BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Director David Fincher casually admits it was a daunting job – casting his American remake of the internationally popular Stieg Larsson mystery “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”

David Fincher

After all, millions of avid readers had consumed Larsson’s gritty, pulpy detective novel – and the two follow-ups, “The Girl Who Played With Fire” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.” And millions of fans had likely formed vivid images in their minds of the books’ scarred and world-weary protagonists – the disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist, a dogged investigator, crusading idealist and unrepentant womanizer; and the anti-social computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, a pierced, punk genius with lots of abusive skeletons rattling around in her psychic closet.

And, to top it off, all three books had already been adapted to the screen in successful Swedish-language versions that featured memorable performances by Scandinavian actors Michael Nyqvist as the handsomely scruffy scribe Blomkvist and the startlingly convincing Noomi Rapace as the dangerously brilliant Salander.

So, during press interviews hosted by Columbia Pictures at Soho’s boutique Crosby Street Hotel, Fincher patiently fielded questions about his method of finding the right actors to inhabit those coveted, high-profile roles and his take on Larsson’s hugely popular novels.

“The mystery of these books wasn’t that interesting to me,” said the notoriously frank director of “Se7en,” “Fight Club” and “Zodiac.” “You know, Nazis and serial killers and the evil that people do in their basements with power tools wasn’t that unique. The thing that was first and foremost to me was this partnership (between Mikael and Lisbeth). I hadn’t seen these two people working together. So I liked the thriller, I liked the vessel of that, but I was more interested in the people front and center.

“Obviously, there are many parallels to ‘Chinatown’ in this story of the Vanger clan and their secrets,” Fincher continued. “But I don’t think Larsson invented anything new except Blomkvist and Salander, this odd pairing, that’s the invention.”

So, much attention and speculation attached itself to the long process of casting Daniel Craig, best known for his two outings at the head of the “James Bond” franchise and last summer’s sci-fi hit “Cowboys & Aliens,” as Blomkvist, and smart actress Rooney Mara, the daughter of pro football royalty (namesake kin to founders of the Pittsburgh Steelers and New York Giants franchises) and standout in a small role in “The Social Network,” as the prickly Salander.

“The casting process began with Daniel,” Fincher said, “and if you build your universe, it’s like a good basketball team, you start with the anchor. And I knew him to be self-effacing and witty, and I knew that I needed that for Mikael. I wanted a very masculine center to the film. The androgynous side of the movie would be carried by Rooney, that was her job. So I knew that I needed a sort of Robert Mitchum center. And so when we had Daniel that was a fait accompli.

“And because there is this sort of magnetic element – (Mikael and Lisbeth) sort of push against each other – I started to look for the things I wanted to see in Lisbeth, and I didn’t see them in anyone we’d been looking at,” Fincher said. “And Rooney was right under our noses, in that I’d already spent four or five days with her on ‘Social Network.’

“But again, when you cast someone you look for an inherent quality that, you know, you’re going to be shooting 14-hour days, you’re going to be tired, you’re not necessarily going to be able to conjure an armor or a façade every single moment,” the director said. “I liken it to a quality that you can’t beat out of them with a tire iron. You’re looking for an innate quality that they have. Rooney was somebody that we brought back time and time again. Not because we didn’t see what we were looking for initially.

“The problems that she was solving for me in the beginning of ‘Social Network’ were that she was intensely feminine, very mature, she was warm, she was verbal, she was trying to build a bridge to Jesse (Eisenberg) desperately in that five and a half minutes she was on screen,” he said. “And none of those qualities applied to Lisbeth. In fact, they were the antithesis.

“So every time she would come in we would work together, and I’d say, ‘OK, here’s a new hurdle and you have to jump this.’ And after two and a half months, the thing that seemed to be most Lisbethian was that she was just not giving up. She was indomitable,” Fincher said. “There were times in auditioning when I was personally embarrassed to say, ‘I need you to come back in one more time,’ and there was never a moment when she balked, although I would have. She always said, ‘OK. What do you need from me this time; what’s the new wrinkle?’ And I would give it to her, and she would come in and do that. And at the end of it, when we put her on a plane to Stockholm by herself to learn how to ride a motorcycle and find an apartment we knew we had the right person.”

In addition to the casting glare, Fincher said the huge popularity of the novels created lots of roiling undercurrents of political speculation about the movie.

“There’s a lot of mythology that comes with Stieg Larsson because of his untimely demise,” Fincher said. “I was certainly aware of his magazine and his political reporting, and I read a lot of stuff in The New York Times and other magazines about the Stieg Larsson story. But I don’t think that the actual political leanings of the material are why the book was optioned or the reason that everybody waiting for a plane at La Guardia is reading this book. That has little to do with everyone’s fear of the ultra-right in Scandinavia.

