On July 1, 2013, Google Reader died at the tender age of eight. It was a beloved RSS feed reader to millions, bringing light into their lives via personalized content pulled from all over the web. Best of all, you didn’t have to share it with anyone else. It was the ADHD bibliophile’s oasis.
Look, I know not a lot of people are going to mourn it, but I was devastated when Google announced that it was going to discontinue its reader. Even though I jumped ship to The Old Reader soon after, lest my beloved reader be wrenched from my fingers, Google Reader still holds a special place in my heart.
Anyways, here are five movies to watch in between your search for a new RSS reader.
The Internship (2013)
Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson play two salesmen who are laid off from a wristwatch company when the company president realizes that people now check their cell phones for the time. They ambitiously apply to become Google interns to avoid having to work dead-end sales jobs at senior homes and mattress warehouses. Amazingly but expectedly, they are hired for the summer and compete with a bunch of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed students half their age to gain permanent positions.
Did you know that Google did NOT pay for the product placement in this movie? Director Shawn Levy just has a thing for the Silicon Valley giant, famed for its free food and creative floor plans. But if Google had known this would be the finished product, they might have paid to be removed from the movie. Not because The Internship is not a bad movie, but because of the lack of originality. In structure, it resembles an underdog sports movie: a group of misfits coming together as a team, overcoming inexplicable prejudice from the competition, finding the meaning of life, etc. It’s Dodgeball, just with nerds instead of pirates. Be prepared for two hours of bootlicking.
The Social Network (2009)
Google killed Reader because of the spread of social networking. This wasn’t entirely unexpected since Google had been coddling its own dear social network for ages: Google+. Remember the fuss and disappointment when that was opened? The problem was that Reader didn’t fit into the social creature template that Google was trying to become to compete with Facebook, Twitter, and the like. Unfortunately, the way content is consumed in Reader doesn’t lend itself well to sharing. I don’t want anyone to know about all the makeup blogs and webcomics I read each day, and nobody cares about that either, so boo. Anyways, The Social Network is about how Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) came to create and operate Facebook while screwing his best friend over, smoozing with the founder of Napster (Justin Timberlake), and becoming an asshole so not to get himself mistaken for Michael Cera all the time.
Supposedly, the factiousness of this film is limited to the accuracy of replication in Zuckerberg’s sweatshirt wardrobe, but I still found The Social Network to be as arrogant and brilliant as Eisenberg’s character. Make no mistake: none of the main characters come off in a good light here, especially after things get dirty and lawyers wade into the undergraduate chaos. Regardless, it is an excellent movie that allows you to look both up to and down upon the players that brought Facebook to life.
The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
Like rats on a sinking ship, Reader users fled in March 2013 when Google announced its imminent shutdown by exporting their feed data to different readers. Feedly, another RSS reader, had 4 million users before Google announced the shutdown. By the end of May, Feedly had 12 million users. My own alternative reader, The Old Reader, buckled under the influx of new users and had thousands-long queues of users trying to import their data for a week.
It’s New Years Eve on a cruise ship, when a freak wave flips the ship after a round of Auld Lang Syne. While the sheeple huddle in the inverted dining room, a small group of survivors slowly traverse the soggy ceilings to escape the sinking ship. Of course, the dining room finally bursts and the ballroom guests try scrambling up aluminum Christmas tree ladders, which collapse under their weight.
The survivors in The Poseidon Adventure are distinguished by their ethnicity or profession: the preacher, the retired prostitute, the Jewish couple, and so on. They invariably run into obstacles that thin their numbers. Heroic sacrifices are made. The plot pieces are extremely predictable and thus extremely relaxing.
The Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999)
In the seventies, Steve Jobs (Noah Wyle) and Steve Wozniak (Joey Slotnick) are at UC Berkely. Jobs also has a beard. Bill Gates (Anthony Michael Hall) attends Harvard. They tinker with computers, frolic through psychedelic fields, and build empires. Naturally, some things and people are going to get overlooked in the technological revolution. The revolution is about pretty GUIs, shapely cases, and Ridley Scott’s Apple commercial. Nobody cares about DOS or Google Reader.
In contrast to The Social Network, the persons portrayed in Pirates of Silicon Valley found their portrayals to be true beyond their wardrobe choices. Bill Gates found that his “portrayal was reasonably accurate” and Steve Jobs stated that Noah Wyle had done “a good job” of impersonating him. But this is no documentary. The movie plays out like a horror show: Gates and Jobs both exhibit ghastly manners throughout, ranging from frat boy antics to egomania, while Wozniak narrates as a tired spectator in a Hawaiian shirt. One never fully connects with any of the characters as the film jumps from amusing anecdote to amusing anecdote. Perhaps life is stranger than fiction, but with this movie, it’s hard to believe.
The Red Planet (2000)
What happens when a planet is no longer able to support human life? You look for a new one, terraform it, and inhabit it. The same applies to RSS readers; you test as many as possible and tweak them to be as close to Google Reader as possible… but if it doesn’t live up to your standards, discard it. Unfortunately, planets aren’t as easily accessible as readers.
In 2056, humanity has pushed a dying Earth to its ecological limit, so the nations of the world have been terraforming Mars by seeding it with oxygen-producing algae. When the oxygen levels drop inexplicably, a team of scientists, including two played by Carrie-Anne Moss and Val Kilmer, are sent to the Red Planet so that they can rectify the situation.
NASA was asked to serve as the science advisor for this movie but, after reading the script, concluded that there was nothing they could do to ensure scientific accuracy. This allowed the director to do things like call beetles “nematodes”, which aren’t even part of the insect family. However, that is my biggest complaint about this movie. It’s formulaic, yes, but there are a few interesting setpieces: an astronaut when his oxygen is about to run out, and an astronaut devoured by the ravenous indigenous life on Mars. The Red Planet is a solid, if unmemorable, B-movie.
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