The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)

[perkizitore]

I throw away some UK slipcases, but i always keep Pixar/Disney ones. Generally, if they feature different artwork i always keep them.

[Jeff]

Well, now I love the packaging. The thing with all the pull-quotes isn't a slipcase. It's just a disposable wraparound (no sides or bottom) to pimp the film for awards season. The digipack sleeve that says "you can't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies" is the actual exterior cover of the set. They'll have to use the wraparound to market it at retail, because the front cover doesn't actually have the title of the film anywhere. The interior digipak cover is the shot of Eisenberg's mug with "punk, prophet, genius, billionaire, traitor" plastered across it. This is all Neil Kellerhouse's work (which, yes, he used before on the Criterion edition of The Man Who Fell to Earth). It looks like a very nice set, similar to the asthetic that Fincher used on the digipak DVD editions of Seven, Fight Club, and Panic Room.

[SSF]

I think I know what he means: It sort of looks like a cardboard case that isn't a full slipcover, sort of like the ones that go onto the back (and part of the front) of HBO sets and peel off easily.

Exactly.

Look at the bottom most picture.

Why would there be 3 layers to the digipack? And how can the digipack slide out the bottom and side of the "Pull Quote" cover at the same time?

Another example off the top of my head would be The Lord of the Rings: Extended Editions, which had a flap on its back and top that you could pull off and throw away.

[domino harvey]

I stand corrected, though at the risk of alienation, I keep those things too! (ducks)

[willoneill]

I keep them, but I fold them in half and tuck them inside the package somehow. Is that sacrilege?

[domino harvey]

I have a big mailing envelope stuffed with them. Why, I have no idea.

[Jeff]

From Collider's Fincher interview:

Jesse Eisenberg has told me that you read a lot of stuff, that you’re aware of things. Is that true or not true? Do you read what people are saying online? Are you an online junkie?

Fincher: No, I mean I think when you’re marketing a movie you have to be—I certainly was aware, when we went to Mark Woolen to do the trailer for The Social Network, we knew that we had a perception issue, if not a problem. People thought we were making The Net or we were making, you know what I mean? That we were making something that was slavishly beholden to technology, and so I said to him, and he’s exactly the right guy to kind of give the most obtuse of brief that you can, cause he’s more than kind of a genius. So I said to him at the time, “I’m not giving you a huge task, you just need to make a trailer that makes sense out of why anybody would make this movie, go do it.” So I was aware at the time that there were people saying, “A movie about Facebook? What the fuck?” I think that they thought that we were making a roller-disco movie or something, that we were kind of fad-hopping or something. And to be honest, when I read the script I didn’t really—I mean my daughter’s on Facebook, so I’d seen it, but I wasn’t versed in what it does or what it could do.

On the Blu-ray:

The commentary track on your Blu-ray has a lot of bleeped out moments. Are you aware they were bleeped out?

Fincher: Yeah – well they were going to remove some of the stuff that I was saying. Look, you know, I don’t swear that much but over a course of four or five hour commentary that gets edited down to two – I guess the most interesting stuff I say usually has fuck somewhere in it.

I wanted to get a little more specific and say did you really give out Aaron Sorkin’s email address while recording the commentary.

Fincher: (Laughter) I did. Yeah… yeah… but again why do company’s put these things that say the views expressed are not necessarily [of the studio] and then ask you ‘why are you saying that? You don’t need to say that’. It’s like – but I did say it so fuck you and you already said when I put the disc in I can’t even fast forward past the fact that Interpol is going to punish me and that the people who are speaking are not speaking on behalf of Sony Pictures. We got into something about it’s a PG-13 movie and you can’t talk like that and I was like fuck that. That’s the way I talk and if you want to use my commentary, you’ll just have to bleep it.

Lots of other great stuff about Fincher's process too, including his penchant for shooting lots of takes (268 hours of video on The Social Network). He does a pretty great job of justifying it all, and talks about how he keeps track of everything. There's some talk of potential upcoming projects too.

[eerik]

HMV exclusive digipack is the same as the US release:

[aox]

Collider's Fincher interview

My respect for Fincher shot through the roof with this interview. Probably the best mainstream/Hollywood working director currently.

[domino harvey]

The faux-slipcover slipcover is just one thin strip away from a normal slipcase, so it's beguiling why they didn't bother to make it one. Also, thank you motherfucking piece of shit Sherwood blu-ray player for reducing this too to merely an attractive doorstop

[mfunk9786]

Wow, I have had the opposite experience with this one. I had a lot of fun throwing away the outer cover, and whatever unique, wonderful material the actual packaging is made of feels far more expensive than the cheapest release date BD that I've ever purchased should have any right to feel. A++++

[knives]

Also, thank you motherfucking piece of shit Sherwood blu-ray player for reducing this too to merely an attractive doorstop

Oh oh. Going to have to check on this one early.

[knives]

Dom, if it helps you any my disc at first wasn't working either(only going as far as this weird load thing where Eisenberg goes from B&w to colour), but after I ran through and checked about six other blus and tried it the disc worked. As is I'm seeing the opening scene.

