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by: Joshua Desjardins


The movie, “Jobs,” directed by Joshua Michael Stern, written by Matt Whiteley, and starring Ashton Kutcher as the late Steve Jobs, has received a lot of negativity by many critics. But I must say that I enjoyed the film as Jobs was a revolutionary reminder to always be one’s best, which is exactly what the movie inspires us to do. Ashton,Kutcher, of course, has earned well deserved rave reviews for his portrayal of Jobs.

As an Apple employee who never had the opportunity to meet my “boss-of-all-bosses,” I don’t know what Steve was like except from watching the many keynote speeches he gave before introducing a new product.  Now, it was well known that Steve took casual Fridays a little too seriously with his jeans and black turtleneck style, but Kutcher not only took on Jobs’ passion for detail, he even walked like him to an extraordinary degree.  If Ashton’s name doesn’t at least get a mention during Oscar season next year, I would be very surprised.

Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak was very funny and his performance sincerely heartfelt.  I read recently that Woz himself thought Gad’s portrayal was “good,” but he couldn’t say much about the film as he is currently in talks with the brilliant writer, Aaron Sorkin (West Wing, Newsroom, etc.) about another film adaptation concerning Steve’s life (which will apparently be based on Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs).

This all being said, I would highly recommend this film to those who are deeply inspired by Jobs’ work which is really anyone who owns a Macintosh, iPad, iPhone, or even the iPod that put Apple back on the map in 2001. However, I would warn that the movie is more about Apple as a company and not so much about the life of Steve Jobs himself.  Major events in Jobs’ life such as being adopted as a child, journeying to India and what he learned from his experience there, even naming the Apple Lisa, after his own daughter, are brief mentions in the film’s script that any audience member could easily miss had they not known going into the theater.  Even the time period after Steve finds himself being removed as CEO from Apple in 1985 to his return in 1996 after Apple buys their second company, NeXT Computer, was simply a 30-second montage in which we learn nothing about what Jobs discovered during this period of his life.  Yet, in his famous speech at Stanford University in 2005, Steve said that “the heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again; less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”  It wasn’t until a young Jony Ive (played by Giles Matthey) appeared on screen that he reminded us—and Jobs—what Apple was all about: enriching the lives of the common consumer by making the BEST of what technology has to offer.

So although I feel this movie should have been retitled “Apple” rather than “Jobs,” it serves to remind us to “think different,” which is what this AMAZING inventor was all about!