Funny or Die's 'iSteve' Is Driving Apple Fanboys Nuts
Nobody finds Funny or Die's very unfunny new feature length film, iSteve, less funny than all the Apple nerds who were very quick to point out all of the movie's techie inaccuracies within hours of its debut on the comedy site late Tuesday night. Here's an editor at Apple site 9to5Mac, who also called iSteve "the worst movie I've ever seen" and "pretty distasteful in some areas," zooming in on, of all things, anachronistic computer parts in a satirical Internet movie:
wow cool, I didn’t know they had USB, serial, IDE, and DDR RAM in 1976! #iSteve twitter.com/MichaelSteeber…
— Michael Steeber (@MichaelSteeber) April 17, 2013
Seth Weintraub, another 9to5Mac writer, pokes fun at iSteve — a parody of the multiple Steve Jobs origin stories in the works in Hollywood — for getting the wrong version of an early Mac: "They couldn't even get an original Macintosh http://cl.ly/image/0v3s3Q471h03 … Nice 'superdrive,'" Weintrarum tweeted. (Here's what the real deal looks like, if you're joining in on the nitpicking.) After calling the movie "pretty bad," Weintraub goes on to call iSteve "historically inaccurate in many, many ways."
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It's possible that all these inaccuracies are a part of, you know, satire that the rest of us not-so-specific Apple aficionados can appreciate. Or — and this is much, much more likely — maybe the folks at Funny or Die just don't care about those kinds of details for a film they rushed out online to beat the serious biopics to theaters. (The Ashton Kutcher film has been delayed after apparent bad test screenings.) But iSteve may be so unfunny that it can't even get away with the it's-just-satire excuse. Take it from someone who suffered through 45 minutes: This Funny or Die "exclusive" (whisper voice) isn't even worth watching for five minutes. It took until minute 16 for me to crack a smile — a pity chuckle for one of the many "Steve Wozniak is a big loser that nobody care about or remembers" jokes. And I'm not the only one who feels that way. Fortune's Philip Elmer-DeWitt, who valiantly sat through the entire "film," gave it a terrible review: "The movie feels like an over-long Saturday Night Live skit that never quite gets rolling," he writes. Lots of people on social media are saying they gave up after a few minutes. So, yeah, iSteve is neither funny nor "hilariously inaccurate" — it's just bad.