Huffington Post:
it really bums me out that The Man In the Machine makes little attempt to portray someone who was, by most accounts, a complex, iconic, but all-too-flawed man who, over the course of his career, could be both inventor and thief, monk and businessman, brat and sage, tyrant and beloved leader, and managed to use those conflicting traits to both change the world and create the most valuable, influential, and admired company on the planet.
Instead, The Man In the Machine is focused largely on the thesis that Jobs was always and only a jerk, that people who enjoy Apple products and admire Jobs are idiots and cult members, and that the computer revolution that was born of Jobs’ vision must inevitably contain the same ugly darkness Gibney feels is Jobs’ defining trait, despite any evidence to the contrary.
This review of the documentary tracks with how I felt about it. Not only was it simply inaccurate in places, it seemed to have its premise in place long before the facts were in evidence. It had Joe Nocera, a journalist who famously wrote “Apple hit pieces” for the New York Times, exclaim he didn’t understand the allure of the iPhone. “It’s just a phone!” That’s like not understanding the sex appeal of a Ferrari because it’s “just” a car. Overall, even though I had high hopes for the movie because of the director’s previous work, I was very disappointed in this documaentary.
Gibney bangs films out at a ridiculous rate. He’s made documentaries about Jobs, Scientology, Sinatra, James Brown, Lance Armstrong, WikiLeaks, and the Catholic clerical abuse scandal in the space of a few years. There’s no way he’s giving these subjects the attention they deserve which is probably why most of them play like personality profiles.
Everyone has to step back and understand that documentaries and bio pics are NEVER, EVER accurate. Get over it and stop acting like we are watching movies for the first time.
Swimming against the stream for the sake of swimming against the stream?
If it is that inaccurate, that calls into question his other work. That would be a hard thing, because his Scientology documentary had much in it that I saw myself when I visited the center in Washington, DC. A friend of mine paid for some courses, and I went out of curiosity and because of my friend’s earnestness. They used just about every trick in the cult recruitment book to get me to join. I never got as deep into it as the people in the documentary (a few days of me laughing at them in their faces does not make me an expert), so now I wonder how much of that is true…