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Friday night is date night, so Anne and I went out to the movies last night.  When we first started dating we use to go out to the movies on Friday night, as regular as clockwork.  We were so regular that we saw most if not all of the many movies that cycled through our two pre-marriage college towns, Ann Arbor and East Lansing.  We saw all of the good movies, but we also saw a lot of bad movies in our day.  Now we are old empty nesters, so getting off the couch after a long work week is often problematic, but last night we made the effort.  We went to go see the hit movie, The Social Network.

The Social Network is a story about the founders of the social-networking website, Facebook and most particularly about its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.  The movie is told via legal depositions and flashbacks.  The flashbacks begin with the genesis of Facebook, lo these many years ago, circa 2003.  Zuckerberg and his ilk are undergraduates at Harvard.  In a fury, what began in his dorm room soon becomes a global social network and a revolution in communication.  A mere six years and 500 million friends later, Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in history.  Justin Timberlake ably co-stars, playing Sean Parker, the former founder of Nabster and eventual mentor to Zuckerberg.

The Social Network plays fast and loose with the facts, most particularly with the breakup scene between Zuckerberg and his Harvard era BU coed date.  They never broke up and by all accounts are still happily married.  But the writers were never granted access to Mr. Zuckerberg for purposes of corroboration, so they apparently made up the story as they saw fit and a good story they created.  The juxtaposition between the legal scenes and flashbacked actions that are being interrogated, work well together.   I give the movie two thumbs up.  Anne gives it just one thumb up, “a good movie, but it was hard to like the protagonist.”  If you are on Facebook, thinking about joining it or just wondering about it, the movie would be worth your time.

The composers busts pictured in this post’s slideshow surround the Compton Heights bandstand in Tower Grove Park.  The bandstand is that red-roofed building.  This venue is the scene of regular summer concerts.  I thought that last Sunday’s morning light captured these geniuses of their day, quite well.  I doubt that Saint Louis will be erecting statues for Zuckerberg, unless he pays for them.