Review: Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Good movie. Based on the bestselling novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a thriller, and a mystery, and kind of a love story. Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nykvist) is a celebrated investigative journalist forced to resign his job when one his targets successfully sues him for libel. At professional loose ends, he accepts the peculiar offer of Henrik Vagner, a retired captain of Swedish industry, to research a forty year old cold case – the disappearance of Vagner’s beloved niece, Harriet. Meanwhile, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) , the eponymous tattoo girl, has taken an interest in Blomkvist’s libel case; she is an extraordinary computer hacker and investigator herself, and she believes the journalist was set up. Lisbeth is a loner, fierce and brilliant and unafraid of violence; only a foolish man would cross her (and when one does her retribution is extremely satisfying). Her research into Blomkvist’s libel case leads her to discover his current project, and the two of them ultimately team up into a multi-talented investigative odd couple.

The novel is crammed with detail, and it meanders a bit across multiple story lines; the screenplay is satisfyingly stripped down, so the characters can shine through, and they truly glow, especially Noomi Rapace’s Lisbeth. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a thriller with just enough action, and plenty of intrigue; altogether a good time at the movies. (Except- faint of heart take note: this picture is unrated because of some graphically violent and sexually violent images. The filmmakers were afraid the film would be rated NC-17 if they submitted it to the ratings board, so they just went with no rating at all. It is not nearly as graphic as the book, but it is pictures on the screen instead of words on the page, so fair warning.) In Swedish with subtitles, but don’t let that bother you. B+

Review: Hot Tub Time Machine

Funny movie. Dumb movie, but still funny, sometimes really funny. John Cusack, Craig Robinson and Rob Corddry are three old friends who have lost touch, but they get back together when one of them – Corddry’s Lou – attempts suicide. Trying to cheer up their buddy, Nick (Robinson) and Adam (Cusack) whisk him off to a ski resort that was the site of many memorable youthful escapades. Problem is, the resort has become a dump, so they try to salvage their weekend by mixing a few cocktails and settling into a hot tub. Which is a time machine, which takes them back to 1986.

As a time travel movie, this picture has a lot of flaws, but as a wacky buddy comedy, it’s right on target. Rob Corddry pushes the edge of the comic envelope; if you think of him as a "Daily Show" correspondent, you are in for a rip roaring surprise – the guy is fearlessly hilarious. Cusack and Robinson are more underhanded in their humor – their funny lines sort of sneak up on you – but they both easily hold their own against Corddry’s onslaught. There are a lot of eighties jokes, but they are kind of beside the point; the real humor comes when these three guys confront their teenaged selves and have to decide what to do about it. With Clark Duke as Jacob, Adam’s twenty year old nephew who also gets swept back in time, and cameos by Chevy Chase and Crispin Glover; Glover remains one of the most underrated actors in Hollywood. He is terrific here. (Word to the weak of stomach: this isn’t a polite comedy. There are a lot of cringe worthy sight gags. I never had to cover my eyes but the guys in the audience often laughed a lot harder than me; sometimes they laughed really hard at things I didn’t know were funny. I’m just saying.) B

Thinking about the weekend? DVD picks

ON DVD this week:

An Education: Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard star in the story of a young woman who falls for a charming older con man just when she’s achieved her lifelong dream of attending Oxford. Set in London in the 1960s, this charming, unnerving film is all about life choices and consequences, but what really recommends it are the remarkable performances, especially Mulligan and Sarsgaard. (Mulligan was nominated for an Oscar for this picture; she also stars the Wall Street sequel, due out this summer.) Great movie; definitely the best new one out there.

Sherlock Holmes: Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law play Homes and Watson in a movie that is more of a romp than a mystery thriller. Fun, lighthearted film. It did well at the box office and scored a B with audiences, according to Cinemascore, a market research company that tracks that sort of thing. I thought it was entertaining, and a lot of fun to watch Law and Downey, Jr. spar with each other. Sort of like House and Wilson.

Baader Meinhof Complex: Not at all lighthearted, this film takes you inside a terrorist group that wreaked havoc in Germany in the 1970s. Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof were children of the Nazi generation who feared their country’s return to fascism, and with their followers used violent means to try and force change. Baader Meinhof plays out like an art film action picture, but it never loses sight of the seriousness of its subject. It got decent reviews and not much of an audience. I thought it was a fascinating story but just a good film. Should be really interesting to anyone intrigued by terrorism, especially the kind that comes from the inside, the neighbors next door.

