Brandon's Buzz

There’s a bit more action at the record store this week than there has been in the last couple, but this Tuesday’s biggest release comes to us from the film world, where the bona fide frontrunner for this year’s Best Picture Oscar makes landfall on DVD. Dig in:

Nomination ballots for this year’s Academy Awards race are due at week’s end, and you can bet your bippy that a good many of them will be marked with across-the-board votes for
The Social Network, David Fincher’s dazzling dramatization of the controversial origins of the global phenom now known as Facebook. Working with a typically terrific (and vividly verbose, natch) script from the masterful, magnificent Aaron Sorkin — whose efforts here are damn near certain to land him the golden statuette he has long deserved — Fincher assembles a crackerjack cast to bring this story to life, including the staggering Jesse Eisenberg (who so flawlessly and fabulously crawls into the skin of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that it’s quite easy to take for granted what a taut tightrope he is walking in portraying a character who is not always easy to like) and the amazing Andrew Garfield (as Zuckerberg’s college pal and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who finds himself frozen out of the company after Mark is seduced by the bells and whistles of Silicon Valley), and coaxes from all this post-adolescent agita a riveting yarn about youth, deception, and what it truly means to be a friend in today’s isolated world. (Incidentally, the great character actor David Selby — best known for his starring roles in Dark Shadows and Falcon Crest — appears in Network as an attorney who engages in several blisteringly brilliant scenes of verbal jousting with Eisenberg, and we discussed his role in this film when he
popped into Brandon’s Buzz Radio last October.)

Also noteworthy this week:

• Boho folk-pop icon Edie Brickell returns this month with two new projects; the first of them — a self-titled solo album — drops this week.

 

• They made a big splash early last year with their debut single
  “Keep On Lovin’ You” (not to be confused with the REO Speedwagon classic of the same title, but a smash nonetheless at country radio last spring); this week, Meghan Linsey and Josh Scott Jones — better known nowadays as Steel Magnolia — follow it up with their full-length eponymous debut.

 

• Funky alt-rock band Cage the Elephant are back with
  their sophomore effort, Thank You Happy Birthday.

 

• Finally, the DVD debut of one of 2010’s most hotly-debated films slipped past me last week, so I don’t want to miss my second chance to recommend to you the mind-bending “mockumentary” Catfish. (I say it that way because, even though the filmmakers present this as a true story, replete with herky-jerky, you-are-there camerawork, there has since been a great deal of argument over whether the events that unfold over the course of this movie could have possibly happened.)
  I won’t spoil the second-act shocker which sends Catfish hurtling on an entirely new trajectory, but I will say this, regardless of the film’s veracity: if The Social Network gives us a peek through the keyhole at how this new online paradigm through which we are navigating the course of our lives came to exist in the first place, Catfish stands as a glorious, gorgeously garish glimpse at said paradigm’s shattering emotional, physical, and spiritual ramifications.

names dropped with reckless abandon: "The Social Network", Aaron Sorkin, Andrew Garfield, Cage the Elephant, David Fincher, David Selby, Edie Brickell, Jesse Eisenberg, Joshua Scott Jones, Mark Zuckerberg, Meghan Linsey, REO Speedwagon, Steel Magnolia