iSteve (2013)

The life of technology guru and Apple founder, Steve Jobs, told as a comedy.I say "comedy" because that's what the synopsis describes it as, plus it is too farcical to be a drama. However, the movie is hardly funny. There are one or two good spoofs (the Robert Palmer one was pretty good) but these are few and far between and there is nothing hilarious. Mostly pretty stupid, relying on lame in-jokes.So unfunny I initially thought the synopsis was wrong and that this was meant to be a serious biopic. Then the plot development was so inaccurate and over-the-top that this theory went out the window.Ashton Kutcher will be relieved - now there's a worse Steve Jobs movie...

Funny Or Die releases what they call "the first biopic" of the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs.They pride themselves of "being the first" and presents an unlikely tribute to the Apple Chief wherein it presents lots of fun and laughter as Jobs provides an examination of the events of his life from his childhood until his return to Apple Computer more than a decade after he got fired from the company by John Sculley.The 80-minute film stars Justin Long as Steve Jobs who provides narration in the events of his life together with Jorge Garcia,James Urbaniak and Michaela Watkins.It presents many events of his life like his student days at Reed,his friendship with Steve Wozniak,the presentation of the first Apple computer at Homebrew Computer Club,his firing from Apple and many others.Aside from real events of Jobs' life,we also get to see unlikely events of his life such as his friendship with Bill Gates,his love affair with Melinda Gates,his partnership with Commodore Computer,his love for soda drinks and many others.Apparently,this film is a combination of both accuracy and inaccuracy to provide funny moments to the viewer.While people who probably saw this film would somehow dislike it due to the inaccurate events,one must realize that it intends to be a parody of the life of an tech icon who gave the world products that people love.

The movie is not the best movie ever, but it is a good parody of every other Steve Jobs biopic. I think all the factual inaccuracies are totally intentional as it was common for Jobs to take credit intentionally and not for a lot of the innovations present in Apple and non-Apple products. For example, he actually had the vision to save Pixar financially, but he didn't create the lamp short film that was the first Pixar short film, and in the movie it appears as if he was the brains behind the lamp flick in an eccentric way.The movie is very eccentric so its jokes are really convoluted and require a lot of previous knowledge of the real history of personal computing, computer animation movies, virtual reality, etc, etc. The story about the rivalry of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates being partially motivated by Melinda Gates is a total fabrication, so it is just a way to make the story stereotypical as a love triangle totally made up as Steve Jobs was successful romantically too and the differences between the two titans were of other sort being competitors for the graphic OS market.The virtual reality sex scene shown a typical virtual world of the 90's if you were into virtual worlds then showing perfect geometrical solids and primitive rendering techniques. So the movie is a little nostalgic in that.The Commodore's CEO plot to out Jobs of Apple is also totally made up and it is a collage of real facts twisted in really imaginative ways. John Sculley uses Jobs' 'weakness' for sodas to infiltrate Apple as a Pepsico Marketing guy. But at the end he reveals that he never worked for Pepsi and he was a con artist working for Commodore. But everybody knows that Sculley was CEO of Pepsi for real and Jobs lured him into Apple. Again a surrealist joke.But Steve Jobs is sort of a cult figure so at the end who knows if the serious biopics of Steve Jobs are more real. I guess that's the point of the movie in my opinion.

This past week, August 16, 2013, the Steven Jobs movie with Ashton Kutcher was released. I haven't seen it yet but it is supposed to be a serious look at the life of Jobs.This movie, cleverly titled "iSteve", came out first and is just the opposite. In fact in the closing credits it states plainly that although some of the names used were real people, that "literally everything that happened in this story was totally fake." And further, "Point is this story is fictional. Phoney baloney."If that had not been clear as the movie unfolded, a certain scene where Jobs is speaking in his trademark turtleneck shirt of his later life, against a totally black background, and his voice grinds to a halt. Then we see him bent over at the waist and a technician comes over, takes a circuit board out of Jobs' back and works on it to get Jobs back to life should have erased all doubt.Justin Long is iSteve, Steve Jobs, a force of nature in computing starting in the 1970s through virtually the present, although he died in 2011. iSteve gave us such things as the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, things that we can hardly understand how we did without before them.As a comedy of fake events it takes great liberties with real people and real events and twisting them until they bear no resemblance to the truth. Jobs meeting the guru in India, getting the three LSD dots for when he needed inspiration. Bill Gates meeting his eventual wife in Jobs' garage, then riding off with her, sitting behind her on the bicycle. Jobs' inspiration for Pixar coming from his white desk lamp he almost sold when he needed money. And many more.Those looking for a serious movie will be disappointed and should not see this. But for those who enjoy the occasional diversion, in what resembles a 75-minute pseudo-SNL (Saturday Night Live) skit, this movie is a lot of fun. Fun just to see how you can take real events and real people and turn it into a twisted, funny story.SPOILERS: The movie is mostly flashback as Steve Jobs is practicing his talk. As the movie ends he says to us, "You guessed it, this room I am in is actually Heaven."