The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo falls flat, The Descendants is the year's best film
Published on January 23, 2012 in Features
by Izzy Kornblatt '12 (Editor in Chief)
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
David Fincher’s Sweden is a bitterly bleak place of cold anonymity, white snow and stark modern buildings. Its chilling beauty sets the stage for a bleak piece of filmmaking, a film where the world is unsympathetic and misogynistic, where we can expect even the most seemingly innocuous characters to do evil things.
Fincher’s slick style, complemented by an excellent, pulsating score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, gives Dragon Tattoo a sense of energy that was lacking in the 2009 Swedish version of the film. We’re fascinated by this freezing world and how similar it is to our own. In one of the film’s best sequences, a man tries to steal Lisbeth Salander’s (Rooney Mara) bag on a well-populated subway escalator. In a rapid burst of stylized action, the two struggle and Salander gets away. She hops over to the downward moving escalator, seizes her bag and jumps onto a departing train. The people all around them seem a bit startled and perhaps annoyed at the disruption, but they don’t seem to care about the young woman who’s just been mugged.
The plot revolves around the 1966 disappearance of the niece of Henrik Vanger, a wealthy and powerful industrialist who lives on a frigid private island with other members of his extended family four hours north of Sweden’s capital, Stockholm. Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative reporter disgraced in a libel suit, is hired to look into the disappearance by the aging Vanger, who has been consumed by the disappearance for years. Blomkvist takes up residence on the island and begins to research what must be the most disgusting collection of people anyone could dream up. Few members of the family are on speaking terms, and no wonder: the family is rife with fascists and Nazis, and, apparently, also includes a murderer.
Though this case, buoyed by the film’s exciting score and Fincher’s fast-paced style, shows some early promise, ultimately it’s not all that interesting. The plot of Stieg Larson’s novel was not what made it so appealing to millions of readers. Rather, it was a single character: Salander, a brilliant hacker and investigator, and a damaged young woman.
Rooney Mara’s Salander is a pleasure to watch: she’s at once otherworldly and very much a victim of the worst of our world. She’s taken care of by the state, in particular by an utterly deplorable lawyer named Nils Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen). This relationship leads to two separate scenes of sickeningly horrifying violence. These scenes are intended to set the stage for the film’s theme of violence against women and give us a sense of Salander, but they are excessive and revolting, and far harder to watch than the equivalent scenes in the 2009 film (which, make no mistake, were still horrifying).
Fincher seems to wallow in this violence, as he does in the generally despondency of the world he creates, in a number of his previous works, like Se7en and Fight Club. Although this film has more to recommend it than either of those, the three share a certain unrelenting bleakness that seems wholly unnecessary. These films lack subtlety in their portrayals of the world: forcing an audience to sit through graphic acts of despicable violence may incite immediate emotion, but beyond that, there isn’t much to it. I was left repulsed and revolted, without insight and without interest in Fincher’s dismal world.
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
It doesn’t take a genius to know that a Mission: Impossible movie shouldn’t attempt to tug at the heartstrings, make a point, or in any way require its audience to think. This is a movie where, armed with popcorn and a soda, I’d like to be wowed with incredible gadgets, slick car chases, big explosions and exciting music. And Brad Bird, director of such Pixar classics as Monsters, Inc. and Ratatouille, makes that happen in Ghost Protocol.
I frankly cannot remember much of the film’s plot, other than the fact that it involved someone trying to destroy the world, lots of globe-hopping, and plenty of opportunities for Tom Cruise to look suave and in charge (as usual). Fortunately, Bird plows through the plot quickly and without any time wasted on silly back stories or doomed romances. Instead, he prefers to let his camera linger on the gadgets and car chases and stunning sets. And thank God for that. It’s hard not to have a good time watching this movie.
The
Descendants
George Clooney, playing the top dog in a wealthy Hawaiian family with a good deal of money and a massive tract of pristine, undeveloped land, spends much of The Descendants at a loss. Not of how to manage his family’s land or his business, but of how to be a parent to his two out-of-control daughters and a husband to his unconscious, dying wife. Clooney gives an extraordinary, subtle performance as a sincere but fallible man. Needless to say, this film wouldn’t succeed without him. But it’s a film that’s bigger than one performance or one actor. It’s a film about real life.
Unlike Alexander Payne’s previous films, which have cut through razor-sharp satirical commentary at fast paces, The Descendants is mellow and slow, even as its plot thickens. Payne calmly and assuredly paints a poignantly accurate picture of a man — and a family — beset by problems with no simple answers. As with all excellent filmmaking, we can feel the truth of what we’re watching: we can both connect to the characters we see and observe their plight from afar.
