The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

It had to happen.  Steig Larsson's Millennium Trilogy has been far too popular a book series to simply get the film treatment in Larsson's native Sweden.  Even though the Swedish version was released in 2009 and featured an excellent performance from Noomi Rapace, it was inevitable that Hollywood would adapt the material as fast as it could with a high-profile director and cast.  Interestingly, the titular female part in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo went to relative newcomer Rooney Mara.  How will she stack up as a character that so many people have come to love from the books?

Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is the recently disgraced journalist/editor of Millennium magazine, because this is a science fiction story where magazines are still important publications.  Mikael is basically ruined because he lost a libel case.

Glasses off: James Bond.  Glasses on: incompetent reporter.

At his lowest, Mikael receives an unusual job offer from Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer); Henrik wants Mikael to investigate the murder of his beloved granddaughter, Harriet, in exchange for information that will allow Mikael to clear his name and revive his career.  Sounds fair enough, right?  Well, Harriet disappeared forty years ago and her body was never found. Henrik suspects his own extended family, who own the island where they live, because they are the only ones who would have a motive to kill the girl.  Also, on the fateful day she disappeared, there was a car accident that blocked the only bridge in and out of town; Harriet was alive and well when the accident occurred, but was gone before the road was clear.  Sweet!  It's an old school, closed-door mystery!

It's a mystery that involves framed, dried flowers and a lack of wall space.  Thrilling...?

When he was hired, Mikael got to see the extensive background check Henrik's people had done on him; and by "extensive," I mean "obviously stepping over the line, into an invasion of privacy."  Still, Mikael knows good work when he sees it, so he contacts and hires the person who learned so much about him, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), to be his research assistant.  Lisbeth is rather abrasive, but she is extremely bright and is a skilled computer hacker.  Pretty soon, the two of them have dusted off a forty year-old mystery and connected it to a series of brutal murders.  They apparently didn't think about how much danger that puts them in, especially if Henrik is right and the killer is one of the few people with them on that island.

Luckily, Lisbeth is the human equivalent of the honey badger

The acting in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is good all-around.  I like Daniel Craig, and it was interesting to see him in a relatively action-free role.  He doesn't have quite the charisma or exude danger like he does in other movies, but he comes across as a direct, intelligent person here.  I will point out, though, that the way he wore his glasses when he was thinking --- hanging off his face, like a chinstrap --- was a ridiculous choice that I have never seen replicated in nature.  Or libraries.  Craig had the easy role in the film, though.  Rooney Mara had the tough one, and I'm not saying that because of her unfortunate bangs and bleached eyebrows.

Shouldn't she accessorize with neck bolts?

This is an incredibly difficult role to pull off; she has to be obviously smart, but emotionally detached, and yet she still has to be naive and emotional --- she is both vulnerable and a warrior.  It is a role full of contradictions, and Mara was very good at expressing them.  Time (and an adaptation of the next film in the series) will tell if Mara winds up being a better Lisbeth Salander than Noomi Rapace, but her varied performance was deserving of her Oscar nomination.  Of course, those two are just the primary characters; there were a handful of other important actors in this film.  Christopher Plummer turned in yet another solid supporting role; he has been on a roll for the past few years, hasn't he?  I wish he was given a little more time to emote on-camera --- his character is the only one with a true emotional investment in what is happening, after all --- but he did a good job with the time he was given. 

Robin Wright was fine as Mikael's co-worker/occasional lover.  I've never been a big fan of her work, but I liked the nonchalance with which she approached her relationships.  Stellan Skarsgård did not give his best performance here(I blame the character more than the actor), but he did deliver some great monologues.  It is to his credit that he was able to steal attention away from Mara in his major scenes.  While I have to admit that Skarsgård doesn't often star in good movies, I think he is very talented and we see glimpses of that toward the end of this film.

"I almost made King Arthur mediocre"

Yorick van Wageningen played a pretty repulsive character, and his performance was suitably unsavory.  In any other movie, he would have been a major villain, but this story casts him in a fairly small, but memorable, part.  You might also recognize Goran Visnijc in an inconsequential role, Julian Sands as a young Christopher Plummer, while Joely Richardson and Geraldine James get to be unfriendly to every single person they encounter onscreen. 

