THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

dMYD

Starring Rooney Mara

That Amazing Trailer That’s Still Amazing All These Months Later

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  Don’t get your face in a twist, it’s just a murder mystery. It’s Bogart, Chandler and Benedict Cumberbatch, a spooky island, a creepy family and P.Is with problems: it’s Scooby Doo for perverts. A lot’s been written about the revelatory genre additions here (It’s in Sweden!) but essentially this is the same old story (The girl has piercings in her face!) that’s been told a gajallion times before in (She’s a GIRL!) a bafillion different guises and skins, but here done pretty good and with an extra dollop of anal-rape on the top. More of that later. But not literally.

 As a film it’s exciting and twisty and intriguing and involving, mainly down to the strength of the source material and characterisation rather than Fincher’s eyes behind the camera. It’s not a big deal, but you get the sense that any workaday dick could have filmed the adaptation in the place of Big Finch, the man who made social networking sexy with all his dim lights and the gentle hands of Aaron Sorkin. That’s not to say he doesn’t manage a perfunctory job; the icy landscape is lit with the same sense of detachment he brought to the Facebook thing, all muted tones and technology sheen, whilst Trent Reznor skits out another brilliantly twinkly soundtrack to make all the nastiness more palatable. This synth bipping extends to the film’s use of technology to update its tale; macbooks and smartphones and flash cars abound, with the irony being that as timeless as the story is, the film will date quicker than Hitler when all’s done and said, which is even more reason to flash in that pan now.  Real credit goes to Larsson’s book-work and the sterling efforts of Rooney Mara, shoving herself into the a-list with a performance so iconic and convincing that you forget how stupid her name is. It’s pretty easy to make Oscar bait out of a caricature, but if Heath Ledger deserved a nomination for his lipstick-smudged pencil-pusher then Mara full-heartedly deserves hers, bringing a near-silent derangement and fire-eyed intensity to what’s, for better or worse, one of the iconic characters of this or any other decade.

  And that brings us to all the rape. It’s trailblazing, it’s brilliant, it’s disgusting and it’s abhorrent. Whatever your take on the insertion of a filthy reprehensible hell-act into a mainstream Hollywood movie, consider that for aeons now Sylvester Stallone and a thousand others have pumped a near infinite amount of bullets into a group of extras the size of fifteen terracotta armies. Toleration of any kind of violence has been entertainment’s guilty little embarrassment forever, and the fresh use of a new atrocity in something this widely seen is either going to trivialise the issue or incite genuine debate about all sorts of violence glamorisation issues. It’s our choice. As the film says at one point; ‘The court of public opinion rewards bad behavior.’

  It’s done now, it’s out there, and like the torture porn and Miley Cyrus and Rambo 4 it’s probably dragging culture down a nasty pit that it’ll never climb out of, but at the very least it’s provided an exciting and independent heroine for the new millennium who’s ruined by the last frame where she fails to get the man of her dreams and presumably rides back to her easy-bake-oven to mop a floor. Great job, everyone involved. An exciting film, some great characters, but difficult to shake that it’s all a fat dead journalist’s liberal wank fantasy.

#girlwithadragontattoo #rooneymara #filmreview

RICHARD III

dMYD DVD

Starring Ian McKellen

Trailer

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  Come on, it’s Shakespeare, it’s the best thing ever, so it’ll be done over and over and over and over and again and again and again until the Earth freezes and there’s no power and we make power, us, the straggling, loathsome survivors, we make power, we get a generator so the last of us, the five, all five of us can gather round the planet’s last shreds of electricity, and we put on Hamlet because it’s brilliant and it tells us all we need to know about life and it’s what the endless streets of frozen corpses around us would have wanted. It’s Shakespeare.