The Descendants never descends (if you’ll pardon the pun) to Spielbergian sentimentality and similarly never takes the easy comic route — the route Payne has already proven a knack for. Payne’s approach is bold in its directness: the world of The Descendants is our own world, without pomp or frills or beautiful people with simple answers. And in that approach, Payne’s film is exceptionally powerful.
In The Descendants, we watch a wealthy family tackle the issue of what to do with its land; in a way, this family isn’t so different from the Vangers of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, only here there are no Nazis or murderers. Payne understands that big plot devices and exciting set-ups are extra: at the heart of any good film are characters who deal with the very same things that we do.
The Adventures of Tintin
Steven Spielberg seems like the perfect match for the graphic novel hero Tintin. Much of his best work has been in liberating adventures like the Indiana Jones series, and he’s always had a taste for the wildly visceral. True to his reputation, Spielberg, aided by a lot of explosions, a John Williams score, and a globe-hopping plot, makes this film come vigorously to life. Spielberg also deserves some credit for his use of 3D, which is to say that he doesn’t overuse or abuse it. He simply uses it calculatedly and carefully, as just another tool in his filmmaking toolkit.
The result of all this is a film of manic energy and no downtime. Even the film’s very first scene doesn’t pause to set the stage; it hurls us right into the film’s rather complex plot, involving a bunch of different miniature ships, not to mention all the big ships, and a whole lot of fighting. Our cast of characters includes, of course, an evil villain (Daniel Craig), along with two bumbling detectives (Nick Frost and Simon Pegg), an adorable white dog, and our hero, Tintin (Jamie Bell). There’s not much that can be said about Tintin; we know that he’s short and boyish, has that classic tousle of red hair, and is a well-known adventuresome journalist, but aside from that, his personality is either extraordinarily bland or simply nonexistent.
This is in fact in keeping with the Tintin of the graphic novels by the Belgian author Hergé. There, too, Tintin, was little more than a blank screen upon which the audience could project its own fears, hopes and dreams. This is not an uncommon thing: after all, Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker serve virtually the same function in their own respective worlds. But Tintin is too boring, so boring that we don’t really care what happens to him or have any interest in connecting to him.
What’s left, then, is a wild and skillfully done adventure with many inventive visuals and a whole lot going on. It’s fun to watch and could not possibly bore anyone. But unlike Martin Scorsese’s excellent Hugo of earlier this year, The Adventures of Tintin is lacking in feeling. Even the most lighthearted films need emotional grounding. Lacking that, Tintin strains at cuteness and remains superficial. You can enjoy watching it, but you won’t remember it the next day.
David Fincher’s Sweden is a bitterly bleak place of cold anonymity, white snow and stark modern buildings. Its chilling beauty sets the stage for a bleak piece of filmmaking, a film where the world is unsympathetic and misogynistic, where we can expect even the most seemingly innocuous characters to do evil things.
Fincher’s slick style, complemented by an excellent, pulsating score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, gives Dragon Tattoo a sense of energy that was lacking in the 2009 Swedish version of the film. We’re fascinated by this freezing world and how similar it is to our own. In one of the film’s best sequences, a man tries to steal Lisbeth Salander’s (Rooney Mara) bag on a well-populated subway escalator. In a rapid burst of stylized action, the two struggle and Salander gets away. She hops over to the downward moving escalator, seizes her bag and jumps onto a departing train. The people all around them seem a bit startled and perhaps annoyed at the disruption, but they don’t seem to care about the young woman who’s just been mugged.
The plot revolves around the 1966 disappearance of the niece of Henrik Vanger, a wealthy and powerful industrialist who lives on a frigid private island with other members of his extended family four hours north of Sweden’s capital, Stockholm. Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative reporter disgraced in a libel suit, is hired to look into the disappearance by the aging Vanger, who has been consumed by the disappearance for years. Blomkvist takes up residence on the island and begins to research what must be the most disgusting collection of people anyone could dream up. Few members of the family are on speaking terms, and no wonder: the family is rife with fascists and Nazis, and, apparently, also includes a murderer.
Though this case, buoyed by the film’s exciting score and Fincher’s fast-paced style, shows some early promise, ultimately it’s not all that interesting. The plot of Stieg Larson’s novel was not what made it so appealing to millions of readers. Rather, it was a single character: Salander, a brilliant hacker and investigator, and a damaged young woman.
Rooney Mara’s Salander is a pleasure to watch: she’s at once otherworldly and very much a victim of the worst of our world. She’s taken care of by the state, in particular by an utterly deplorable lawyer named Nils Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen). This relationship leads to two separate scenes of sickeningly horrifying violence. These scenes are intended to set the stage for the film’s theme of violence against women and give us a sense of Salander, but they are excessive and revolting, and far harder to watch than the equivalent scenes in the 2009 film (which, make no mistake, were still horrifying).