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo marks an interesting moment in the career of director David Fincher.  This is the first time I have watched one of his movies and noticed how differently he would have handled it earlier in his career.  In many ways, this film could have played out like Se7en, and that would have been perfectly fine because that's an awesome movie.  In other words, Fincher could have made this a plot-driven film with a variety of camera gimmicks to show off his skills.  For better or for worse, Fincher has embraced a more subtle touch, focusing more on the primary actors in his films recently.  Sure, that sounds good on paper, but I don't think anyone will argue that Brad Pitt was more fun to watch in Benjamin Button than in Fight Club.  Fincher did a great job with Rooney Mara and centered ...Dragon Tattoo around her performance.  He could have gone for more graphic violence, especially in the rape scene, but he focused more on the aftermath. 

He could have exploited the sex in the script, but aside from a little bit of nipple ring-flashing, he went out of his way to not sensationalize it --- and this is a guy who directed Madonna videos, so I'm thinking his restraint was intentional.  I also liked his use of the score (once again contributed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) --- it was well-suited for the mood Fincher was establishing.  Technically, I can't think of anything David Fincher did wrong with the direction of this film.

Of course, that's not exactly a glowing recommendation, is it?  The actors are all pretty good, and Rooney Mara's performance borders on greatness.  The story's pacing was fine and I liked the overall mood of the film.  It was just missing something for me.  Did I want the violence to be more graphic?  Maybe, although I was relieved that the rape was as brief as it was. 

Not this scene.  This was awesome.

Was it the weird blend of European and American sensibilities?  Not exactly, although I was thrown off by the fact that everyone spoke English, but apparently wrote in Swedish.  Was it the weird James Bond-esque opening sequence that looked like a Bond girl covered in crude oil?  No, I was okay with that, especially since it's the closest thing to a new Bond title sequence I've seen in a while.  What did bother me about this movie is that it is a mystery with only one major actor in the suspect pool; I wonder if the villain will be the Swedish character actor I've never seen before, or the guy that's been in Summer blockbusters?  I hate when my recognition of actors undermines a mystery. 

I also have problems with James Bond needing stitches.  Wuss.

I had also hoped that the climax of the story --- while true to the source material, it should be noted --- would be less anticlimactic.  In fact, the whole story seems to be building to a conflict between Lisbeth, Mikael and the killer, and we never really get a great moment like that.  Is the problem with the source material or the filmmaker's vision?  That's debatable, but I found the climax to be disappointing and the falling action to be less than triumphant.

On the other hand, this is a better movie than the 2009 Swedish version.  If you're going to remake a movie, especially so soon after the original, it is important to improve upon the formula.  Daniel Craig was definitely a step up in the acting department from Michael Nyqvist and Rooney Mara was about as good as (although less edgy than) Noomi Rapace.  I also preferred the small changes made in this version, like what led Mikael to meeting Lisbeth.  Fincher did not show off much with the cinematography, but his direction was still felt more than that of the Swedish director.  I feel a little guilty for having such high expectations for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  It's a Hollywood remake of a Swedish film (that I've seen) that is based on a work of popular fiction (which I normally despise as a genre).  Still, I think that the acting and direction upgrades more or less negate the anticlimax.  I thought that the Swedish Millennium films dropped rapidly in quality with each sequel, but this gives me hope that Fincher and co. will be able to improve on those films, as well.

The Social Network

...or, as Maddox has pointed out on his Facebook page, at all; Facebook has a limit of 5,000 friends.  Way to go, marketing people.

The Social Network is the semi-biographical story of Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and brains behind Facebook, based on the book The Accidental Billionaires.  After his girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara), broke up with him for completely understandable reasons, Harvard undergrad Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) does what comes natural for a computer nerd; he gets drunk, blogs about what a bitch Erica is, and does some computer programming.  If that isn't what you do when you're heartbroken, maybe you didn't go to Harvard.  Mark's programming is pretty genius, even though he's drunk; he hacks into Harvard's varied databases and finds pictures of basically every girl on campus --- his impromptu website pits random Harvard girl against random Harvard girl, with the users voting as to which girl is hotter.  It's just a harmless drunken prank until Mark's site crashes Harvard's network after only two hours online, and not anywhere near peak using hours.  This gets Mark placed on academic probation for hacking the school's databases and in the doghouse with just about every woman is Massachusetts.  It also plants the seed for a website that will encapsulate the college experience.  People want to know who's doing what, with whom, and see the pictures, right?  Well, Mark designs the website that can do all that and more!  Along the way, he manages to royally piss off his closest friends, as well as the Harvard upper crust that dangled social elitism before him.  But why does Mark do all this?

