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Thread: The Aaron Sorkinish of it All

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    Default The Aaron Sorkinish of it All

    I love this. I loved it as soon as I saw the title on my twitter feed. This is so true, IMO. It's always males if you ask me. This is why when Cawacko asked me if I am into those liberal-leaning tech gurus in the Silicon Valley I hissed much like a vampire shown a cross. And why are they always so sexist? Don't know, but they are. I've known plenty like em IRL unfortunately. The most sexist man I ever met could quote Simone de Beauvoir! It's really weird though because I love Keith Olbermann who might be ever-so-slightly like this. But I pretend he's not and it's not like I know him. I know for sure my bf Paul Krugman isn't, thank God. I can't think of any of the liberal guys on this board who strike me this way at all either.

    Why do people hate liberals so much? Two words; Aaron Sorkin

    "Aaron Sorkin is why people hate liberals. He’s a smug, condescending know-it-all who isn’t as smart as he thinks he is. His feints toward open-mindedness are transparently phony, he mistakes his opinion for common sense, and he’s preachy. Sorkin has spent years fueling the delusional self-regard of well-educated liberals. He might be more responsible than anyone else for the anti-democratic “everyone would agree with us if they weren’t all so stupid” attitude of the contemporary progressive movement. And age is not improving him.

    Sorkin is … not as popular as he once was, when he was still just the creative mind behind the much-loved “Sports Night” and “The West Wing.” People are, broadly, sick of his shtick. But he’s also, undoubtedly, more professionally successful than ever, back in demand as a major film screenwriter (coming off an Oscar win followed by a nomination) and heading one of HBO’s trademark “prestige” dramas. He seems nonplused by the negative responses to his new show, “The Newsroom,” and he has plenty of reason to be: To his mind, he’s the same hack he’s always been.

    He has a limited bag of tricks. Even his sparkling banter is one-note. His characters always say exactly, precisely what they mean, at all times. There’s no subtext, no irony, nothing ever left unspoken in his dialogue. His characters don’t even get to be sarcastic without someone asking them if they’re being sarcastic. Everyone alternates between speechifying, quipping and dumbly setting up other people’s quips. It’s exhausting.

    The guy can write a memorable line, but he repeats himself so much that you start to wish he’d maybe allow some of the other writers on his shows to write something.

    His work also gets things deeply, pointlessly wrong — no big deal in a purely fictional universe but dodgy when dealing with real events, or, in the case of “The Social Network,” engaging in the biography of a man still living. Sorkin fit the broad details of Mark Zuckerberg’s life and Facebook’s founding into the only sort of story he is interested in and able to tell. It’s well and good to say Sorkin’s sole responsibility is to entertain, but I think an obnoxious little Sorkin analogue character would probably look askance at some Hollywood screenwriter who took such liberties with the truth in the service of disposable entertainment. (On the other hand, the moral responsibilities of an artist dealing with real-world material is maybe the sort of question too thorny for Sorkin’s paper-thin characters to dispense with in a quick Act 3 speech.)

    I have never been a fan. “Sports Night” had its moments — it helped that it was incredibly low-stakes, making its characters’ self-importance seem like character traits instead of extensions of the author’s self-importance — but I never cared for “The West Wing.” (I agree, more or less, with what Chris Lehmann wrote about it back in March 2001, especially his point that Bartlet’s administration was fixated on petty cultural inanities and “symbolic posturings.”) But I understand the appeal of “The West Wing.” I can acknowledge that it was good TV.

    “The Newsroom” is phenomenally bad good TV. Sam Waterston and Jeff Daniels and Emily Mortimer are all terrific! So is the production, and the direction, and even the editing! The show looks great. (Sorkin’s always been gifted with incredibly talented directors to help paper over his limitations — not just Rob Reiner and David Fincher, but also his longtime television collaborator Thomas Schlamme, who brought to “Sports Night” — and then “The West Wing” — the single-camera Steadicam style he developed at the single best sitcom ever about television, “The Larry Sanders Show.” Only the “talk” part of the famous Sorkin “walk and talk” is actually Sorkin’s.) It’s just a shame that all these wonderful talents are being used to animate Sorkin’s increasingly curdled and miserable worldview.

    The inciting incident of “The Newsroom” is an unreasonably statistic-laden improvised tirade that Jeff Daniels’ news anchor character gives in response to a bad question at a journalism school panel. A dumb girl (dumb girls are this show’s primary villains) asks what makes America the greatest country in the world, which is the sort of question asked only by Sean Hannity, and Daniels says that it’s not: not just because of our poor infant mortality rate but also (and much more importantly) because as a society we no longer revere “great men.” This is the same idiotic nostalgia that inspires your typical David Brooks column, but in this world the speech is a controversial and notable thing, because Will McAvoy — the “second-most-watched anchor on cable,” apparently — is not supposed to have opinions, for some reason.

    (The show is so confused about what McAvoy is and who he works for. Is McAvoy supposed to be Wolf Blitzer? He seems to be Joe Scarborough hosting a network evening news broadcast on CNN. Except he’s also very obviously Keith Olbermann.)

    And then his ex-girlfriend shows up to be his executive producer, and in order to create a more perfect news broadcast, they turn his show into “Countdown.” McAvoy begins yelling at Tea Party people, basically. The best part is that the entire thing takes place in the very recent past and uses real events, so that we learn how Sorkin thinks the major news events of 2010 should have been handled — and the answer is always that the equivalent of a week’s worth of research and reporting should have been accomplished in the two hours before that night’s show.

