Apple founder Steve Jobs had an interesting existence. To put it simply, he did a lot of soul searching as a young man, went on to found Apple and revolutionized modern computing and entertainment before he passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2011.
As soon as Jobs’ time in this world came to an end, studios began rushing to start work on a film based on his life. In the tech world, he who does it first usually fares best, and the same is true about movies.
Directors Aaron Sorkin and Joshua Michael Stern are currently working on films about Jobs, competing to see who can finish first. Unfortunately for them, they’ve already been beaten.
While the public was fixated on the race between Sorkin and Stern to the silver screen, the creative and subversive minds at popular Internet comedy website Funny or Die went ahead and made a movie of their own, titled “iSteve,” which they managed to write in three days and film in five.
The site is revered for their short sketches, featuring celebrities, that usually run about 3- to 5-minutes long, so the concern about the quality of their first feature length movie is fair. Can they handle a full-length movie? Will their audience, so used to quick bursts of hilarity, be patient enough to sit through a 78-minute, 9-second video? Is the movie any good?
“iSteve” feels more like a long Funny or Die video than it does an actual feature film, which is perfectly understandable: It’s not like they were trying to squeeze out a rush job and make people spend money on it in theaters. It can be watched on funnyordie.com while your email inbox and Facebook home page are open in another browser tab, although the film is engaging enough to draw focus on just one tab.
Funny or Die recruited Justin Long to portray Jobs, which might seem like a strange choice … until you remember that he was the face of Apple, for a while — remember the classic “I’m a Mac” commercials?
The movie starts with Jobs in a darkened room, mumbling to himself as he flips through note cards he’s prepared for a keynote speech he has to give the next day. After a janitor reminds Jobs that it’s getting late and maybe he should head home, Jobs notices we, the viewers, and launches into his life story.
One of the early scenes shows Jobs working on some project in his garage when future Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak — hilariously played by Jorge Garcia, best known as Hurley from “Lost” — walks by and stares at Jobs several times before working up the courage to ask, “Hey, feel free to say no, but do you think … that … you might wanna … feel free to say no … hang out sometime, drink some soda, maybe? Feel free to say no.”
Garcia’s recessive depiction of “Woz” throughout the movie is a hilarious jab at the alleged over-glorification of Job’s importance to Apple and the repression of Woz’s historical value in the company. There are many other funny instances when Woz quietly tries to insert himself into a scene that you might not catch without an attentive eye.
Some critics have said that the film drags at times, but there are plenty of different elements that keep “iSteve” at a good pace. Jobs’s drug-using tendencies, the strained relationship between Jobs and Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the strange assertion that Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan is responsible for many of Apple’s innovations all keep the film going and provide many laughs along the way, even if the laughs aren’t as big as those resulting from a big-budget comedy.
“iSteve” may have started as an attempt for publicity and a small “eff you” to Hollywood, but the end result is actually kind of funny and worth at least one viewing, if not more. Either way, suck on this, Sorkin and Stern: Funny or Die got the “Job” done first.