[domino harvey]

Mine stalled after the image load thingy as well (it did the same thing with Easy A too). Will try your method while I live without a new Blu-ray player for the next couple days

[mfunk9786]

Rom Com Dom

[domino harvey]

More like Chick Pick Netflix Pix

[Professor Wagstaff]

The weird slip cover threw me off too (it's sitting on my desk and I don't know what to do with it), but I agree with mfunk, I really love the rest of the packaging.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

The faux-slipcover slipcover is just one thin strip away from a normal slipcase, so it's beguiling why they didn't bother to make it one.

It would have been nice as the black packaging is gonna get a few smudges and fingerprints all over it now. The embossed lettering is a great touch for the set, though.

[HistoryProf]

I'm probably the last person in America to see this, but watched it last night after blind buying in the B&N sale - because I was so sure I would love it. big mistake. I didn't hate it, but when your favorite thing about it is the packaging, there's a problem. I can't really pinpoint the issues I had with it, other than it simply felt bland, by the numbers, and while everyone else seems to be in love with Aaron Sorkin, I just didn't buy it. The opening scene alienated me and it was hard to recover from that. I didn't dislike it, but I didn't love it either. It's just a decent movie, nothing earth-shattering, and nothing all that terrible. Tells an interesting story in an interesting way for the most part, but is simultaneously too in love with it's own cleverness - which I have come to realize is Fincher's over-arching issue in everything he does.

I guess I feel the same way about this as I did the Wrestler - good movie, no big whoop. I REALLY can't understand the gushing about how this is some existential treatise on the state of society in 2010....unless you consider the fact that by the end I was playing solitaire on my laptop, and maybe they're on to something

[tavernier]

Mine stalled after the image load thingy as well (it did the same thing with Easy A too). Will try your method while I live without a new Blu-ray player for the next couple days

I had to reload TSN three times in my Sherwood, but it ended up working fine.

[knives]

I REALLY can't understand the gushing about how this is some existential treatise on the state of society in 2010....unless you consider the fact that by the end I was playing solitaire on my laptop, and maybe they're on to something

Have you read the rest of the thread because it has been mostly talked about in depth here on how the quoted part is right and that it's in the character study aspect that this movie really shines. It's nothing groundbreaking, sure, but as a character study I do find it to be very involving with a unique and interesting subject to examine. Also out of curiosity what was it about the opening that took you out of the movie?

[big mouth]

Neil Kellerhouse's "Social Network" cover is rather an inverse of "Last Year At Marienbad". Instead of white and embossed, it is rubbery, black, and indented. I see how this works for "Marienbad" because it rather follows the style of the title sequence for the movie, and Criterion's cover shows this off quite well.

Kellerhouse is one of the best designers out there, and it is oh-so-infrequent that anything done outside of Criterion, and in the U.S. is as interesting as his work (just look at his Criterion covers and his poster for "I'm Still Here"), but while I love the whole DVD presentation's quiet starkness I am still not quite sure how it all fits together with the film. Black and rubber do not equal Apple white and Iphone chrome (or for that matter, Facebook's ubiquitous blue). However, he sure knows how to use text and "the big headed problematic poster style" with flair.

[HistoryProf]

Have you read the rest of the thread because it has been mostly talked about in depth here on how the quoted part is right and that it's in the character study aspect that this movie really shines. It's nothing groundbreaking, sure, but as a character study I do find it to be very involving with a unique and interesting subject to examine. Also out of curiosity what was it about the opening that took you out of the movie?

just the simple fact that i've never in my life ever seen or heard a conversation remotely like that in the opening scene. I just don't particularly care for Sorkin I guess, and didn't know that until I watched this - not having ever watched The West Wing. I understand that it works in a movie to have snappy dialog and all that, but for something like this that has been roundly celebrated as some kind of profound exegesis of modern society, the artifice of the interactions - best embodied by that opening - was something I just couldn't get past. Typing that, I suppose one could argue that said artifice is precisely the point - i.e. that the impersonal digital age has reduced us to that, but snappy, witty, "smart" dialog doesn't stand in for, U R h0t1!

In the end, I side with Fincher himself, who seems to have rejected the glowing adulation the film has received and thinks people are reading WAY too much into it. And again, i'm not saying I hated it, just that i didn't LOVE it. it was a good movie. but that's all it was to me.

Edit: and dammit, now I can't remember where I read this - it was in the last couple of days - but Fincher goes into a whole "zodiac is a film, social network is a movie" spiel and expresses his amazement that people have read so much into it...basically saying, "people, it's just a movie."

[knives]

You read that here in the Dragon Tattoo thread most likely. Again though if this movie is great, and I think it is, it is great as a character study not as this generation definer that people make it out to be. Your dissatisfaction with the film seems to be more related to what people have made it out to be rather than what it is. I'd say look to Hawks more than anyone else to get a feeling of how the film should be treated. Though even with that in mind you don't like the artificial nature of the dialouge, which I only found artificial in certain cadences but not in the interactions themselves, that's fine and understandable.

[domino harvey]

Better this define our generation than, say, Madagascar 2