  This is a pretty good one though, because it’s got Ian McKellen and he’s great. The design is amazing as well, using a Third Reich motif and all sorts of decadent ‘30s interiors and clothing to show the wealth and elegance of these backstabbing scumbags and ineffectual victims. McKellen parades through the role as well he should, all sneers, crippled limbs and occasional tusks, though Annette Bening has a good try at stopping his film-grab with a wisely – Americanised turn as the queen who loses everything to a stunted dickbag. Other characters flit in and out, as they do a lot in these things, Robert Downey Jr’s appearance particularly funny because of its brevity and lack of talent. Despite being on the poster it’s clear that he was just sniffing out crack at this point, hired as a pretty face and overactive penis, but it’s nice to see Iron Man crop up and shout pointlessly at Magneto anyway. It’s a film of extremes – though lusciously shot by Richard Loncraine it’s McKellen and the production design that overshadow everything else, despite cannily adapted dialogue rolling around everyone’s mouths like a bag of expressive, expensive marbles, whilst the film comes to a ridiculously overblown climax by blowing up Battersea Power station and having that bloke from The Wire ride around in a jeep over the wreckage. Crucially it makes something that can become rote and boring (oh come on, it’s six thousand years old. Sometimes you just want this) exciting and vibrant, the visuals popping in your face and the whole thing cracking along at a quick pace for something that’s usually staged over a couple of ice ages. Plus, unlike The Deep Blue Sea last week it feels like a genuine film rather than a cut and paste A-Level theatre job, but this is probably because it’s got GUNS AND EXPLOSIONS AND SHOUTING AND STUFF. Bad man, terrible man, good film.

Oh, and Microsoft spell checks like to correct Annette Bening to Annette Benign. Who sounds like a lovely person.

01/29/12

richardIII  ian mckellen  film review 

THX 1138

dMYD DVD

Starring Robert Duvall

Trailer

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 George Lucas has selective obsessive compulsive disorder. SOCD. He’s a tinkerer and tosser where he used to be a dreamer and scrapbook enthusiast, and he’s let a lot of things go to his head. He’s not really a film-maker in the traditional sense andTHX 1138 isn’t his masterpiece, Star Wars is, a cobbled together mishmash of Flash Gordon, lasers and youthful defiance that still pops and burns even when you strip away the continent of plastic crap that’s risen in its wake. Both films tell the same story of individualism against conformity, but there the similarities end, THX 1138preferring to cast itself as art while Star Wars delves into a vat of popcorn and wisecracks. The differences in success are startling, and Lucas’ later years reveal the bizarre crossover of fiction and fact that the two films would lead to; it’s humanity that sets the original Star Wars apart, whilst THX, by necessity, leaves most of it out. It’s easy to feel sorry for Robert Duvall, but you wouldn’t want to spend time in a cantina with him, or get crushed to death in a trash compactor whilst he flicks his non-existent hair. Audiences respond to characters they can be friends with, and that’s where the money lay; by the time the first Star Wars was done with the box-office the movies would never be the same again, beginning the slow slide to monetary domination that’s punctuated the summer’s output for the past decade.       

  Then those god-awful  prequels took the conformity and coldness of THX’s police state and applied it to filmmaking, replacing humanity with a machine mentality that methodically barfed out all the insane details sat in an old man’s head that nobody else cared about, details designed to sell articulated figures and phones and cups andslippers and balls and CDs and lighters and bags and notebooks and statues andglasses and duvets and towels and cupcakes and pens and dog clothes and platesand toasters and ducks and chopsticks and air fresheners and charms and jars andboxes and swimsuits and shelves and bathmats and radios and headphones andmasks and trainers and Lego and baby clothes and DVDs and styluses and cuddly toys and fish tanks and coffee and perfume and umbrellas and chairs and burgers andforks and T-shirts and chess sets and bobbleheads and cookbooks and cereal andpaper and coins and TVs and bookends and postcards and educational software andremote controls and dressing gowns and oven mitts and sleeping bags and hot dog holders and badges and magnets and gloves and stickers and phone alarms andbooks and underwear and watches and flash drives and carpets and tins andsandwiches and guns and phone cases and clocks and keyrings and locks andpatches and wallpaper and shorts and funk and posters and sensor bar holders andhats and belt buckles and sellotape holders and games and bottles and toothpasteand soft drinks and bikes and roller skates and toothbrushes and flannels and pillowsand curtains and lamps and dresses and cars and pizza.

  THX II38 is a good film, a quiet film and an interesting film.  It’s a shame that nearly everything its director did next ensured that these types of movies would be hugely difficult to make again.

