to the rumors that flame through instant Internet contact. It's almost funny how a student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, is seen as a deadlier social weapon than any of the national papers Kane's empire ran.

Much of the substance of David Fincher's films can be gleaned from his opening credits, something the great video essayist Matthew Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas are currently demonstrating with their pieces for the Museum of the Moving Image (part one found here). As ever, the atmosphere and character of The Social Network can be seen in its own opening. Rejected by Erica, Mark marches home as the camera glides over Harvard (or at least the shooting locations standing in for Harvard), showing all the interesting sights and people Mark could be interacting with instead of running home to blog. The score bristles with dark tones, and for all the camera's grace, you begin to fear that he might be planning something to hurt the girl. And, in a way, he does, insulting her online and subjecting her to verbal abuse from other misogynistic guys. It establishes Mark as a man who cannot let things go, and Erica manages to float around the back of his mind the entire film, as if he made Facebook solely to prove himself not an asshole rather than simply apologizing and acting more nicely.

Still, you never fully hate anyone in this movie, even if you want to give them all a good slap. Mark becomes the youngest billionaire in the world, but he has no one to enjoy it with, and his incessant invasions of privacy ensure that even the public that uses his site like a drug does not admire him. Like Facebook itself, The Social Network stays constant just long enough for you to get used to it before something changes, not in the narrative so much as the mood. Arrogance gives way to the insecurity motivating it, which in turn morphs into loneliness. When Mark sits by himself at the end, surfing his own website in that bizarrely fixated way of his, the chasm of darkness around him and the implication of his lawsuit with Eduardo make him resemble less Charles Kane than Michael Corleone. He's the most powerful man in the world -- just read any ranking of the most influential people -- and he has nothing to show for it and no amount of clicking 'refresh' will change that.