    “You are a smart, talented guy who isn’t very nice,” says a chatacter to McAvoy, and while the show takes great pains to show us that McAvoy is an asshole with a heart of gold, it’s clear that at this date Sorkin thinks being smart and talented is a license to be not very nice. His style hasn’t changed, but a meanness has infected sunny Sorkinland, which is what I think his former fans find so off-putting about “The Newsroom.”

    It’s never been clear that Sorkin has much respect for his audience (never forget the post-9/11 “West Wing” episode in which the kindly president and his brilliant, hard-working staff, led by Sorkin stand-in character Josh Lyman, literally explain the roots of terrorism to teenagers), but he at least used to give lip service to the idea that people who aren’t brilliant middle-aged white men deserve some measure of respect.

    The hero, now, is a man who calls a date a “bitch” for caring about reality-TV stars, and his creator is a man who said this to a newspaper reporter: “‘Listen here, Internet girl,’ he says, getting up. ‘It wouldn’t kill you to watch a film or pick up a newspaper once in a while.’”

    That’s what Sorkin thinks of basically every woman and every person under 50. He hates everything frivolous — “frivolous” is womanly things like gossip and fashion and television not created by Aaron Sorkin but explicitly not, say, sports — and McAvoy’s war on frivolity extends to what Jane Fonda’s network owner refers to as “human interest” material on, say, obesity. (Which is obviously, in our reality, a very real and complex problem, but whatever.) The villain of episode 4 is a lady gossip columnist (well, her and the lady owner of the network). This is a pretty fundamental misreading of the purpose and history of “the news,” which is not actually wise men sternly lecturing you about what you need to know even if you don’t care about it. In episode 2, Mortimer kills the outgoing producer’s “The Day in YouTube” segment — it’s not NEWS!! — as if comics, crosswords and box scores didn’t sell newspapers during the couple decades of objective mass news reporting we now look back on as a golden age.

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    DARLA: The Internet's Leading Cause of White Dude Butthurt 12 Years and Counting

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    But I pretend he's not and it's not like I know him. I know for sure my bf Paul Krugman isn't, thank God.

    If Skidmark finds out about this we could have a major cat fight on our hands.
    You're Never Alone With A Schizophrenic!

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    Quote Originally Posted by Derp Derp View Post
    But I pretend he's not and it's not like I know him. I know for sure my bf Paul Krugman isn't, thank God.

    If Skidmark finds out about this we could have a major cat fight on our hands.
    Watermark doesn't have a crush on Krugman he is just smart enough to recognize Krugman's unique brilliance and beautiful mind. There is someone here though who flies into a vicious jealous rage anytime anyone brings up Krugman's name. I can't mention any names. I try to fly Krugman under the radar here. I'm scared.
    DARLA: The Internet's Leading Cause of White Dude Butthurt 12 Years and Counting

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    Quote Originally Posted by Darla View Post
    Watermark doesn't have a crush on Krugman he is just smart enough to recognize Krugman's unique brilliance and beautiful mind. There is someone here though who flies into a vicious jealous rage anytime anyone brings up Krugman's name. I can't mention any names. I try to fly Krugman under the radar here. I'm scared.
    LMAO... you flew him too high... Krugman is indeed brilliant, on the topic of economics. His problem lies in the fact that he doesn't talk economics any more. Instead he warps economics by inserting his political beliefs into it. That causes his distorted Keynesian views to be spewed forth on a daily basis in addition to his daily 'I love Republicans' mantra. (<---Sarcasm alert)

    Keynesian economic theory works if done correctly. It just doesn't work the way Krugman pretends it does today.

    Now back to the Aaron Sorkin is a schmuck commentary...
    Quote from Cypress:
    "Scientists don't use "averages". Maybe armchair supertools on message boards ascribe some meaning to "averages" between two random data points. And maybe clueless amatuers "draw a straight line" through two random end data points to define a "trend". Experts don't.

    They use mean annual and five year means in trend analysis. Don't tell me I have to explain the difference to you. "

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    See Mott? It's like he sniffs out the name Krugman!
    DARLA: The Internet's Leading Cause of White Dude Butthurt 12 Years and Counting

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    Quote Originally Posted by Superfreak View Post
    LMAO... you flew him too high... Krugman is indeed brilliant, on the topic of economics. His problem lies in the fact that he doesn't talk economics any more. Instead he warps economics by inserting his political beliefs into it. That causes his distorted Keynesian views to be spewed forth on a daily basis in addition to his daily 'I love Republicans' mantra. (<---Sarcasm alert)

    Keynesian economic theory works if done correctly. It just doesn't work the way Krugman pretends it does today.

    Now back to the Aaron Sorkin is a schmuck commentary...
    Well, I don't think he has a problem sorry!

    We can agree about Sorkin though.
    DARLA: The Internet's Leading Cause of White Dude Butthurt 12 Years and Counting

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    Quote Originally Posted by Darla View Post
    Well, I don't think he has a problem sorry!
    True, but you are just a dumb woman.

    We can agree about Sorkin though.
    yes... total Hollywood douche bag.
    Quote from Cypress:
    "Scientists don't use "averages". Maybe armchair supertools on message boards ascribe some meaning to "averages" between two random data points. And maybe clueless amatuers "draw a straight line" through two random end data points to define a "trend". Experts don't.

    They use mean annual and five year means in trend analysis. Don't tell me I have to explain the difference to you. "

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