I love Apple products. Unfortunately, this was a very boring movie with very little emotional or technical interest. Many scenes contain slow drawn out conversations and long pauses. And after enduring all of that the movie ends abruptly. I was dying to see more of how Jobs grew the company into the biggest in the world but it never appeared. Most of the focus was on board (or should I say BORED) meetings and personal exchanges. Disappointing.
... View MoreI'm not a big fan of Ashton Kutcher so I wasn't really looking forward to watching this film, but I was interested in Steve Jobs. The movie starts off slow in my opinion and at times it seemed to drag on a little. I don't think Ashton Kutcher was right to play this part. While he bears a resemblance to Steve Jobs I don't think he fully pulled it off. I didn't like the scene where he tells his pregnant girlfriend to leave and subsequently denies the girl is his daughter, that seemed very shallow to me.Obviously he eventually has a relationship with his daughter. If Steve Jobs was really like that in real life then he wasn't the most nicest person. He seemed like a very intense person who if things didn't go his way then he flipped out. I haven't seen the other Steve Jobs film yet but I'm hoping it's better than this one. I think Ashton should stick to romantic comedies and well... Comedies.
... View MoreI've seen this film and the one starring Michael Fassbender, "Steve Jobs". The difference between the two is this - This film shows a great deal of Steve's' life, with a real accent on the mid to late 70s as Apple was being created. The Fassbender film only shows three specific scenes in Steve's life, but by the time the film is through, even though Fassbender does not even resemble Steve Jobs, you feel like you are looking right at him because of Fassbender's electrifying performance. In "Jobs" Kutcher may be made up to look and walk like Jobs, but I never feel like I am getting into the head of Steve Jobs.What does this film do well? The first half of it captures the look and feel of early home computing in a totally realistic way - the kind of people who were involved, the way that they dressed, what early homemade personal computers in the 1970s looked like. What did they look like? It was like the first cars when they were called "horseless carriages" because that's what people AND the inventors understood as the old paradigm. The horse was being replaced with an engine and the rest of the car looked like carriages always had looked. So the earliest computers had switches and lights and sat in unattractive blue boxes that engineers thought were great, but the average person had no idea what to do with such a thing and didn't want one.What did this film do poorly? I'd say Steve Wozniak is presented as a mere shadow of himself here. You never see the camaraderie or dynamic between himself and Jobs. The old Home Brew Club looked up to Wozniak, and when he presents the first "Apple" computer to them they just look bored and Woz looks scared.Finally I come to Ashton Kutcher. Ashton Kutcher's problem is that he did one of his earliest roles so well and so long - that of mega screw up Kelso in the long running TV comedy "That 70's Show". He did it so well in fact that I ALWAYS see Kelso whenever I see Kutcher, no matter how well he is performing. In this film I kept waiting for his 70's Show girlfriend, alpha female attack dog Jackie, to come jumping out of a dark corner and start yelling at him and tell him what a screw up he is. Kutcher can't help this. I call it "Norman Bates Syndrome" - the same thing that happened to Anthony Perkins. No matter what role Anthony Perkins took after Psycho, no matter how well he did it, he was always Norman Bates. You just kept waiting for him to hit somebody over the head and start preparing the body to add to his collection of stuffed animals/people.This is not a terrible film on Jobs. Nobody does a bad job, and it is interesting from a history of personal computing perspective. I'd say see this one for the history, and watch the Fassbender rendition in "Steve Jobs" to get a feel for the essence of the man, who will always remain somewhat of an enigma.
... View MoreThe entrepreneur is one of the incarnation of the new American Hero in movies, and it is not surprising that the people who made the Personal Computer and the Internet part of the basic fabric of our lives, and turned Silicon Valley in the center of the technological Universe are getting more and more attention from the Southern neighbors in Hollywood. Steve Jobs has his turn as one of these heroes, his premature death in 2011 made of his character an easier to deal with. Easier because he is no longer here to sue anybody, and also because his malady and than death gave an implicit tragic substance to a life of full of achievements but also of personal controversies. As I have seen in one weekend days both feature films dedicated lately to his biography I have the feeling that none of them would have been possible if Jobs had been still with us.At first sight 'Jobs' directed by Joshua Michael Stern would be the most conventional of the two biographical movies. It starts with one epic moment of success (the launching of iPod which changed forever the music industry) to go back in time to the late 60s when the young Jobs was searching his ways in life among music, India, some drugs, girls. He was different, he was thinking a creative way, but we never get a real glimpse of his technology or design insights. The script written by Matt Whiteley seems rather to emphasize his astonishing business skills, doubled by recognition of talent that can be used in other people, and a set of no-prisoners tools which guided him in his career as well in his personal life. The Steve Jobs in this 'Jobs' is almost a persona we are invited to hate.What keeps him away from the ugly negative characters space is the acting of Ashton Kutcher. I have read so many bad things about him that his performance in 'Jobs' comes as a real surprise. He succeeds not only to recover many of the physical characteristics of the character, but also gave substance and charm to many of the moments of the film, especially in the first part that deals with the early years. Do we come closer to understanding the real Steve Jobs? I do not think so, but I believe that the problem is in the script and not in the acting, which did not walk the extra mile of trying to discover and explain the motivation of the man and the secrets of his extraordinary skills. Yet, while dealing only with the external strata, the film is quite successful in my opinion in retracing the atmosphere of a time where the flower power revolution resulted not only in fabulous music but also in a wave of inventiveness which changed the world in a different place than intended.Would Steve Jobs have liked this film? I doubt it, and not only because he personally comes out as the rather jerky character in the story. He may also have said - 'I have already seen this', fired the team and go deal with the next thing. That was Steve Jobs.
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