Weekend Update 3-26-2010

Hot Tub Time Machine! Who hasn’t been waiting for this film to open? It’s got John Cusack and Darryl (Craig Robinson) from "The Office" and Rob Corddry from "The Daily Show." It’s supposed to be raunchy and hilarious and it’s probably pretty dumb, but what the heck, John Cusack is in it. And there’s time travel. So here’s the basic storyline: a bunch of bored middle aged guys get the opportunity to retroactively put their lives on a different track when they are transported back to the eighties via a magical hot tub. The film has a lot of fun with eighties references, including movies that featured John Cusack; Crispin Glover and Chevy Chase also make appearances. Some critics have loved Hot Tub and others, not so much. Extremely raunchy, keep that in mind – rated R for “strong crude and sexual content, nudity, drug use and pervasive language.” Also opening is the family friendly How to Train Your Dragon; this animated Viking adventure has gotten good reviews, mainly for its visuals and refreshingly natural use of 3D technology. Likely to push Alice in Wonderland off its box office perch, particularly because 3D ticket prices have gone up all over the country, just in time for this movie. Really. 

In limited release, Chloe is an “erotic thriller” starring Amanda Seyfried and Julianne Moore. Best I can tell, it’s terrible. Steamy though. Greenberg officially opened last weekend but if you don’t live in LA or New York you might not have noticed. The Ben Stiller picture about a lonely, unemployed middle aged man who comes to LA to house sit for his successful brother has gotten good reviews, especially for Stiller’s performance. It’s a drama with funny moments. Opening all over the country this weekend. I’ll probably go see it, but only after Hot Tub Time Machine.  Cusack movies are a priority.

Weekend Update 3- 19-2010

Nearly three weeks in and the big news is still Alice, so if you haven’t seen it yet, and you like the 3-D experience, now is the time to go. Next Friday the big scramble for 3-D screens begins with the opening of How to Train Your Dragon. Theater owners are between a rock and a hard place on this: the new arrivals are insisting on the 3-D treatment, but Alice is just making so much money it’s tough to bump it off the screen. The The LA Times reports today that DreamWorks and Paramount are playing hard ball, telling theater owners that if they won’t play Dragon in 3-D, they can’t have the 2-D version either. So there.

This is a big story because there isn’t much else going on. The only movie doing anything in theaters right now is Alice; Green Zone pretty much tanked last weekend in spite of Matt Damon, and the other new entries didn’t impress. This weekend there is some expectation that Bounty Hunter, starring Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston, will attract women who love Aniston and men who love action pictures. Could happen, but it’s not going to top Alice. Diary of a Wimpy Kid is also out this weekend, appealing mostly to tweeners who are familiar with the books; and Repo Men, a sci fi futuristic thriller about some guys who repossess people’s transplanted organs if they can’t pay their medical bills. Just another liberal diatribe about health care. Kidding! That was a joke.


Photo - Disney

Weekend Update March 12, 2010

Hollywood has seasons. There's Awards Season, which finished up last weekend at the Kodak Theater. That’s when you see a lot of serious dramatic films with great performances that Oscar voters like. Coming up is Blockbuster Season, usually kicking off the first weekend in May. Then you get a lot of big budget, special effects laden, full of explosions movies that make loads of money, even if they aren't any good (I’m talkin’ about you, Transformers 2). Between now and then studios release pictures that can’t compete with a blockbuster but aren't likely to win any awards either.

Which brings us to Green Zone, a thriller set in Baghdad in 2003. Matt Damon plays an Army inspector searching for WMDs, but then he stumbles onto some sort of conspiracy thing. Directed by Paul Greengrass of Bourne Identity fame, this has gotten decent reviews: apparently it’s fast paced, bold, and Matt Damon is pretty good. If you like action pictures Green Zone looks entertaining. If you prefer romantic comedy, you might enjoy She's Out of My League, one of those love stories with lots of gross frat boy humor that are real popular right now. This one’s getting mediocre reviews but the two lead players (Jay Baruchel and Alice Eve) are supposed to be fun to watch. There’s also Remember Me, Robert Pattinson’s effort to branch out from his Twilight persona -- but not too far, he’s still all brooding and beautiful. Doesn’t sparkle though. Remember Me is a love story about two broken people (Pattinson and Emilie de Ravin) finding each other, and critics pretty much hate it. Finally there’s Our Family Wedding, a story about a young Latina woman (America Fererra) who surprises her family with her engagement to an African American man (Lance Gross). Hilarity apparently ensues. Also featuring Forrest Whitaker and Carlos Mencia.