“My interest was it had a ballistic envelope, it had an aerodynamics to it,” he said. “Obviously 60 million people thought it was a ripping yarn. I thought it was a ripping yarn, but the thing that interested me most was these two people.”

So, Fincher is asked, will he be behind the camera for the sequels?

“Classically, movie studios don’t make deals with directors for sequels, even if there’s a hope that there’s going to be three, because they want to make sure that you behave,” he said.
But if he did agree to do two more films in the series, he speculated that a wise filmmaker would shoot them back-to-back in one big production push.

“The other two books are very much one story,” he said, “and it doesn’t seem prudent to me to go to Sweden for a year, come back for a year, put out the second one, go to Sweden for a year, come back …

“Please, don’t,” Mara piped in from the sidelines.

“I don’t think Rooney wants to be doing this four years from now,” Fincher said with a wry laugh. “So, I think that would be crazy, especially given that it’s a story that’s kind of bifurcated in the middle.”

Jesse Eisenberg

In what’s shaping up to be the summer of the rude, crude R-rated comedy, “30 Minutes or Less” is a strong contender as the blackest and rawest of them all.

It’s a bleakly comic crime caper that feels like a stoner’s riff on a macabre Coen brothers concept. It’s profane and nutty, it’s fast and furious, and it delivers a fair number of queasy laughs and goofball visual payoffs in a lean, mean 90 minutes or less.

Edging out such gleeful summer vulgarities as “The Hangover Part II” and “Bad Teachers” for over-the-top raunchiness, this pitch-black crime comedy is freighted with the added, dubious dimension of being loosely based on a bizarre, real-life 2003 incident that ended in the tragic death of a bomb-strapped Pennsylvania pizza deliveryman.

Playing real tragedy for twisted laughs is a dicey proposition, at best. But first-time screenwriter Michael Diliberti at least has the courage of his convictions and goes full-out brazen in carrying them out. And hip director Ruben Fleischer (“Zombieland”) smartly invests the proceedings with a gritty visual patina, rapid-clip pacing and a raw, jangly, guitar-driven rock score that fit the movie’s off-kilter vibe.

The filmmakers characterize this as a “double buddy” movie as it focuses on two pairs of doofus best friends. Jesse Eisenberg takes the explosive lead as Nick, a slacker twentysomething drop-out who is happy enough screeching around town in a souped-up junker delivering pies for Vito’s Pizzeria (slogan: 30 minutes or less or it’s free) and smoking weed in his off hours. His pal Chet (Aziz Ansari) is a substitute teacher on track for a full-time job who nonetheless proves himself as hapless as Nick.

The second buddy duo is the profane Dwayne (Danny McBride) and his sweetly stupid pal Travis (Nick Swardson), two lamebrains who – when they’re not cleaning pools for Travis’ ex-Marine, lottery-winning dad, The Major (a hard-case Fred Ward) – hang around the garage tinkering with explosives and homemade flamethrowers.

The loopy plotline that brings these dueling dullards together goes like this: Dwayne can’t wait for The Major to die so he can inherit his lottery lucre. So he and Travis decide to hire a hit man named Chango (a funny, creepy Michael Pena). But to raise Chango’s $100,000 hit fee they must rob a bank.

Leary of being caught themselves, Dwayne and Travis hit upon what they deem a brilliant scheme. They’ll kidnap some low-level schmoe (that would be Nick), strap a bomb with a timer on him and force him to pull the bank job.

Hence, Nick goes to deliver a pie to a midnight junkyard and finds himself wired into an explosive vest and given an ultimatum – rob a bank or KABLOOIE!

So, naturally, Nick rushes to his google-eyed pal Chet, and the two frantically set off planning their amateur heist. And, just as predictably, all manner of comic chaos ensues.

While it’s impossible to take any of this seriously, the ticking-bomb deadline should give the action some sense of urgency and forward propulsion. But Fleischer wastes too much time setting things up and establishing the knucklehead bona fides of Nick/Chet and Dwayne/Travis and muddying the plot with a stalled romance between Nick and Chet’s twin sister (Dilshad Vadsaria). The bank heist itself is a laugh bonanza, but the planning and lead-up feel tedious.

As a result, “30 Minutes or Less” (despite its quick running time) seems oddly meandering and aimless, and it fails to cook up the sort of tasty, biting black comedy that director Fleischer’s zesty “Zombieland” delivered with such bloody efficiency.