01/29/12

THX 1138  george lucas  film review 

THE AVENGERS: NO

THE AVENGERS: YES

 

THE DEEP BLUE SEA

dMYD

Starring Rachel Weisz

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   Remember 1950s Britain, when everyone in the country walked around trapped in a giant suit made of their own repression? Well, you don’t, you’re too young. You’ve got Xboxs, and fake cheeks and trainers made of your own spontaneity. Anything you’ve ever known about the 1950s has come from a series of movies like The Deep Blue Sea, films designed to make you think that everybody in the country was suffering from a love they couldn’t admit, or post-traumatic stress disorder, or thirty-six back street abortions and an overabundance of fish and chips. After twenty years of economic-depression and war-suffering, it was the decade of the cool breakdown, of stiff upper lips and tears in the corner of the eye and a shot of Brandy before breakfast. The Deep Blue Sea doesn’t go anyway towards changing this view, preferring to stick with the clichés of post-war London by wallowing in the mire of long-looks and teary letters by the fireplace.

  On the other hand it does do it very, very well, with gorgeous gas-lamp cinematography and three startling central performances. It’s a play, it was a play, it comes from a play by Terrance Rattigan, and like every other theatre adaptation under the sun it never quite escapes the staid, stationary restraints of it’s dialogue and uber-slow scene shifts. Consequently there’s delirious highs of genius quotes and nadirs of unrealistic exo-speak – it’s a credit to Terrance Davies that he manages to fuse his keen eye for an interior with a decent stab at naturalising the words, helped enormously by having a trio of great actors peddling his lines. The emotions it’s dealing with are timeless, but the shocking originality of it’s naked confessionals has lost the power to surprise after a good sixty years in print, making the movie feel like a museum piece or a simple curio for it’s director. In a world where Big Brother contestants cry if they blink at the wrong time it’s nice if a little old-fashioned to see reserve tempered with shouting matches, to see someone attempting to rationalise their problems instead of jumping straight into an over-emotional nightmare. It’s a fragmentary thing, with glimpses of brilliance and flickers of tears, and all the better for it. Love ain’t perfect, who said films had to be?

REQUIEM FOR A DREAM

dMYD DVD

Starring Ellen Burstyn

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  Drugs are bad, mmmkay? And that’s it, that’s all it has to say, the first big success of Darren Aronofsky’s overblown career. Like the drugs it showcases the film has a big bad case of style over substance, spending too little time concentrating on the lives of it’s jacked up beautiful people to create any real empathy for them by the time they’ve fallen down their mind tubes. There’s also cutting room issues here; while it’s essential to show the isolation of an isolated character, the near-complete absence of Ellen Burstyn’s tragic lock-in from the rest of cast leads to a case of two films going on at once, neither of them with the depth to make them the masterpiece they could have been.

  But on the other hand, drugs are great. They give a whole new shine to the world, they blast it into stained glass windows and basslines, to colours you’ve never seen and speeds you’ve never reached. They’re the only way to have a conversation with a seventeen-foot John Goodman waxwork whilst ‘Hakuna Matata’ gives you a sensual massage, aside from having a mental breakdown at a Disney-centric King Ralph convention in a health spa. As a sensory experience the film still holds up as a whirling network of fast-cuts, close ups and hallucinations, some dated, some still terrifying; the piece builds to it’s nightmare climax by having the scene shifting get faster and faster, more disorientating with regards to who’s doing what and why, what they’re feeling, thinking and doing, what’s real and what’s imagined. As a music video it’s great, as an engaging film it’s only a few steps away from one of those awareness films they showed you at school where the accountant’s teeth fell out and he ended up panhandling on the street next to his old office building. Amidst all the smack whores and amputations and frisco freak outs there’s a big hole where the heart of the film should have been; by centering on style and horrific imagery Aronofsky’s done both drugs and people a disservice, skirting round the excellent mind-trampolines they can be and devaluing the lives they can destroy by treating them as drug mules to push his art style. Worth watching for it’s slick audacity alone, but if you want some real dirt look to Heath Ledger, in more ways than one. Or this.