If you fell like staying in this weekend, Up in the Air is out on DVD; the film didn't win any Oscars but it's not a bad way to spend a Friday night.  If you're a Michael Moore fan you can rent his latest, Capitalism: A Love Story. It's a very entertaining but extremely ambitious film, sometimes awe inspiring, sometimes confusing.  Also it has old family movies of Michael when he was a little kid.

The wrap: it's likely that Alice in Wonderland will top the box office again this weekend.  If you haven't seen it, now's the time to go because it will have trouble holding onto those 3-D screens when How to Train Your Dragon comes out in a few weeks.  Alice is a fun movie, well worth a trip to the multiplex.


Photo: Universal Pictures 

Ghost Writer

If you like Ewan MacGregor you will like this film; there’s not much else going on. Ghost Writer is a thriller, with a conspiracy twist, all tied up with the latest news headlines about the Iraq war. Pierce Brosnan plays Adam Lang, a Tony Blair style former British Prime Minister who may have been involved in some really bad Blackwater torture kind of stuff; MacGregor is hired to ghost write Lang’s autobiography after the previous ghost writer committed suicide, or suffered a horrible accident. Or was murdered; this is a thriller after all, and anyone who’s ever seen a thriller knows that if a BMW is abandoned on a ferry after it docks in a blinding rainstorm, well, there must have been foul play.

Macgregor’s character (who remains unnamed) comes into the project with detached professionalism, until the mysterious behavior of Lang’s staff and the cryptic notes left behind by his predecessor lead him on a reckless course to discover the truth. He seems torn between terror and outrage, but his behavior is less bold than just dumb, like in a horror movie when the girl hears a noise in the basement and decides to investigate, even though it’s pitch black and the power is out because of a crashing thunderstorm. 

Speaking of storms, it rains a lot on the tiny island off the coast of some place back east (actually filmed in Germany, since Polanski isn’t welcome in the US), where the action all happens in an ultra modern house right on the beach. People are always going out in the rain for no obvious reason, coming back drenched and needing to change clothes. In the rare breaks between downpours a handyman tries to sweep the deck with an old fashioned broom, but the wind is always howling so the debris flies right back. We see that all this weather and isolation are metaphorical but it’s never clear why that matters: it’s either embarrassingly obvious (sweeping under the rug?) or so obscure as to be irrelevant, and I prefer the latter because I want to believe that Polanski is still an interesting director. But in Ghost Writer he has only thrown a noirish, stylistic wash over a meager little story, leaving his actors adrift. Also starring Olivia Williams as Lang’s apparently suffering wife (if you’re interested in Williams skip this film and see An Education instead), and Kim Cattrall in the femme fatale role – her British accent, or attempt at one, is astonishingly bad. It’s hard to imagine how she even got on Polanski’s radar.  B-


Photo - Summit Distribution

Oscar Scandal

Last week Pete Hammond of the Los Angeles Times broke a story about The Hurt Locker: seems Nicolas Chartier, a little known producer on the film, sent an email around to a sizable Hollywood mailing list, trying to scare up Best Picture votes and getting a little snarky about his indy film’s big box office competitor. The Academy didn’t care much for that (according to their website, Academy rules prohibit “casting a negative or derogatory light on a competing film”) so today they slapped Mr. Chartier real hard on the wrist and told him he wasn’t allowed to come to the big party at the Kodak on Sunday.

Now this might seem like a blip on the Oscar season radar, but it’s a little more dramatic than that: in all its history, the Academy has never barred someone from the Awards ceremony because of bad behavior. If nothing else, it makes for some pretty damning press. Tireless Oscar prognosticators are considering whether Chartier’s indiscretion will cost Hurt Locker the big prize, but that seems like a stretch to me, since no one knew who Chartier was before he sent around his emails and all the big names on the picture immediately disavowed his actions. Also when the story broke it was late in the game: the deadline to vote was less than a week away and a big chunk of ballots were already in. There is a rumor that some Academy members have demanded their ballots back, so they can change their choices but, c’mon people, this is America. We vote all the time and we all know the rules. There’s no takebacks.

I feel a little sorry for old Nicholas Chartier. Sure he’s a bull in the Hollywood china shop, but he put up most of the money for Hurt Locker; without him the movie wouldn’t have gotten made. And now, by all accounts, his colleagues on the film are looking the other way when they see him on the street. Tough times in Tinsel Town.

So what do you think? Did Nicholas Chartier step over the line so far that he deserves to miss the show?