- Dennis King

“30 Minutes or Less”

R
1:23
2 1/2 stars
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Nick Swardson, Danny McBride, Aziz Ansari
(Crude and sexual content, pervasive language, nudity and some violence)

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Ruben Fleischer must feel like a harried teacher presiding over a room filled with rowdy class clowns.

Aziz Ansari, Jesse Eisenberg

As director of what he classifies as the new “buddy-buddy” movie “30 Minutes or Less,” Fleischer had to ride herd on a talented but unpredictable cast that included the very studious Jesse Eisenberg (“The Social Network” and Fleischer’s own “Zombieland”), frisky-funny Aziz Ansari (TV’s “Parks and Recreation”), blustery and profane Danny McBride (“Pineapple Express,” TV’s “Eastbound & Down”) and goofy but sweet Nick Swardson (“The Benchwarmers” and Terry the roller-skating gay prostitute on “Reno 911!”).

During a pre-release press conference hosted by Columbia Pictures at the Ritz Carlton Hotel, Fleischer again found himself trying to keep his quartet of stars on topic during Q&As that often turned comically raucous and veered off into X-rated territory.

But as he was in “30 Minutes or Less,” Fleischer proved to be a benevolent tutor, highly tolerant of his cast’s penchant for edgy improvisation.

“Reuben would keep us grounded,” Swardson said of the filming. “We improv-ed a lot. Danny and I had really good chemistry and would kind of go crazy. And Ruben would have to be like a parent and go, ‘Alright guys, settle down, you’re kinda getting off track.’ Like, we would just say the craziest stuff, and Ruben would police us like how far and how crazy we got.”

“30 Minutes or Less” features Swardson and McBride as Travis and Dwayne, two bumbling, small-town numbskulls who hatch a scheme to kidnap Eisenberg’s pizza deliveryman Nick, strap a bomb to his chest and force him to rob a bank. The desperate Nick enlists his fidgety friend Chet (Ansari) to help pull off the heist.

With its dynamic of two sets of close buddies at odds, someone asked the panel if this movie is, indeed, a “bromance.”

Danny McBride, Nick Swardson

“Can everyone just stop saying bromance?” Ansari piped up. “For some reason that bothers me.”

“I call it a double buddy comedy,” Fleischer interjected. “That’s how I like to describe this movie because we’re so used to buddy comedies, but this is really two pairs of friends. And for me the friendship never strays too gay. It’s just a true affection and support and love for a friend, which I think Aziz’s character represents by putting his life on the line to help his buddy Nick.

“And then at the end Travis and Dwayne have a unique relationship,” the director said, “as Dwayne proves what a good friend he is when instead of chasing after the money he goes to help his friend, who’s on fire.”

Added Swardson, “I think the cool thing about the movie is it does show the relationships of guys and how tight a friendship can be, that you can be so close and intimate with another guy, it just shows that … guys are awesome.”

“It’s a bromance,” McBride cracked.

“Like bromancing the stone,” Swardson added.

“OK. It is great because you guys are the bad guys in the movie and you have such a sweet relationship,” Ansari conceded. “And it really pays off, comedically.”

“It’s very bromantic,” said Swardson, claiming the last pun on the subject.

Eisenberg, apparently the straight man of the group, acknowledged that the film’s comedy springs from a very dark place – a real-life 2003 incident that ended tragically for a Pennsylvania pizza deliveryman.

“When I got the script I thought this premise gave us this incredible opportunity for my character and for Aziz’s character to be forced to rob a bank,” Eisenberg said. “So it seemed all the great comedy in the script for us came out of how these guys realistically would have to rob a bank. And the bomb was the best vehicle and device for that storyline.”

“When I first read the script, I was like how is this going to work?” Swardson said. “But the people behind it – like Ruben is amazing and the producers Ben Stiller and Stuart Cornfeld – I just trusted them a lot. As far as the real incident, it’s so different. It wasn’t like – my God! – this is verbatim. It was so far from it.”

For McBride, who has a reputation as a virtuoso of blue language, the script’s dark comedy and edgy profanity were an attraction.

“I just like lowbrow, dirty, juvenile humor, and so some of the projects I take on tend to have that flavor,” he said. “But it’s not really a flavor that I … umm, I don’t really call up my Mom and say, ‘Hey, what the (bleep’s) happening?’ I’m still respectful.”

But, McBride said, he enjoys playing bad boys.

“Some of my favorite characters when I was a kid were always the villains in movies,” McBride said. “Like, in ‘The Karate Kid,’ I always rooted for Cobra Kai, weirdly. You know, you love Darth Vader. Even as a writer, it’s fun to write characters whose moral compass is slightly askew, and you’ve got to figure out a way to get an audience to still root for that person. I think it’s kind of a challenge.”