Fincher seems to wallow in this violence, as he does in the generally despondency of the world he creates, in a number of his previous works, like Se7en and Fight Club. Although this film has more to recommend it than either of those, the three share a certain unrelenting bleakness that seems wholly unnecessary. These films lack subtlety in their portrayals of the world: forcing an audience to sit through graphic acts of despicable violence may incite immediate emotion, but beyond that, there isn’t much to it. I was left repulsed and revolted, without insight and without interest in Fincher’s dismal world.
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
It doesn’t take a genius to know that a Mission: Impossible movie shouldn’t attempt to tug at the heartstrings, make a point, or in any way require its audience to think. This is a movie where, armed with popcorn and a soda, I’d like to be wowed with incredible gadgets, slick car chases, big explosions and exciting music. And Brad Bird, director of such Pixar classics as Monsters, Inc. and Ratatouille, makes that happen in Ghost Protocol.
I frankly cannot remember much of the film’s plot, other than the fact that it involved someone trying to destroy the world, lots of globe-hopping, and plenty of opportunities for Tom Cruise to look suave and in charge (as usual). Fortunately, Bird plows through the plot quickly and without any time wasted on silly back stories or doomed romances. Instead, he prefers to let his camera linger on the gadgets and car chases and stunning sets. And thank God for that. It’s hard not to have a good time watching this movie.
The
Descendants
George Clooney, playing the top dog in a wealthy Hawaiian family with a good deal of money and a massive tract of pristine, undeveloped land, spends much of The Descendants at a loss. Not of how to manage his family’s land or his business, but of how to be a parent to his two out-of-control daughters and a husband to his unconscious, dying wife. Clooney gives an extraordinary, subtle performance as a sincere but fallible man. Needless to say, this film wouldn’t succeed without him. But it’s a film that’s bigger than one performance or one actor. It’s a film about real life.
Unlike Alexander Payne’s previous films, which have cut through razor-sharp satirical commentary at fast paces, The Descendants is mellow and slow, even as its plot thickens. Payne calmly and assuredly paints a poignantly accurate picture of a man — and a family — beset by problems with no simple answers. As with all excellent filmmaking, we can feel the truth of what we’re watching: we can both connect to the characters we see and observe their plight from afar.
The Descendants never descends (if you’ll pardon the pun) to Spielbergian sentimentality and similarly never takes the easy comic route — the route Payne has already proven a knack for. Payne’s approach is bold in its directness: the world of The Descendants is our own world, without pomp or frills or beautiful people with simple answers. And in that approach, Payne’s film is exceptionally powerful.
In The Descendants, we watch a wealthy family tackle the issue of what to do with its land; in a way, this family isn’t so different from the Vangers of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, only here there are no Nazis or murderers. Payne understands that big plot devices and exciting set-ups are extra: at the heart of any good film are characters who deal with the very same things that we do.
The Adventures of Tintin
Steven Spielberg seems like the perfect match for the graphic novel hero Tintin. Much of his best work has been in liberating adventures like the Indiana Jones series, and he’s always had a taste for the wildly visceral. True to his reputation, Spielberg, aided by a lot of explosions, a John Williams score, and a globe-hopping plot, makes this film come vigorously to life. Spielberg also deserves some credit for his use of 3D, which is to say that he doesn’t overuse or abuse it. He simply uses it calculatedly and carefully, as just another tool in his filmmaking toolkit.
The result of all this is a film of manic energy and no downtime. Even the film’s very first scene doesn’t pause to set the stage; it hurls us right into the film’s rather complex plot, involving a bunch of different miniature ships, not to mention all the big ships, and a whole lot of fighting. Our cast of characters includes, of course, an evil villain (Daniel Craig), along with two bumbling detectives (Nick Frost and Simon Pegg), an adorable white dog, and our hero, Tintin (Jamie Bell). There’s not much that can be said about Tintin; we know that he’s short and boyish, has that classic tousle of red hair, and is a well-known adventuresome journalist, but aside from that, his personality is either extraordinarily bland or simply nonexistent.
This is in fact in keeping with the Tintin of the graphic novels by the Belgian author Hergé. There, too, Tintin, was little more than a blank screen upon which the audience could project its own fears, hopes and dreams. This is not an uncommon thing: after all, Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker serve virtually the same function in their own respective worlds. But Tintin is too boring, so boring that we don’t really care what happens to him or have any interest in connecting to him.
What’s left, then, is a wild and skillfully done adventure with many inventive visuals and a whole lot going on. It’s fun to watch and could not possibly bore anyone. But unlike Martin Scorsese’s excellent Hugo of earlier this year, The Adventures of Tintin is lacking in feeling. Even the most lighthearted films need emotional grounding. Lacking that, Tintin strains at cuteness and remains superficial. You can enjoy watching it, but you won’t remember it the next day.
