STEVE JOBS: THE MAN IN THE MACHINE (ON DEMAND AND IN THEATRES)

Documentarian, Alex Gibney’s  brazen honesty and prescience, gifts viewers the “good, bad, and ugly” dimensions of Steve Jobs; “adopted visionary”, iconoclastic, unconventional genius; a man whose passing was mourned globally (1956-2011); since his death, his aura has exceeded mythic proportions; an exceptional man whose ambition and lust for technological advancement has changed the world and how we thrive in it .

Gibney leaves no “story”: genealogy, friendships (business and personal) untouched; his petty and egregious treatment of business partner, Steve Wozniak  and Chrisann Brennan who gave him his first child “Lisa”; his megalomania cost him his ouster from “Apple” in 1985; returning “Phoenix  like’’ in 1996, hence the birth of iTunes, iPods, iPods, iPhone, improved MAC; Jobs was infallible, “Magic Midas”, a new age phenomenon.

We have been bludgeoned, inundated with “Jobs” intellectual, filmic paraphernalia: Walter Isaaacson’s weighty biography “Steve Jobs”; Ashton’s Kutcher’s  surprisingly profound portrayal in the 2013 “Jobs” movie; the upcoming Aaron Sorkin/Danny Boyle collaboration, starring Michael Fassbender as the iconic enigma. It was with trepidation that I watched Gibney’s documentary; but instantly fascinated, listening to those who knew the man, loved and shunned him; his lifetime flirtation with Zen, Japan and his guru. His immoral tactics, abuse of Chinese workers; back -dating stock options, tax shelters; his blindness to laws he felt inapplicable to his mightiness; the absence of a philanthropic gene, an anomaly, impenetrably problematic.

Gibney’s core quest as to the “why” of Job’s consolidation of man’s empathy, perpetual grief at his passing; possibly because he informs our success, accessibility in today’s world; we clutch, embrace him with our hands, ears and eyes, a unique intimacy, a connectedness never before experienced; Jobs, the man and the machine, inseparable.

Steve Jobs, although pivotal in his creativeness, was just a man, flawed, tortured, unable to transform his love of Zen to  mankind; his search for inner peace, lacked the power, electricity to touch his heart; a travesty, secondary to, as Nicolas Rapold states “the cultural technological landscape” he leaves in perpetuity.

FOUR & 1/2 STARS!!!!

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