Another challenge that appealed to both McBride and Swardson was the high level of explosive mayhem that the script called for, featuring scenes of Travis and Dwayne blowing up Teddy bears and watermelons and using a flamethrower.

“The watermelon explosions – that’s what made me want to do the movie,” McBride said. “That stuff is always fun when you get to mix comedy with weapons. That always seems cool. Nick was always in a good mood on the set every single day, but when he had to wear the flamethrower that was the quietest Nick we ever saw.”

Added Swardson, “It was one of those things were you read it in the script and you think, ‘This is so awesome.’ Then you get to the set and think, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ It was scary, man. I wasn’t that nervous about it because I did all this fire training and there were all these guys standing by in case something went wrong. They explained all these scenarios, like, ‘Well, if this does burst into flames on your back, this is what you should do.’ But it didn’t help that Danny kept throwing rocks at my flamethrower backpack trying to make it blow up.”

“There were so many safety precautions,” said McBride, ”and they ran us through all these things that could happen. So it was almost disappointing when nothing bad happened.”

“Yeah,” quipped Swardson. “I was really bummed out that I didn’t burn myself up.”

Ruben Fleischer

NEW YORK – A quirky bank robbery and tire-screeching car chases play key roles in “30 Minutes or Less,” a black comedy in which a pizza deliveryman and his hapless pal are coerced into pulling off a bumbling holdup by a pair knuckleheaded masterminds.

So it stands to reason that the movie’s four stars and its director – Jesse Eisenberg, Aziz Ansari, Danny McBride and Nick Swardson, plus helmer Ruben Fleischer (“Zombieland”) – would have their own rosters of favorite, go-to heist movies and car-chase pictures to inspire them.

They were each asked to list their favorites during a pre-release press conference staged by Columbia Pictures. Here’s what they said.

Nick Swardson (Travis): “I love ‘Point Break.’ It’s one of my favorite movies of all time. I was obsessed with that movie for a long time. Car chase films – I love all the car stuff in ‘Ronin,’ there’s some great car chase stuff in that and in …umm, ‘Fried Green Tomatoes.’”

Danny McBride (Dwayne): “‘Dog Day Afternoon,’ is probably my favorite bank heist film, and ‘Bullitt’ has my favorite car chases.”

Jesse Eisenberg (Nick the pizza guy): “Yeah, I also like ‘Dog Day Afternoon,’ and I watched some of the ‘Lethal Weapon’ movies because my character referenced it and I’d never seen it. It was interesting to see the way our characters think of themselves as being like Danny Glover and Mel Gibson when we run into the bank.”

Aziz Ansari (Chet): “Like Ruben said, we had a big folder of all the bank robbery movies. And the day we filmed the bank robbery I just kept watching the one from ‘Heat’ over and over again. I love that one and also ‘Point Break.’ And one movie I watched that I hadn’t seen before was ‘The Killing’ by Stanley Kubrick that had one of the coolest endings. And – let’s see – the car chases in ‘Steel Magnolias’ are really awesome.”

Ruben Fleischer: “My favorite car chase is from ‘The Blues Brothers,’ just because I think it’s be best version of a comedy car chase and the massive scale of the cars in it is incredible. And I love all the heist movies that the cast mentioned. But a movie that I’d never seen before that a producer introduced me to was called ‘Straight Time,’ that Dustin Hoffman stars in. That has a couple of really good heists, both a bank and a jewelry store. And I tried to get a line from that in our movie but they wouldn’t say it. It was like, ‘what, are you in love with me? Then stop looking at me,’ or something like that. I kept trying to feed that line to Aziz but he just wouldn’t say it.”

Ansari: “I was like, three people total are going hear that and think, ‘Oh, cool, that’s from ‘Straight Time.’”

- Dennis King

This week, the oddest DVD to appear on release lists is:

“Camp Hell”

Is it a horror movie, a coming-of-age story or a religious cautionary tale concerning the “sins of the flesh” and the wily ways of Satan? Should it be titled “Camp Hope” (as it was originally tagged) or “Camp Hell,” the title affixed to the DVD due out on Tuesday?

And what’s up with plastering Jesse Eisenberg’s face on the DVD box cover, even though the star of “The Social Network” and “Zombieland” (who, by the way, has a new movie due out on Friday – “30 Minutes or Less”), even though the actor only appears in a two-minute-or-less cameo?

“Camp Hell” is an oddity that raises those pertinent questions and many others as it stumbles its way onto video shelves.

