John Reviews The Social Reckoning, Muse Wonder, Apple’s HomeView | Diet TBPN

John Coogan (0:02)

How was your weekend?

Jordi Hays (0:03)

It was great, too long.

John Coogan (0:04)

Yeah?

Jordi Hays (0:04)

Too long.

John Coogan (0:05)

Yeah, four days is way too much. I missed you. Yeah. I missed us.

Jordi Hays (0:10)

I missed the Ultradome. I'm glad to be back.

John Coogan (0:13)

We are back, and yeah, it was a good weekend. I saw The Social Reckoning. Big drop, big weekend, because I think it was opening weekend this weekend. The theater was completely empty, but it's interesting. Do you think that the meta team tried to time up Muse Wonder, all the good news, to like fight back, like the cheeky pine appearance? Because they completely steamrolled the movie.

SPEAKER_3 (0:37)

They won.

John Coogan (0:38)

I don't think they needed to, because the movie got really panicked.

Jordi Hays (0:40)

The crazy thing is that I have zero desire to see the movie. I will not be going to the movie, and in many ways, it's my job to at least go. I feel like I figured you were going to go, so I felt like we were covered.

SPEAKER_3 (0:54)

So I did go.

Jordi Hays (0:56)

It's crazy how excited I am to go see the Nathan Fielder film, and how little I even care to even know about. I don't even care about your review.

John Coogan (1:06)

Okay. Well, you're about to care. Others might. My review is going to be riveting. Okay. So it's Saturday. It's a little rainy in LA, and so I'm like, I'll throw on this jacket. I'll get a little cozy. You go see a film. I had to go to some other events, went over to our friend's place, and then I go to the movie. So I walk in, and I think I'm looking good. I'm dressed for a nice rainy day in LA. I walk in to the theater. I sit down for The Social Reckoning, and it's stars.

It focuses on this Wall Street Journal reporter, Jeff Horwitz, and in the movie, I'll pull up a picture of what he wears in the movie, because I looked like a kid from Spider-Man who dressed up as Spider-Man going to see Avengers.

I was like, wait, that's my exact jacket. I had the same jeans and boots too.

It was really, really striking. I just accidentally wore a costume to the movie. So it was very funny. I was like, that is exactly my jacket. It's not even just the same brand. I think it's the exact same jacket. Anyway.

Jordi Hays (2:14)

That's so funny.

John Coogan (2:15)

It was a very funny moment. It's not quite a sequel to The Social Network. Like it's not the same structure of protagonists, antagonists. It's not really about the internal operations that matter at Facebook. It's very much about the... So the Mark Zuckerberg character is now played by Jeremy Strong instead of Jesse Eisenberg. And it's much more peripheral. The story follows data engineer Francis Haugen and Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz. The whole thing feels very out of date in the scaling era.

The race towards super intelligence is so dominant in the minds of tech people right now. I'm not surprised that this movie is underperforming because it doesn't answer the questions that people are asking about tech companies right now. Worldwide opening was 9 million on a budget of 40 million. So it's like gearing up to be a flop, but the game is not over yet.

And Rotten Tomatoes has a 55% score across 215 reviews. The acting is fairly compelling. The lighting, it moves quickly.

The story ebbs and flows nicely over the two hour runtime. But it feels like a time capsule from a completely different era. Mark Zuckerberg has so thoroughly reinvented himself that it felt like, I was like, who is Jeremy Strong playing? And I'm like, oh yeah, Mark was kind of like that in 2019 But since then it's like UFC, complete fashion makeover, change the company's name. They have fashion line now with like glasses and so many different elements. And then AI, obviously, personal assistance. Like even hearing the word Facebook feels antiquated now, because people have actually shifted to, well, Instagram is the more important social platform, and then MSL and the AI stuff is really important. So Muse is a more important buzzword than Facebook. And then they renamed the company and stuff. So it felt like a blast from the past. People often say the job of media is to speak truth to power, ask the hard questions. And I came away thinking Aaron Sorkin refused to ask the hard questions. There are so many hard questions to ask about meta. You could ask, will Muse margins be comparable to Meta's core ad business? But Sorkin doesn't ask that. Or you could ask, does Muse Wonder, jumping really good on the benchmarks, does that change the underlying- Is it Benchmax? Is it Benchmax? That's a hard question.