The Social Network has two amazing things going for it.  The first is the script by Aaron Sorkin, writer of The West Wing and Sports Night (one of my favorites).  The other is Trent Reznor's score.  Before I go into Sorkin's writing, I have to show my appreciation for the music.  While I am a fan of Nine Inch Nails, I did not expect to be fully aware of the score in this movie; it is really good, and the story fits Reznor's traditional themes of rage and not fitting in like a glove.  Sorkin's script is about what you would expect from the man; it is fast-paced and witty.  I really like Sorkin, but he has a tendency to go for the witty instead of the heartfelt.  This movie is full of razor sharp barbs from Zuckerberg, but it is surprisingly sparse on heart.  That is nitpicking, of course; when you have a script that is this charming and witty, it sometimes feels like a low blow to point out that there really isn't much of an emotional core to the film.  Even without any moments that really hit home, this is a very entertaining script that manages to make business deals and computer programming both fun and thrilling.  Kudos to Sorkin.

I have no problem with the acting in this movie.  I generally enjoy Jesse Eisenberg (ever since the wonderfully abrasive Rodger Dodger), and it's nice to see him in a film that separates him from Michael Cera's geek-chic.  Eisenberg really showed off his promise here, delivering some truly fantastic dialogue (which I knew he was capable of), as well as displaying the most emotional depth I have seen from him, to date.  Eisenberg really carried the picture with his successful portrayal of the too-cool-for-school Zuckerberg, although there are several notable supporting cast members, including Andrew Garfield, Rooney Mara, Justin Timberlake (as the founder of Napster), Rashida Jones, and Brenda Song (who you might know from The Suite Life of Zack & Cody...or not).

How lucky is this jerk to be played by a former boy-band heartthrob?

Actually, Garfield gave a pretty solid supporting performance, but his character was painted as the nerd among nerds, which made him less likable.  I thought the antagonists were played decently well, too, even if Armie Hammer got credit for both of the Winklevoss twins; to play twins, a body double was used for one of the characters, with Armie's head transplanted on in post-production.  Armie was okay, as was Max Minghella as the Winklevoss's supporter.

That is part of the problem I have with The Social Network.  As much as I enjoy Eisenberg's performance, I was not terribly impressed with the rest of the cast.  It's not that I doubt the talent of up-and-comers like Andrew Garfield (the next Spider-Man) or Rooney Mara (Lisbeth in the American version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo).  I just don't see Sorkin's script as a launching point for either talent.  This is a film that focuses almost solely on the main character.  It was fun to watch, granted, but seeing somebody be a clever asshole for two hours doesn't carry the weight of a character that actually forms relationships within a film.  There is a moment, toward the end of the film, that tries its best to make up for the lack of emotion in this movie, but it is just too little too late for me.

I'm not going to lie...Facebook is pretty addictive, and the story behind it is pretty interesting.  I acknowledge that this film over-dramatizes parts of the story, and I am more than willing to agree that this is a timely film.  Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that the film is totally successful.  I think this movie wanted to be so much more important than it really was (kind of like Sorkin's Charlie Wilson's War) that it lost sight of what made it special in the first place.  This shouldn't have been a film about how cool or clever or appealing Mark Zuckerberg is/was/should be; it should have focused on the importance of friends and the irony of a social networker losing his only friends.

David Fincher is turning out to be a pretty reliable director (I haven't seen Zodiac yet, though), which surprises me.  I thought he was only able to tell fractured narratives, but The Social Network was pretty appealing.  I'm not a huge fan of the narrative split between present and past --- it kind of takes away the drama when you know the gist of what will happen --- but I liked the way Fincher handled the story.  It definitely would not have worked nearly as well as a chronological narrative.  He handled the actors pretty well, too.  I was a little worried about him after the horriborning The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but it looks like David Fincher, prestige picture director is here to stay for a while.