Never having received a theatrical release, despite a name cast the includes Eisenberg (sort of), former brat-packer Andrew McCarthy, desperate housewife Dana Delany and reliable character actor Bruce Davison, this picture from freshman writer-director George VanBuskirk can’t quite decide whether it’s fish or fowl.

It begins in earnest as a religious family drama in which deeply pious parents (including McCarthy and Delany) send their children to New Jersey’s summer Camp Hope to be guided clear of life’s evils by Father Phineas McAllister (Davison), who seems rather too eager to hear about his young charges’ “sins of the flesh.”

Then, when mysterious pools of blood appear, when statues in the camp chapel appear to move, when grunting demons appear in the woods, the movie flirts with religious allegory on the way to becoming a full-blown, if thoroughly conventional and plodding, B-grade horror movie. The devil’s work, indeed.

“Camp Hell” is rated R for teen sexuality and disturbing violent images, and it runs for 99 minutes. It’s being released by Lionsgate.

- Dennis King

Sporting a carnival of eye-popping colors, slapstick comic characters, dazzling 3D imagery and the requisite double-entendre humor that should speak to kids and their adult chaperones on appropriate levels, “Rio” is one smart bird of a movie that shows its feathers brilliantly.

Produced by Fox’s Blue Sky animation division and ably directed by Carlos Saldanha, the guy who co-directed the first animated “Ice Age” epic (with Chris Wedge) and helmed the two successful sequels, this tropical lark might well do for the Brazilian tourist board what the previous films did for the Pleistocene Epoch.

It features a bright and chipper cast of familiar voice actors – lead by dry-witted Jesse Eisenberg as the flightless, domesticated macaw, Blu, and feisty Anne Hathaway as Jewel, the last macaw in the South American wilds.

The story is clever but largely pro forma for this sort of film: Blu lives a comfy, homebound life far from the tropics as the pet of strong-willed owner Linda (Leslie Mann) in the snowy Minnesota town of Moose Lake. Removed from the Brazilian jungles as a small bird, timid Blu never experienced the wild and never learned to fly.

One day, a Brazilian ornithologist named Tulio (Rodrigo Santoro) shows up in the Great White North to tell Linda that Blu may be the last male of his species. Tulio asks Linda to take Blu to his institute in Rio de Janeiro to mate with his female macaw, Jewel. Linda reluctantly agrees.

In Rio, all manner of chaos ensues as the meek Blu and the intrepid Jewel don’t hit it off; as the reluctant love birds are kidnapped by an inept gang of animal smugglers, and as the soon escaped Blu and Jewel benefit from the aid of a band of street smart city birds that includes the friendly canary Nico (Jamie Foxx), a rapping cardinal named Pedro (will.i.am) and a love-struck toucan named Rafael (George Lopez).

The macaws’ chief antagonist in all this is a nasty, psychotic cockatoo named Nigel (Jermaine Clement), who molts evil and spouts corny villain lines such as, “Like an abandoned school, I have no principal.”

Following a pattern set by other recent animal-centric animated features – “Ice Age,” “Madagascar,” “Kung-fu Panda” and the like – the evil and peril here are tempered by laughs, and the kid-friendly story folds in a few neat, life-affirming lessons about love, friendship, bravery and spirits soaring and wings spreading (a key joke concerns Blu’s fumbling efforts to finally learn to fly).

The 3D effects are most effectively rendered in a dizzying opening sequence amid a rainbow-hued flight of birds performing aerial acrobatics over the color-saturated Brazilian rain forest and in soaring, bird’s-eye view shots over Rio de Janiero, especially when the camera swoops around the city’s famed Christ the Redeemer statue.

While “Rio” adds nothing new to the tried-and-true formula of current animation features, it is a film rich with joyful plumage that makes up in exotic setting and feel-good humor what it lacks in narrative freshness.

- Dennis King

“Rio”

G
1:38
3 stars
Starring: voices of Jesse Eisenberg, Anne Hathaway, George Lopez, will.i.am
(Mild off-color humor)

Justin Timberlake, right, and Jesse Eisenberg

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Don’t mention to Justin Timberlake any buzz about him possibly landing an Academy Award nomination for his dynamic performance as Napster founder Sean Parker in “The Social Network.”

It might jinx him.

Clearly, the former boy-band member turned pop-music star turned actor is, if not superstitious, uncomfortable in tweaking the Oscar gods about his odds of being so honored for his first big, serious, studio acting gig.

When the O-word was mentioned during the press conference following “The Social Network” premiere at the New York Film Festival, Timberlake looked visibly taken aback.

