Men Who Hate Women: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
For a film so dependent on its plot, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo‘s story isn’t as gripping as it needs to be. Though seemingly meant to genuinely unsettle us, it too often feels like little more than an exercise in paint-by-numbers. Take its premise, for instance: a falsely-convicted journalist whose name has been dragged through the mud gets a chance to redeem himself and make a few bucks in the process; a family with much to hide on a secluded island adds layers of intrigue; alternative-looking love interest helps everything fall into place and the skeletons come out of the closet one by one. The murder mystery that serves as Dragon‘s catalyst is fine as a starting point, but director Niels Arden Oplev seems less interested in turning the late Stieg Larsson’s 2004 novel into a resonant look at the innate darkness of his native Sweden than an atrocity exhibition a few rungs higher up the ladder than Saw. To this end, there are liberal doses of graphic violence, three rape scenes that add nothing to the plot–and far too little in the way of character development–to justify their inclusion in the first place (to say nothing of their excessive length), and an undercurrent of Nazism lest we forget that even a socialist haven like Sweden has its dark underbelly. Continue reading
We learn everything we need to know about Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), soon to be known as Kick-Ass, in his opening monologue: he is a teenager remarkable only in how unremarkable he is; a bit on the nerdy side, he’s got two friends funnier than he is (though even more forgettable) and an unrequited crush on a girl named Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca). To put it in his words, “I just existed.” Unfortunately, I tend to agree: Dave does little over the next two hours to distinguish himself, the end result being a movie whose unanchored violence leaves us at sea in terms of whether what we’re watching is meant to be taken with an open mind or a grain of salt. Such is the world of Kick-Ass.
Out of the past and my unending resentment of the goddamn Cinema 7 for not playing Hot Tub Time Machine comes this look at The Graduate, which I’ve been forced to conclude is either a film of its time that hasn’t aged well or one I’ve failed to understand, despite my best efforts. It’s hard to tell which, considering the timeliness of my reviewing the film: In less time than I care to admit, I, too, will have returned home to Los Angeles after graduating from a mysterious college on the east coast. Words fail to convey my great hope that I find life after college less disenchanting than does Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), the title character.
It is clear from the first few frames of Samurai Spy that we are about to watch a film that stands an arm’s length away from its peers in the chanbara genre. It begins and ends with a narrator explaining the story’s historical backdrop, immediately making it clear that the Battle of Sekigahara, which took place in 1600, serves as the catalyst for the events that are to follow: the characters’ lives have been shaped by it to such an extent that some see themselves as mere riders on the crest of a wave of war; they have enjoyed relative peacetime for nearly fourteen years, but can sense that it will soon pass.
Sword of the Beast is a strange one. On the surface, it seems a standard tale of swordplay and vengeance, but there’s much more at work here: namely, a meditation on what it means to live honorably as a human, hidden in the guise of an almost Ahabic quest for gold. What better vehicle for such heavy ideas than a samurai film?
Martin Scorsese is long past the point of having to prove himself. Having finally won his long-overdue Oscar, it seems he can pretty much do whatever he wants (if he couldn’t already). That freedom has led him to the enigmatic Shutter Island, the premise of which almost seems beneath the giant in whose hands it is delivered: and yet it’s because of those hands that the movie works so well. Drawing on uniformly brilliant performances from his cast, stunning cinematography, and his own incomparable skills as a director, Scorsese has woven together a thriller as intricate as it is haunting.
If you’ve seen A League of Their Own and can imagine that film’s setting transposed to fourteenth-century Japan and the womens’ wartime occupations from professional baseball players to samurai-killers, you’re coming close to Onibaba, a Japanese film from 1964 so strange and unsettling that there still doesn’t seem to be a consensus on it. The violence is grisly, the sex nigh-gratuitous. At its core, however, Onibaba is an almost-tragic tale of three people living through war and poverty, coping in ways that only make matters worse for themselves and each other.
Zombieland, the latest entry in the nascent zombie-comedy subgenre, is a film of few surprises. Its archetypal characters are just fleshed-out enough (no pun intended) to keep us interested, and the requisite explanation for the zombie apocalypse is nothing we haven’t seen before. The film doesn’t attempt to reinvent the wheel, nor does it need to: it sticks to a tried and true formula, and relies on the always-charismatic Woody Harrelson to keep us entertained. More Shaun than Dawn, the Ruben Fleischer-helmed film, which proves that boy-meets-girl-meets-zombie can be a recipe for success, delivers just what you’d expect and hope for: gore, laughs, and fun by the bucketful. On a related note, who the hell is Ruben Fleischer?
Guy walks into a doctor’s office. Not for a checkup, not for an x-ray, but because his soul is weighing him down. The man is Paul Giamatti (as a fictionalized version of himself), and his angst stems from an upcoming production of Uncle Vanya in which he’s the title character. He hears about the Soul Storage Company, in whose office he’s now standing, from an article in The New Yorker his agent half-jokingly suggests he read. Believing his soul is hindering his performance, Paul takes the advice seriously, which leads him on a misadventure from New York to–where else–St. Petersburg, Russia.
“Sometimes awful things have their own kind of beauty.” This line, spoken by a male prostitute in Tom Ford’s A Single Man, is perhaps the most poignant and encapsulating of the entire film. The man, named Carlos, says it to George Falconer (Oscar nominee Colin Firth), an English professor at a small college in 1960s Los Angeles trying, as he says to himself in the mirror at the beginning of the movie, to “just make it through the goddamned day.” His partner of the last sixteen years, Jim, has died in a car crash, and George is far from over it. He drifts in and out of the present, reminded of his lover by every little thing, and spends much of the one day over which A Single Man takes place planning to join him again.
the Crossing 