The Social Network might end up being one of the definitive movies of this generation.  That's kind of sad.  When you take a step back, this is a movie about emotional disconnect and business distrust; that may be a sign of the times, but it sure as hell isn't reassuring.  The script is pretty fantastic, but the lack of appealing secondary characters hinders this story.  It's a good effort, but it yearns for greatness that it doesn't quite reach.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

The horror franchise "reboot" trend is an understandable one.  Most horror franchises start with a low-budgeted surprise hit movie, and the sequels add gore and special effects, but never match the effect of the original movie or idea.  I totally get why movie producers would want to scrap all the continuity and baggage from years of lame sequels and try to start anew.  Friday the 13th, Halloween, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre have all had reboots/reimaginings in the past few years, so breathing new life into Freddy Kreuger seemed inevitable.  Personally, I would have preferred the wish-it-would-but-never-gonna-happen Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash to have been made, but that's just me: a fan of awesomeness.

The story begins with Dean (Kellan Lutz) nodding asleep while at a diner.  He doesn't want to sleep because he is having some nasty nightmares, but we don't get much insight into them here.  When Dean's girlfriend, Kris (Katie Cassidy), arrives to meet him, Dean falls asleep once more; this time, it's fatal.  In the dream, Dean tries to protect himself with a knife from a shadowy, fedora-wearing, clawed-glove-wearing villain.  The villain turns the knife inward toward Dean and slowly pushes it toward his body.  In the real world, it looks like Dean's knife hand wants to kill him --- and succeeds.  He basically committed hari kari on his throat.  With Dean's death, a group of kids in town, start to admit to having the same nightmare; some guy with a hat and a clawed glove is forcing them to have bad dreams.  But bad dreams can't hurt anyone, right?  Well, I doubt this is your first exposure to Nightmare, but here goes anyway...SPOILER: They can.  And will.  Anyway, at Dean's funeral, Kris notices a picture of herself with Dean as preschoolers.  That's weird...they met for the first time in high school...or did they?  It turns out that all the kids who are having (and dying in) these dreams --- Nancy (Rooney Mara), Jesse (Thomas Dekker), and Quentin (Kyle Gallner) all went to the same preschool.  And, thanks to some detective work, they figure out that the mysterious dream figure is a man named Freddy Kreuger (Jackie Earle Haley).  But why is he hunting these kids?  And how?  For God's sake, I must know the origin of this supernatural phenomenon!

Actually, I don't need to know how Freddy attacks you in your dreams, but it is interesting that this film never even makes a half-assed attempt to explain that unusual course of events.  Really, there isn't even any explicit motivation given to Freddy, either.  Sure, they retell his origin, making it grimmer for today's jaded viewer, but there's never a "Freddy's going to kill me because ____".  I find that strange.  They just accept that Freddy is in their dreams and that he's trying to kill them.  Well, okay.  Maybe I'm just the curious type.  But, while I'm asking questions of motivation, why is Freddy attacking now?  It's been between ten and fourteen years since Freddy's had motivation.  What's with the delay?  We can't all be Jimmy John's fast, but that's a long time to hang out in dreams, not killing people.

Obviously, I have a few basic issues with the basic premise behind this movie.  Beyond the villain's motivation, how was this movie?  Pretty terrible, actually.  The movie starts with a kid being murdered in front of his friends and stays that cheery throughout.  These teens are, at no time, even remotely happy.  They're not even sarcastic, which is far more shocking than the happy thing.  With such a serious tone, the movie doesn't really have anywhere to go.  I'm not saying that horror movies need levity, but I need the actors to show a variety of emotions, if only to indicate that one scene is supposed to be scarier than another.  The big story when this movie was released was that the filmmakers had decided to make Freddy less of a hyena-laughing jackass and more of a killer.  I love that idea (the "Vegas Freddy" movies are pretty terrible), but the execution leaves something to be desired.  For some reason, Freddy still likes to laugh, but he doesn't make jokes.  He's not even being mean (aside from all the murdering) or a jerk, so his chuckles come off as very unnatural.  And, I'll be honest, I didn't think the realistic burn victim makeup did anything to enhance Freddy's menace.  There were moments where the recessed eyes and lack of facial definition made me think I was watching a muppet designed to teach children about fifth-degree burns.  So, the tone of the movie was too one-dimensional and the villain felt a little off.  What about the story?  Let me answer that question with a question: how much do you love back story?  If you answered anything less than "a crapload," then you're going to be annoyed.  The movie makes it seem like there is a mystery in Freddy's origin that will blow your mind when it comes to light, so the story spends a lot of time trying to develop that secret.  But the secret ends up that Freddy is a mean bastard that likes to kill people.  It's a little underwhelming, as far as secrets go, and the story is all about uncovering it.  Blech.