“Why did you say that?” he said, shaking his head, “Why did you just say that?”

After an uncomfortable pause, he switched subjects and talked about his casting in the most substantial acting role yet.

“I briefly bumped into the real Sean Parker here in New York, and we spoke for all of two minutes. Ironically, I met him before I was cast in the role,” Timberlake said. “There was about a three week period were I was going through auditions, but it had been announced on the Internet that I was going to play the role. So I went through that period thinking, ‘damnit, I’d better get this role.’ But we met briefly and he seemed like a nice guy, and he mentioned that he had read the script and he thought I was going to do the part before I was actually cast, so that was awkward.”

With his focus set firmly on acting, Timberlake said making the switch from creating stadium concert shows to making movies is not that much of a stretch.

“Obviously, I’ve spent a lot of time on stage, and the rehearsal process for getting ready for a tour, that alone is probably like writing a screenplay and putting together the shot sheets,” he said. “Putting together a stage production probably took, on my last tour, about 10 months from concept to actually doing the first show. So it’s very similar to theater, and you have a very long, drawn-out, methodical rehearsal process. That’s because you only get one take. For instance, you step up on stage and you only get one pass at it.”

So he said in his early conversations with notoriously meticulous David Fincher, he was eager to learn as well as to let the director know he was a team player.

“I’ll give you an example of a conversation I had with David Fincher about making this film and his process,” Timberlake said. “When I first came in he said, ‘look, I know you probably like to get your performance all together because of your instinctive nature coming from the stage, and I’ll try to be cognizant of you growing tired of as many takes as I like to do.’

“And I stopped him right there and said – I used a crappy sports analogy from football – that I wasn’t going to be a whiny wide receiver. That I came into the movie completely knowing my role and excited about it and that I thought of myself more as a linebacker and if he wanted me to make a hit – wow, it’s equally as crappy in front of all of you – that I would do it 98, 99 times.

“I find the whole process (of filmmaking) fulfilling because it’s more collaborative,” he said. “You know, everything I put together on stage I’m sort of the buck and everything stops with me. But to get to toss the ball around – yeah, another sports analogy – with such great actors, it’s a completely different, fulfilling, collaborative experience. And to have the freedom to go in and mess it up for 97 takes and then when you get to the 98th and it’s good you move on. I think we just all wanted to please David. So if we did that we were all satisfied with our performances.”

Timberlake admitted that he’s not a big Facebook fan, but he’s not without his own lengthy theories on why the site is such a worldwide phenomenon.

“There’s a line where Jesse Eisenberg says (Facebook) is like being in a final club (an exclusive Harvard club) and you’re the president. It’s a party and you’re throwing it,” he said. “That’s kind of the truth behind everyone’s Facebook page, creating your own profile and it’s your world. I would assume that’s sort of what it is. I think that what makes the film so intriguing in the bigger picture of things, if you kind of zoom out, is that social networking in general is still a hypothesis.

“I find that people are still asking the question, and they ask it more and more,” he said. “I don’t know why they expect an answer because, like I said, I’m ridiculously stupid when it comes to computers and social networking, but the hypothesis is: is it a good thing or a bad thing? I think there’s a medium that’s always being pushed, to show us how human we are, how kind we are, how cruel we are.

“The immediacy and instant gratification of having all your photos and profile out there for the world, that’s probably what makes something like Facebook so great to a lot of people,” Timberlake concluded. “That’s also the great intrigue – if it’s going to create great things in the world or if we’re just going to waste away with it.”

Rooney Mara and Jesse Eisenberg

In the first blush of enthusiasm after viewing director David Fincher’s stunning, of-the-moment film “The Social Network,” it’s tempting to characterize it as the cyber age’s answer to such epoch-defining classics as “Citizen Kane” and “Network.”

That might initially seem like so much sound-bite cheerleading or delirious hyperbole. But the larger social parallels that the film shares with Orson Welles’ 1941 epic on the rise and fall of a grandiose publishing titan and Sidney Lumet’s 1976 satire on the seductive, corrosive powers of television are striking and true. All three possess Shakespearean dimensions as they pinpoint pivotal moments in the cultural evolution of human communications.

And it’s telling to note that each film sprang from the pen of a brilliant screenwriter uniquely in tune with the zeitgeist of his time – Herman J. Mankiewicz (with Welles) for “Kane,” Paddy Chayefsky for “Network” and Aaron Sorkin for “The Social Network.”

Sorkin, a celebrated playwright and the verbally astute creator of TV’s “The West Wing,” seems at first oddly paired with Fincher (“Se7en,” “Fight Club”), an obsessively precise director renowned for his distinct visual artistry. But the combination of Sorkin’s daredevil verbal precocity and Fincher’s precise attention to surface detail results in a film that’s extraordinarily rich in both language and texture.

