So feeling sick and miserable, I wanted a light piece of fluff, and hey look, it’s Aaron Sorkin!

So the movie is framed around three different product launches — the Mac, the NeXT Cube, and the iMac — and if you were to treat it as a literal documentary, it would be genuinely remarkable that all Jobs’ most significant relationships had huge eventful moments in them in the minutes or hours before a product launch.

But of course it’s not really a documentary, it’s really just trying to paint this portrait of Jobs through these few moments. The portrait it paints — an exacting perfectionist, a sociopathic asshole, but also something of a product genius — is extremely familiar by now, but it’s well-executed (Michael Fassbender wisely doesn’t try to really imitate Jobs in any way, Kate Winslet is great as Apple marketing exec Joanna Hoffman, Seth Rogen is a fun Wozniak, and Sorkin’s dialogue is always his strongest point).

The Social Network, I think, transcended the biopic genre to actually redefine who Zuckerberg is to the world; this doesn’t achieve that feat, but of course partly that’s because Jobs is a much larger and more well-known figure in modernity than Zuckerberg was when that movie came out.

Anyway, I’m a sucker for computer history stuff, so a competently executed version of that (mixed in with a movie about a troubled family relationship) is good enough for me.