The screening of two movies in the year 2013, ‘Jobs’ and ‘The Internship’, can be seen as a cinematic trend marching boldly, and surely, into the digital age, making computers and java scripts more palatable for people to watch no doubt. Before that, ‘The Social Network’ depicting the drama connected to the laying down of Facebook, came out to have created a storm from two years ago in 2010. So, too, this year albeit this time with different movies! If you aren’t much of a movie buff, but love technology, watching these two movies will help explore how the fabric of everyday life has been affected by those changing the face of the game on the very top level.
Jobs, a biography about Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, and ‘The Internship’ a comedy highlighting the regrets and failures of two individuals in their 40s trying to make a mark in a relatively new terrain: digital age – are both very different in their genres, but similar in the vein they both take in talking about life and the storms, in them, in general.
Jobs, a slightly more serious drama, a biography portraying graphically Steve Job’s genius mind, worked to showcase his many complexities. Getting the gait and the facial expressions right, Kutcher deserved a standing ovation in how he tackled the character. The numerous misgivings of Jobs – the way he cheated his partner, left his girlfriend, dropped out of college or took part in the musical chairs of board room, Jobs, the movie, was a tasty treat to sink into, the perseverance and determination running through the movie delivered with just the right touch.
The movie made one empathize with the protagonist in the hard work he had cut out for himself – how he combined design with the technology and his wit to make sure the product was quickly devoured up by consumers, also, vital that it matched the integrity of his technical expertise and crucial, that it found the profits for his enterprise.
Seeing Albert Einstein’s picture on the threshold of his house, and the uncanny choice of picking Einstein’s biographer to write a biography for him while still alive, Jobs, possibly so aware of it himself, knew he was no ordinary mind. However, a lot of his quotes and wisdom speckled in the backdrop of the movie especially the one to do with competition and design, “The competitor is important in what he does differently,” or “What would Picasso have done – taken risk all the way.”
‘The Internship’ was another movie that played with how the game is changing from the top, down to the bottom of the bottoms. Against the sharp silhouette drawn across are the growing trends we see in our world today – businesses operating directly with each other and their customers have destroyed our concept of the ‘middle man.’ Working with this new landscape, the movie plunged headlong into the important human skills one learns of love, tenderness, integrity, compassion, camaraderie –necessary for survival, without a doubt – which machines can only ever hope to achieve (a computerized dog is no fun!) and which time and again, we will have to come back to.
People skills will always be the need. It is people you are dealing with, after all – one saw the theme running strongly across the movie Job, where personal computers, gadgets, the end customer was the one Jobs saw to catering. Interestingly enough we saw a lack of Job’s people skills, or was it nobody cared for his vision enough, that saw him becoming a rough ruthless critic. The greatest Picasso of technology that the world will see, the consumer technology retail is riding on the storm that he created, until now. His shrewd business acumen, together with his rapid attention to detail, only makes him a figure complex and multi-layered. One can never know him now with his death, but it definitely makes him quite enigmatic.
The Internship, with its fair share of thrilling escapades, snorting-out-loud wise-cracks and hold-me-down important life lessons, it entrapped, showed the beauty of what human relationships in this Machine Age are, and for what they are worth.