“The Social Network” opens with a brilliant overture in a noisy brew pub near the Harvard campus, where geeky undergrad Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) tries to impress his girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara), with a mile-a-minute spiel rife with sarcasm, sexism, egotism, insecurity, blind ambition and an utter absence of social grace. At its breathless conclusion, she dumps him with one of the film’s most cutting putdowns.

At which point, the spurned Zuckerberg races through the snow to his dorm room, swills some beers and begins a frenzied all-night computer hacking session that leads to the infamous creation of Facemash, an ill conceived, patchwork website in which Harvard men are challenged to rate the hottest girls on campus. It immediately goes viral and crashes the university’s computer system.

Hence are planted the seeds of Facebook, and the film deftly charts Zuckerberg’s progression from rejected boyfriend to boy genius and budding billionaire with amazing efficiency and with grand comic and dramatic urgency.

The filmmakers (drawing from Ben Mezrich’s book “The Accidental Billionaires”) adroitly shift around in time, presenting the story’s dramatic core in a series of legal depositions in which Zuckerberg is being sued by two parties that claim proprietary stakes in the invention of Facebook – notably his former best friend and fellow Jew Eduardo Severin (Andrew Garfield), who financed the site’s modest startup and then got frozen out, and twin sons of WASP privilege Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer and Josh Pence), square-jawed jocks who allege that Zuckerberg stole the idea from them.

Using a “Rashomon”-style approach to winnowing out elusive, shifting truth, the film then flashes back to key moments in the lightening growth of Facebook from a clever Harvard computer phenomenon to a world-wide paradigm shift that has virtually redefined the word “friend.”

Stunningly good performances crop up throughout – from the reluctant muse Mara (soon to assume a coveted role in Fincher’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”) to the thoughtful, sympathetic Garfield (soon to become Spider-Man) and from rock star Justin Timberlake as dazzling, Svengali-like Napster founder Sean Parker to the quizzical Eisenberg, who invests the prickly genius Zuckerberg with an off-putting armor of witty sarcasm while slyly suggesting the touching vulnerability and lonely longing beneath.

In the ethereal Internet world that Facebook so potently embodies, the dweeby, socially inept Zuckerberg strides like a colossus. Move aside Charles Foster Kane, your 21st century media-empire equivalent has arrived in “The Social Network,” and he’s about to “friend” every single moviegoer who ventures out to the multiplex.

- Dennis King

“The Social Network”

PG-13
2:00
4 stars
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer, Rooney Mara
(Sexual content, drug and alcohol use, language)

Aaron Sorkin

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – The dress code of the Harvard Club is clear: “Business attire required. No jeans or sneakers allowed.” It’s enough to send the average member of the national movie press corps skulking to the closet in search of a rumpled, rarely used necktie.

And for those less-than-spiffily attired movie journalists attending Columbia Pictures’ press conference for “The Social Network” at the august club, located just down West 44th Street from the New York Yacht Club and the storied Algonquin Hotel, it was small comfort to note that the subject of the groundbreaking film, former Harvard undergrad and billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, would himself likely be found sartorially wanting in this bastion of old-money civility.

Though now the world’s youngest billionaire, Zuckerberg on his own Facebook page and in a multitude of photos posted on the Internet appears to favor T-shirts, blue jeans and sneakers in his attire. And in the film, he’s generally depicted as defiantly scruffy in gray Gap hoodie, baggy shorts and rubber flip-flops with socks.

But as a quartet of actors and the film’s screenwriter trooped into the oaken Harvard Club lounge the day after the movie’s premiere at the New York Film Festival to talk to the press, all were decked out in neckties and pressed shirts. And star Jesse Eisenberg, who portrays the rebelliously nerdy Zuckerberg, looked especially respectable in white shirt, crisp tie and dark sports jacket.

“I never had the chance to meet the real Mark Zuckerberg,” Eisenberg told reporters, “but I studied him and lived with him in my head for the time we were making this movie, and I really developed a deep affection for the guy. I’d like to take him to Johnny Rocket’s and buy him a shake.

“In the movie the character that Aaron (Sorkin) created is a guy who is desperately trying to fit in and doesn’t have the social wherewithal to do so. I can certainly relate to that,” said the young actor who came to prominence amid a family of eccentrics in 2005’s “The Squid and the Whale.”

