I still haven't seen this movie. Maybe I should get on that.

Nitpick: her name is actually Rooney Mara, not Mara Rooney. Which is fucking confusing, so I can understand.

While we're on the topic: Armand Hammer. That's his ACTUAL NAME. It's like naming your kid Dove Bar.

That's also affected by Fincher's propensity to have a throw-away character have the last line of their one scene be something tremendously intriguing. Meaningful look. Cut.

One correction:

The Hall of the Mountain King sequence was NOT shot in tilt shift.  Nor was it motivated by Fincher wonkery.  Long story short, they shot at the real Henly-on-Thames event but they were not allowed to put their actors in the water.  Nor were they allowed to change the scoreboard in crowd shots, or add anything saying "2004" on it. Early on they knew that many of those shots would have to be composits. They also needed  the scene to tell 2 story points at the same time: 1) Facebook goes international, and 2) The Winklevi decide to sue.  So they needed the scene but they needed to get over some real logistical issues.

Fincher decided to shoot elements and layer them, and do a shallow defocus entirely in post to essentially blur out any incriminating evidence.  It produced a tilt shift like effect, but absolutely none of it was done in camera, nor was it conceived as such when they shot.  The directive to use the music was Fincher's choice, and he and Trent went back and forth on the interpretation.  The blu-ray does a side by side comparison of the original track and its...startling.

I wrote it before you guys got to that part.  I was reacting to comments earlier in the commentary.

I didn't much like this movie. Mainly because the central character is an unlikeable douchebag and the film never seems to know how to handle it. It never seeks to explain why he's acting the way he does and what motivates him - he appears to be a dick because he wants to be. He's a borderline sociopath. The film seems to want to counteract this by making all the people he's up against equally unlikeable. Then at the end the film wants the audience to feel sorry for him, and this was a bit too forced and sudden for my liking.

Great commentary dudes - would like to hear more commentaries on Fincher and Ridley Scott films if you ever get the time.

Just a quick addendum - The Insider (Michael Mann) is another "recent period" movie made just after the actual events portrayed in the movie. In fact, the time period between the events depicted in The Insider and the movie is even shorter than The Social Network.