The acting was as good as it needed to be in a horror movie with this level of prominence.  The kids all look fairly young (they ranged from 22 to 25 years old), which is nice to see in a movie about high school kids, but that's probably the best thing I can say about them.  Every single character was one-dimensional and had no chances to develop; they're scared of death, then they're scared of sleeping and dying, and then they die --- it's not much of a dramatic arc.  I don't think any of them were overly terrible (except Kellan Lutz, whose line delivery is on par with that of a bored corpse), but the plot and dialogue make that hard to determine for sure.  I thought Aaron Yoo's uncredited cameo (which I didn't think people made, unless they were really famous) was some of the film's best acting, but that's not saying much.  As the film's resident adults, Clancy Brown and Connie Britton both had their talents wasted, with few scenes and less dialogue.  Jackie Earle Haley took over the Freddy Kreuger role that Robert Englund had played in seven movies.  His take on the character was, at times, pretty sinister; unfortunately, this movie delivers no actual scary moments (or even the startling ones), so I was pretty disappointed with the new, meaner Freddy.  This was the first feature film that Samuel Bayer directed, after a distinguished music video career that includes Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, Blind Melon's No Rain, and all of Green Day's American Idiot videos.  Bayer can tell a story decently well, but if he can work with professional actors to get the right performances, the proof is not evident here.

Forget all that "acting" and "story" junk, what about the violence?  This is a horror movie, so the violence and nudity should help grade this movie on a curve.  As for nudity, there is none.  At all.  There's nothing remotely sexual about this movie.  So that's definitely different than most horror flicks, but not unheard of in the Nightmare series.  As for the violence, there are only three death scenes and one of them was a remake of the ceiling kill in the original movie.  There's nothing wrong with recycling a classic kill, but it looked as good now as it did then --- it just wasn't as scary, since I had seen that exact kill before.  The third kill (the first one was the one that opened the movie) was only decent, but I liked how Freddy taunted his victim; this was one of only two times where Freddy was intimidating at all.  A Nightmare On Elm Street has never been, as a series, about the body count.  I was surprised that a reboot wouldn't raise the number of corpses, but I was shocked by how visually boring these scenes were. There were maybe thirty dream sequences in the movie, and only two were even moderately cool or imaginative, and I'm pretty sure they lifted something from Silent Hill.  This movie even directly lifted two of the original film's best moments (Freddy's glove in the bathtub and Freddy's face in the wall), so the best parts of this movie were done exactly the same way twenty-five years ago!  So, let's recap: no nudity, mediocre (at best) kills, and no originality.  Even by horror standards, this movie sucked.

Man, the dream sequences pissed me off.  This is a movie where you get killed or chased or whatever in your dreams...but we don't ever see any of these kids dreaming.  Freddy doesn't interrupt them during a dream about being a spy or the Dos Equis guy or seducing that special someone --- they dream about being in a creepy industrial warehouse or boiler room or something.  Way to miss the boat, people.  You can dream anything, so these movie sequences could add all sorts of character insight, visual appeal, or extraordinary things that are not limited by realism.  Shouldn't the scary thing about Freddy be that he gets us in our dreams?  This is just dull writing, but you can't expect much when a first-time screenwriter is brought in to polish up the script from the writer of Doom.

Since this is a remake, and I have seen every Nightmare to date, I might as well address how it stacks up to the other movies.  Nightmare, unlike most other horror franchises, has always been tangled in its story continuity.  Does anyone really care about the details about Freddy's life and afterlife?  The answer is no.  We want to be frightened by something that we have no protection against, a monster that kills us in our sleep.  I liked that this movie tried to escape the convoluted story of the series, but they just introduced the least mysterious mystery I have ever seen in a horror movie, instead.  This movie doesn't capture the defenseless fear that makes the original film and Part 3 fun to watch, either.  Instead, it takes a more serious and boring path to its final destination, the bad movie pile.  It should feel right at home, though, since it's about as bad as the rest of the Nightmare series.