“And so to cope Mark creates this incredible tool to interact socially in a way that he feels comfortable,” Eisenberg said. “And because of his incredible insight, 500 million people also feel comfortable using that tool. It’s just a fascinating character, complicated in all the right ways. And even though he acts in a way that’s hurtful to other characters, it’s by the end of the movie totally understandable.”

Jesse Eisenberg

Sorkin, who counts himself dubious of Facebook’s allures, said he was drawn to Zuckerberg’s story because of its dramatic challenges.

“The antagonist and protagonist of this story shift as we go along,” Sorkin said. “This movie I don’t think belongs to any particular style of drama. But the style it’s most closely related to is the courtroom drama where we are certain of someone’s guilt or innocence at the beginning and we change our minds five times all the way through.

“But strictly speaking, and I don’t mean to get hoity-toity on you, in Aristotelian terms Mark is the anti-hero,” he said. “He spends the first hour and 55 minutes being the anti-hero and the last five minutes being the tragic hero, which means he has paid a price and is experiencing remorse. The antagonist, which is the person without whom the story couldn’t get going, includes in this case the Winklevoss twins (who alleged intellectual property theft) and Eduardo Saverin (spurned Facebook co-founder), which is to say that if no one had ever sued Mark over Facebook there wouldn’t have been a story.”

Sorkin said much has been made of the partnership between he and director David Fincher in making the movie, and it was the subject of a lengthy article in New York magazine.

“It (the article) almost sounded like a narration of the old ‘Odd Couple’ television show,” the screenwriter said. “In a lot of ways there was a Felix and Oscar dimension to our partnership. At first glance it’s not intuitively the right marriage of director and material. David is an absolutely peerless visual director, and I write people talking in rooms. David first of all embraced the fact that this was going to be a story told through language. But he did bring a distinct visual style to this and did as a director get sensational performances from this very talented but young cast.”

However, there were differences of opinion along the way. For instance, Sorkin said he and Fincher debated over whether to depict Mark Zuckerberg getting drunk on the night he hacked Harvard’s dorm sites and created the controversial Facemash incident, from which Facebook was eventually born. Sorkin said he wanted Mark to drink screwdrivers because they seemed more visually interesting, but Fincher insisted that Mark in fact had gotten drunk on Beck’s Beer, so Beck’s Beer it was in the movie.

“That’s just one very small example of how serious we were about the facts,” he said. “But the fact that we know what brand of beer he was drinking on a Tuesday in October seven years ago, when there were only three other people in the room, tells you something about how close our research sources were to the subject and the event.”

In the larger scheme of things, Sorkin said he couldn’t have had a better ally than Fincher in bringing this dialogue-rich story to the screen.

“What David was adamant about not having was a script development process,” Sorkin said. “He insisted to the studio that the movie be made right away. He didn’t want to go through nine drafts and notes from executives of the studio. They would have been very smart notes, but it would have homogenized the idiosyncratic nature of the writing, and David didn’t want to do that. So, we may be Felix and Oscar, but it worked and if I never work with another director besides David Fincher in my life then I’d be very happy.”

Sorkin acknowledged that much speculation has preceded the film regarding how much of the story is factual and how much is fudged or fictionalized.

“I was very lucky that there were a number of people who were portrayed in the movie, as well as other people who were there in the room for things happening, who did talk to me,” he said. “But most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity, so I’m afraid I can’t clear it up any more than I already have.

“Let me clear up the thing about discussions of having to change Harvard and Facebook in the film,” Sorkin said. “That was more a comic, overarching thing. (Producer) Scott Rudin was negotiating with the director of communications for Facebook, and Scott said, ‘What would it take to get you to cooperate with us?’ And he said, ‘Don’t set it at Harvard and don’t call it Facebook.’ In other words, we’ll help you out if you write fiction, but we’re not going to help you out telling the true story.”

Regardless, Sorkin said he’s satisfied that while Zuckerberg isn’t always portrayed in the most flattering light, the young billionaire genius won’t be harmed by anything depicted in “The Social Network.”

And as to suggestions that Zuckerberg made a recent, large charitable donation as a form of damage control to balance his negative portrayal in the film, Sorkin answers adamantly:

“That has nothing to do with the movie, but I really do think that it’s worth mentioning because no sooner had it been announced that he was going to donate $100 million to the Newark public school system, a school system that like a lot of public school systems sorely needs it, that talk of cynical motives began to be ascribed to it. And I just have to say that that’s wrong,” Sorkin said. “It’s a great gesture that he’s done. Surely, the students, their parents and teachers don’t care why he’s done it. Somebody does something like that and the only proper response is, ‘Thank you, sir, thank you very much.’ I just think it’s worth us especially coming to Mark’s side for that.”

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