SPEED RACER

dMYD DVD

Starring Emile Hirsch

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  Taking its inspiration equally from the source material, Playstation 2 games and that episode of Pokemon that killed half the children of Japan, Speed Racer is a hyper-jumping mess of half formed ideas and base-level insanity that never actually forms the chassis of anything good, but remains the perennial Hollywood noble failure, though it's still preferable to thirty two copies of the last two Matrix films stacked together under a mountain of cocaine, coincidentally the conditions under which the Wachowskis made the film. Its faults lie in the realism/mentalism divide; cartoon characters never look confused by their surroundings or lost in a sea of green screen, choosing instead to scream their passion at the viewer with wide eyes and spastic limb movements, performing unimaginable feats that animation alone allows. Put real, jerking humans into this vat and you’ve got a god-awful mess of good actors trying to make sense of what’s going on; Emile Hirsch comes out best with a decent stab at the impossible task of making a character named ‘Speed Racer’ likeable, whilst Matthew Fox tries hard to imbue a man called ‘Racer X’ with a nice older-brother-Batman quality and a sensitivity entirely lacking from the other supporting characters. The nadir ironically comes in the racing sections; the limits of the CGI result in endless demo-tracks that never create more excitement than a sub-standard episode of Wacky Races, the weightless, unreal cars bringing the unbearable feeling of watching somebody else play F-Zero X.

  Still, there’s a noble attempt to attack big business (at least from something with this gargantuan a budget) and a nice line in John Goodman throwing people around a room like Uncle Phil from the Fresh Prince. It’s a likeable film, but it’s not very good and the little fat-kid comic relief needs to be gene-spliced with his monkey buddy until they’re both nothing more than a gibbering, ungodly bundle of puke on the CGI floor. See it on mushrooms, hope for the best.

GET FUCKED II: AGAIN AND AGAIN, FROM DIFFERENT ANGLES

  So it turns out that the purple thing from the last thing was Louis’ own sense of emotional wellbeing, desperate to have him back in a last minute plot twist of mind-boggling dimensions. He burnt it with a make shift flame hose round the back of a local Nandos and walked off into the sunset, gargling to himself and thinking of all the fine china he could afford now he was a possible schizophrenic.

  The creature wasn’t dead. It leapt on his back, all purple and stuck, screaming about it’s immunity to fire as a result of being a metaphysical construct of his own mind, that he needed it to be a full man, to shield him from the sunspots careering in front of their vision. ‘Why did I walk into the sun?’ He wondered, but what he really meant was ‘I need a superhero’, but what he really meant was MY EYEBALLS ARE POPPING. The creature squealed as a DVD player made of liquid heat seared its way into his arm. It was a film by James Gunn. They flailed together for a bit more, just to keep things interesting, then the movie started.

SUPER

dMYD DVD

Starring Rainn Wilson

Trailer

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  Two old men sit at a chessboard screaming at each other, one’s wearing frat-boy shorts and a baseball cap and he’s all ‘KICK ASS!’ and the other’s in an Edwardian wig, he’s giggling and mumbling ‘Oh, how delightfully SUPER!’ under his breath. He wins; the pieces fly in the air and embed themselves in the Kick Ass Octogenarian’s skull in a breathtaking display of overt symbolism and kinetic-mahogany wood magnetism. In the declining spate of superheroes going all ‘real’ recently nobody seems to have noticed that they’re all rubbish and about as realistic as Michael Fassenbender’s Magneto accent. They’re balls – Super’s got balls, it represents a troubling jump closer to our everyday world in that the hero is a barely-functioning sociopath with a love for blunt objects and screaming, whilst Ellen Page portrays his kid sidekick as a genuinely terrifying nerd rapist obsessed with blood, swearing and bone fractures. It’s a film au fait with all the tropes that have gone before it, smacking clichés with clever wit and dumb set pieces that’ll have you spewing beer onto your shoes and gaping in amazement.

  It’s knowing and it knows it, too stylised to be the true dirt-bag  Mean Streets grit fest that the genre’s crying out for, but at least that lets it shoehorn in musical sections and increasingly-amusing animation, as well as letting Kevin Bacon play a bastard in both this and the appallingly inferior X-Men First Class. The two films are a six degree-nightmare – fresh from Kick Ass, Jane Goldman and Michael Vaughn fucked up with Fox’s demands on the dwindling X-Franchise, whereas they should have done something like this: no budget, no constraints, barely any morals, it’s the film Ass-Kick wishes it could have been, even with that swearing purple girl, and as such deserves it’s place on any comic book fan’s DVD rack, albeit littered with Dorito crumbs and stinking of whiskey. Swearing purple girls? Purple girls swearing? Girls swearing purple?

  It was a girl. Louis’ emotions were a purplewoman, poured into the shape of a gigantic orb designed to protect him from the flares of our sun. He sat there, encased within his own mind, as it gently sang him a lullaby with the vocal range of Sarah Vaughn.

All hell’s a poppin’

My Icarus Line

The lava fields tremble

We’ll have a great time

You’re stuck in your own head

Way out in the stars

No way to get back home

No door left ajar

And the people can’t hear you

They don’t give a damn

There’s one guy who knows you

He’s Charlie Kaufman

He’s written a movie

It makes little sense

But if we’re to escape the infinite density following the collapse of this star we’d better watch it and understand the analogy I’m trying to sing

  The purple face looked angry, if beautiful. Realising that physical attractiveness was the only emotion worth bothering about, Louis woke up and watched the film, lighting a cigarette by scratching a match against a jagged edge of hi passing purple jollity. It sparked.

ADAPTATION

dMYD DVD

Starring Nicholas Cage and Nicholas Cage

Trailer

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  There’s room for guttural emotion, there’s acres for vicarious thrills and stomach twists and tear ducts. There’s the sensual people, you’ve seen them, a billion strong and twisting round the corners of the world’s cinemas, queuing and jonesy and waiting for Saw Five and Hostel Eight and Final Destination Forty Five Thousand and Fifty Seven. They need the kick that these visceral bastard films can bring. There are movies that make you feel, and they’re great, but there are movies that do that and are also very clever; the remove between feeling and thinking is the key to all things. And Charlie Kaufman’s having trouble with it.

  A beautiful film and an extremely clever one, like Citizen Kane Adaptation layers itself in different levels of reality and perception, but unlike Orson Welles’ fabupiece it has the sense to tether it’s ruminations to three very different characters, each representing the different types of attachment to life that Kaufman’s talking about. Chris Cooper’s Orchid Thief is the man with real sorrows, the chump who lost his mother in a car crash and fills the void with collecting everything under the sun, while Meryl Streep quietly nicks the film as a journalist who can only connect through the thief, his life becoming her fiction, letting her engage with a world that she’s lost by looking through other people’s lives. And then there’s the brothers Kaufman. Charlie’s problem is that he’s seeing the world through too many filters, a man looking at Susan Orlean looking at John Laroche, the endless adaptations of the title. And he has to write a film about it. That he succeeds is a testament to Kaufman’s genius, that it’s entertaining as well is a small miracle, mainly down to the healing hands of his brother Donald, a sad casualty of the film’s descent into crowd-pleasing and probably one of the greatest characters ever created. Nicholas Cage deserves a vat of credit here for downplaying his roles and understanding what’s going on in the first place, delivering possibly his finest performances in a lifetime of great (in both senses of the word) turns, ably backed up by everyone around him.

  The result is a film that has to be seen to be understood, to be felt and thought about and immersed in to get all its twists and depths. A writer’s movie on the surface, adapting a little deeper lets you see it for the accessible piece it really is, the perfect mid-point between Malkovich’s monkey-shines and the outright insanity that is Synecdoche New York. As such, it’s probably Kaufman’s best, and by default one of the greatest movies ever made, with a level for everyone and a joke every five seconds.

  But if you watch it on any form of mind-altering substance you’ll soon find yourself trapped in a flimsy analogy being hurtled at billions of miles an hour around a callous ball of burning gas an insane distance from your home, your pets and the people you love. Louis slipped in his emotion orb, struggling to grasp the slick sides of his hopefulness and courage as they slathered around the inner surface of the ball. It was getting hotter, and he’d only managed to stuff his fear into the pockets of his jeans. He was sweating.

  ‘I get it!’ he screamed. ‘It’s to do with the film! Both of them! SORT OF!’

His emotions smiled and gave him a peck on the cheek, forming the words ACCEPTANCE in huge purple lettering. With a flash they were sat in a plastic replica Winnebago dangling off the edge of the Hoover Dam.

  He started to comedown. BUT WHICH WAY?