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Welcome to How to Spend $20, BOP’s look at the latest Blu-ray discs and DVDs to hit stores nationwide. This week: Mark Zuckerberg has zero friends, Richard Dreyfuss does a Jaws redo and Comedy Central roasts The Hoff.

Pick of the Week

For people who can follow fast conversations: The Social Network

My favorite movie of the year, The Social Network threw me for a loop over the summer when I found myself thoroughly enjoying something I figured would, at best, whelm me. I mean, come on, a movie about Facebook? How good could that be? Had I not had some fairly insistent friends by the side, I don’t know that I would have seen the thing much before its home media release. I liked the trailer enough, yet one too many assumed negativities got the best of me: Justin Timberlake would be a distraction, the storyline would fail to sustain and, well, the general idea that The Social Network wouldn’t live up to the hype.

Well, I was wrong on all three. And further, The Social Network was way better – and I mean waaaay better – than I mentally gave Aaron Sorkin credit for. If Charlie Wilson’s War was the cinematic equivalent of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, then The Social Network is The West Wing. It’s just so bloody fantastic.

For one, Jesse Eisenberg’s spot-on Zuckerberg (or what I assume to be a spot-on Zuckerberg) is exactly that. His exhausting yap, twitches, eye flickers, frozen stares and, yeah, forlorn looks are wonderful. Of the Globe nominees for Best Actor that I’m familiar with – Eisenberg, Colin Firth and Mark Wahlberg – Eisenberg would bank the win were I in charge. Firth’s character errs too on the side of, oh, whiny bitch to garner any sympathy from me. And Wahlberg was out-acted by three of his co-stars in The Fighter, so…





Moreover, Einsenberg is backed by an impressive ensemble. This includes Andrew Garfield, Rooney Mara and, yes, Justin Timberlake. Timberlake, in fact, is one of the most refreshing things about the movie at large. He plays suave, prima donna way entirely too well, and for him not to be contending with Garfield on Sunday for supporting actor makes zero sense.

For the haters who didn’t give this one a chance because they figured it to be a movie “about Facebook,” be rest assured it’s anything but. The Social Network is about Facebook as much as Little Fockers is funny. Facebook is merely the backdrop, a framing device, if you will, for a juicy story devised from mostly equal parts creativity, jealousy and betrayal. Thoroughly entertaining throughout, the two-hour runtime just zips by.

Disc includes: Making-of documentary (feature length), four featurettes, early cut of Trent Reznor’s soundtrack, “Ruby Skye Sequence” multi-angle interactive feature

For people who’ve led a personal ban against swimming in the ocean since about 1975: Piranha

Here’s a fun piece of trivia for you. Richard Dreyfuss, as we know, starred in Jaws as ichthyologist Matt Hooper. Piranha, the original 1978 piece and not the remake that this post is concerned with, came out three years after Jaws and is probably inspired (largely?) by Jaws. Piranha 3-D, as I said, is a remake of 1978’s Piranha. And lo and behold, Dreyfuss appears in the fish disaster movie as a near-reincarnation of Hooper. Wild!

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