Steven Rea's Picks

Steve Jobs: Compare and Contrast

Danny Boyle and Aaron Sorkin's Steve Jobs isn't the only film treatment of the Apple visionary out there. For a more comprehensive (and perhaps confounding) picture of the man, here are two more titles to consider. Plus, a YouTube video of Jobs' 2005 commencement address to the graduates at Stanford University.

Jobs (2013) A quickie biopic with none other than master thespian Ashton Kutcher in the role of the Apple co-founder. Director Joshua Michael Stern hits the Jobsian timeline's significant blips, but never mind probing for psychological meaning, or motive. Wearing wire-rims, a beard and carrying himself with a stooped, marionette-like gait, Kutcher looks the part (more than Michael Fassbender does, actually), but it's still Steve Jobs lite. Very lite, like the new MacBook.

Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine (2015) Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney takes things personally - at least he takes Jobs personally, offering a penetrating look at the Silicon Valley tycoon and his impact on the culture, the way we communicate and collect information. Reflecting on the worldwide outpouring of grief over Jobs' death in 2011, Gibney considers the epic contradictions of the man: a Buddhist, a Bob Dylan fanatic, a lover of design, a cutthroat businessman who eliminated his company's charitable giving and stood by while workers in China toiled for low wages and long hours in environs that made them physically sick. And still Gibney depends on his iPhone, as do millions of others.

Steve Jobs' Stanford Commencement Address (2005) More than 23 million YouTube viewers have watched Jobs, a Reed College dropout, tell three autobiographical stories to the California university's sun-baked grads, finishing with a directive Jobs found on the back cover of the final issue of his treasured Whole Earth Catalog: "Stay hungry, stay foolish."

In the spring of 2005, Sorkin got a call from Jobs asking whether he'd help out with the speech he was going to give at Stanford.

"I really didn't do much more than correct typos," Sorkin says, noting that the fact that Jobs split his speech into three parts, and that Sorkin split Steve Jobs into three parts, is pure coincidence. Watch on www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc