Män som hatar kvinnor (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) (2009)

Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace, in an awesome performance), a researcher/hacker with a criminal past, works for a large security firm. She's been assigned to spy on Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a journalist recently convicted of libel. After she gives the information she's gathered on Blomkvist to a lawyer named Frode, Frode approaches Blomkvist on behalf of his client, Henrik Vanger. The ultra-wealthy Vanger hires Blomkvist to spend the months leading up to his prison sentence investigating the murder of Harriet Vanger--Henrik's niece. Blomkvist moves to the island of Hedebey, home of Henrik and family, and begins to dig.

He doesn't find much on his own, but Lisbeth, still hacking his computer, figures out a clue and e-mails him. Blomkvist, annoyed but intrigued, shows up at Lisbeth's door and gets her to join his investigation. Together, they are the best crime-solving team ever, uncovering a series of gruesome murders on their way to solving the Harriet mystery.

Before Lisbeth joins up with Blomkvist, there's a subplot where she has to deal with a new probationary guardian. From his first appearance, it is clear that this man--Bjurman--is controlling, sadistic, and an all-around winner. Lisbeth's interactions with him felt like the scariest, highest-stakes part of the movie. He's not central to the plot, but he is the clearest and earliest indication of the movie's big theme: misogyny. The Swedish title of the movie (and of the original book) means "Men Who Hate Women." I think this is pretty funny; I can imagine the English-language publisher saying, "Nope! Nope! No! Call it something else; call it anything else. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? Great. Print."

Men Who Hate Women Including the One with the Dragon Tattoo does an exceptionally good job of using vagueness to build suspense. The Vanger Group's business looms over the entire movie, yet I don't remember what kind of business it was. Are we ever told? Similarly, the infrequency of Blomkvist's contact with Vanger family members added to the unease I felt about them. It's really unnerving when Blomkvist is summoned to a meeting with the assembled Vangers, severe middle-aged and elderly strangers staring him down in an underlit living room. Henrik's brother Harald is the only Vanger on Hedebey who doesn't go to that creepy meeting--which makes him even creepier. Harald is the movie's bogeyman. He's mentioned often, and his house is an imposing presence on the island. He can't be overlooked, but he can't be seen, either. It's a really typical way of building up fear of a character, so I feel weird making a thing of it, but I thought this movie carried it off particularly well.

In general, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo uses familiar tricks but makes them feel compelling, not worn. Some of the plot developments were predictable--who was sending the pressed flowers, Lisbeth's violent crime--but that didn't bother me or make me enjoy the movie less. Plus, let's be real: it is incredibly refreshing to see a thriller about misogyny rather than a thriller filled with misogyny.

- Really Liked It

The Castle of Cagliostro (1979)

During the getaway from their latest heist, master thief Lupin III and his sidekick Jigen realize that the cash they've stolen is fake. They set off to the tiny principality of Cagliostro to search for the source of the superb counterfeits. On the way, they see a beautiful young woman in a convertible trying to elude a car full of thugs. She is Princess Clarisse of Cagliostro. Lupin tries to rescue her, but the thugs win, and Lupin and Jigen travel to the eponymous castle, determined to recover both Clarisse and the counterfeiting plates. Oh, and Clarisse is engaged to marry Count Cagliostro--an evil dude who tries really hard to kill Lupin.

I'd been told (by the Internet) that this movie works without any background in the Lupin III series, and it does, but not that well. There are two characters--the samurai Goemon and con artist Fujiko--who seemed totally superfluous to me. I can only imagine they're in the movie because they're established characters in the series, and fans would expect them. Even Jigen (Lupin's sidekick) and Zenigata (a Japanese cop who pursues Lupin) seemed to be treated as more significant characters than they were in this particular story. The Castle of Cagliostro works as a stand-alone movie, but I think I'd probably have liked it better if I had read the manga or seen the TV series, and I think I've enjoyed other Miyazaki films more in part because they felt more self-contained.

The Castle of Cagliostro's main characters--Lupin, Clarisse, and the Count--bear a strange resemblance to the main characters of The Princess Bride. Count Cagliostro is a carbon copy of Prince Humperdinck. Lupin must cleverly work around an injury in his assault on the castle. He and his two sidekicks even set up a "terrifying apparition" routine to interrupt the wedding--a routine very much in the spirit of the Dread Pirate Roberts. In the same scene, I was honestly surprised when the officiating clergyman didn't say, "Mawwidge is what bwings us togevah today." (Instead he tells Clarisse, "You must speak now. Otherwise, silence will be accepted as consent to this union." GOOD. That is a good policy.)

Clarisse cannot object to the union because the villainous Count has sedated her. Even without the drugs, though, Clarisse is pretty passive. She has the opening car chase going for her, but after that, she turns into a garden-variety damsel-in-distress. At one point, there's a wide shot of her standing still as the lights are switched off in her well-appointed tower prison.


I thought it would be funny if she just stayed that way, perfectly still--if she switched to a state of suspended animation whenever there were no men around to talk to her. Alas, she does not; instead, she occupies herself with staring rapturously at a fuckin' flower Lupin gave her or whatever. The movie's other female character, Fujiko, seems to have much more potential. I presume she's a regular in the Lupin series; it's too bad she's such a minor character here.

Overall, I felt like The Castle of Cagliostro was not a particularly compelling movie, but it had some very compelling sequences. The car chase with Clarisse, Lupin, and the baddies is a lot of fun, and I loved Lupin's heist antics on the castle rooftops and in the aqueduct. But I didn't love the movie, partly because I didn't know enough about the characters, and partly because my expectations were too high. I was hoping Cagliostro would be as magical as later Miyazaki movies like Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, or even Porco Rosso. It's not.

- Liked It

Doctor Who: Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks (2007)

"That motherfucker had, like, 30 goddamn dicks."

Doctor Who is this great show about a dude named the Doctor who is an alien and is awesome and zips around space and time in his space-and-time machine, which looks like a blue box and is called the TARDIS and is also awesome. One caveat to the show's awesomeness, though: sometimes it sucks.

In this two-part episode, the Doctor (David Tennant, at this point) and his companion Martha (Freema Agyeman) visit New York during the Great Depression, because, you know, they figured that would be fun. Alas! Their quaint excursion to the breadlines is foiled by--who else?--the genocidal Daleks. The Doctor's mortal enemies are kidnapping people and dragging them to the Empire State Building in service of some evil plan.

Okay. Pretty straightforward. Also pretty boring. Neither the Doctor nor Martha does or says anything particularly interesting, and most of the guest characters are similarly flat. I do like the relationship between stagehand Laszlo and Adelaide-clone Tallulah. It's sweet and sad. Everything else about this two-parter, though--the tedious plot, the awful American accents, the idea of Human Daleks--is best forgotten.

For some reason, in new Who*, the presence of Daleks (or Cybermen, another classic enemy of the Doctor) tends to indicate crappy episodes. The big exception is the Ninth Doctor episode "Dalek," which is heart-wrenching and pretty dope. But while "Dalek" pulsed with an emotional core, most Dalek-centric episodes have been heavy on the "EXTERMINATE!" catch phrase (which--don't get me wrong--I love) and light on real feeling. The most recent season of Doctor Who was superb; to my mind, its only truly lackluster episode was the third one: "Victory of the Daleks." I'm going to idly speculate that Dalek episodes disappoint because 1) they're probably commissioned in an unimaginative way ("Give us Daleks in the thirties!" "Give us Daleks in WWII!") and 2) Daleks bring down the whimsy level, which means that the episode must compensate by being really dark or really scary. Otherwise, it's just really dull.

Looking back on season 3 of new Who, I'm sad for Martha Jones. She was a one-season-only companion, and she got shortchanged. First, her pining after the Doctor was not a particularly meaty arc. Second, she was in a lot of mediocre-to-bad episodes. In spite of those substantial handicaps, I find Freema Agyeman's performance completely winning. I love Martha and want only the best for her. But she did not usually get the best. She usually got "Daleks in Manhattan."

*There is "old Who," which ran from 1963-1989, and "new Who," which began in 2005. New Who is not a true reboot; it continued from where the old series left off. (More or less.)

- Didn't Like It (but if I were rating new Who as a whole, I'd give it 4 stars, and if I was rating the newest season of new Who, I'd give it 6 or 7)

The Commitments (1991)

Note, in the front row: baby Glen Hansard!

Jimmy Rabbitte (Robert Arkins) is obsessed with music. Two of his friends ask him to whip their band into shape, and he responds by taking it apart and putting together a new one: The Commitments. This soul cover band has a wise old veteran trumpeter, an egotistical dick of a lead singer, three talented female backups (who could easily have replaced insufferable frontman Deco), and five young nerds on guitar, bass, sax, piano, and drums. Will the band succeed, or will it be destroyed by too much infighting and not enough money?

Early on, one bandmember suggests that they may be too white to play soul music. Jimmy responds that the music fits them because "the Irish are the blacks of Europe. And Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. And the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So say it once, say it loud: I'm black and I'm proud." This sort of sentiment, well-intentioned though it may be, makes me really uncomfortable. First of all, it seems to render actual black people invisible? There are black people in Europe--and, indeed, Ireland--and if white Irish are "the blacks," then who are black Europeans? Also the blacks? Different blacks? Now, Jimmy's trying to draw a parallel between Britain's historical treatment of the Irish and America's historical treatment of black people. I get that. But that is itself problematic: you can't reduce "blackness" to just the experience of oppression or to a romanticized picture of musical "character" born of suffering. Not to be (even more) obvious (than usual), but it's a bit dehumanizing to treat people as metaphors instead of as, um, people.

This same sort of presumption manifests later in the movie, when club walls are papered with the band's posters proclaiming them the "Saviours of Soul." I'm sure Roddy Doyle, Alan Parker, et al. didn't mean anything by it, but saviors from what? I don't know. Maybe this isn't as bad as it seemed to me. I do this; I make a big deal over practically nothing. What do you guys think?

Race stuff aside, the movie seemed to me to have some structural weaknesses. The Commitments is based on a novel, and it felt like it would work better as a book. I haven't read the book, but I'm going to speculate wildly that there's probably more substantial character development there than in the movie. Plus, I think novels can get away with having less conflict than films.* There's a lot of conflict in the movie, but it isn't explored in a plottish way; it just erupts and subsides and erupts again, unhandled and probably unhandleable. (These are all official critical terms. Pauline Kael will back me up.) Anyway, to me, the movie felt a little thin on plot and on character.

Still, it's not thin on charm. I enjoyed watching it. I rooted for the band. I loved the dialogue between Jimmy and Joey "The Lips" Fagan at the end. Couldn't ask for a line much better than "That would have been predictable. This way it's poetry." Overall, though, I expected to like the movie more than I did, and I expected there to be more there there. (Not unlike my feelings on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.)

Maybe I should just be happy I got through it. In the last couple days, I have tried to watch Diabolique and Return of the Secaucus 7 and gotten bored with both. I think I'll go back to them. They're probably very good. Maybe my attention span is just shot. Maybe I'm having post-Moon malaise, as I predicted I would. Maybe, right now, I only have eyes for The Wire.

*It is possible that I'm full of shit.

- Liked It

NOPE.

Netflix appears to be under the impression that "romantic" means "has sex in it." That is not what it means.

Actual review up tonight.

Moon (2009)

This is a great week for everyone but me being right. For years, my friends, colleagues, and frenemies have been telling me I should watch The Wire, and I have said, "I will watch The Wire when I watch The Wire." Now I am watching The Wire, and you all were right, and I was stupid. Similarly, last year, while everyone I knew flipped out about Moon, I said, "Yeah, I'll get around to it." WELL, I HAVE GOTTEN AROUND TO IT, AND IT IS GREAT.

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) works for a company called Lunar Industries, mining helium-3, which humanity has adopted as its primary energy source. Sam is the only human part of the operation, there to inspect and maintain the automated harvesters. He's been alone on the moon for almost three years. When the movie opens, he's two weeks away from returning home, which is good, because the isolation is driving him crazy. He's started hallucinating, and one vision distracts him as he's driving out to a harvester, leading to a nasty collision. In the aftermath of the accident, he starts uncovering his employer's sinister secrets. (Ooh! Sinister! [Very sinister.])

Here are some things that Moon has:
-Sam Rockwell
-A robot
-Outer space
-Feelings
-Great production design/art direction


Moon looks better and is better (smarter, more interesting, more emotionally compelling, etc.) than almost everything that was nominated for an Oscar last year, blah blah, arts awards are bunk. And it is more original than everything else I saw last year, with the possible exception of Logorama. People who know how fond I am of In the Loop and A Serious Man will understand how much it pains me to say that any movie exceeded them at anything, but it's true.

Watching movies like Moon is wonderful, of course, but it's also a little bit awful: it makes average movies look really bad. For a few weeks after I saw Hunger, other movies and TV shows felt mechanical and unchallenging. I'm sure that Moon will also make me bridle at the next movie I try to watch.

Moon is energetic. That's what it is. It has the scrappy intensity of a very ambitious movie made on a small budget, a fuck-you-itiveness. It says, We will show you humanity and corruption and sadness and hope. We will do it on the moon. For $5 million. And it will look goddamned fantastic.

- Loved It

Murder on the Orient Express (1974)

"Bitterness is a paralytic. Love is a much more vicious motivator."

Okay, so Poirot doesn't actually say that. That's Sherlock Holmes in the new miniseries Sherlock, which everyone should be watching. (More generally, everyone should be watching everything Steven Moffat touches right now. He is at the top of his game.) My original point: Poirot easily could say that thing about bitterness and love. It's true of the criminal motive in Murder on the Orient Express.

Fifteen people board a sleeping car of the Orient Express in Istanbul. One of them is murdered, one of them is famous detective Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney), and the remaining baker's dozen are suspects. Over the rest of the movie, Poirot collects clues and talks to the passengers, then assembles them all in the dining car to expose the guilty.

The big reveal scene follows that age-old screenwriting adage: "Show, and also tell." This scene is so long! Lumet is a brilliant director, but I don't understand some of the choices he made in this movie--for example, why he chose to include Poirot's detailed description of the crime and lengthy flashbacks. There might have been room for both of those things, but not for so much of each of them.

One of the film's strong points, on the other hand, is its music. This movie has an honest-to-God overture! I love overtures, I love when movies have them, and this is a great one. Listen to this fucking overture:



Now are you stoked to see a movie, or WHAT? The whole score of Murder on the Orient Express (composed by Richard Rodney Bennett) is fantastic--the best thing about the movie, no question.

Overall, I thought the film's pedigree outshone the film itself. I imagined that Lumet, Finney, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, and John Gielgud would, together, make a great movie, but Murder on the Orient Express is just pretty good. It's fun. And strangely heartwarming.

- Liked It

Banlieue 13 (District B13) (2004)

"This is actually the best part of my day so far."

In the near future, violence has skyrocketed in the impoverished outskirts of Paris, which are now ruled by sadistic drug lords and their private armies. The French government has either responded to this phenomenon or caused it by walling off the most dangerous "districts," like the eponymous B13. Leïto (David Belle) lives inside B13. He is a vigilante (?) and landlord (??) who has stolen a lot of heroin, in a public service kind of way. When enforcers come to recover the drugs, Leïto destroys the stash and leads them on a merry chase across the rooftops. B13's kingpin, Taha (Bibi Naceri), retaliates by kidnapping Leïto's little sister, Lola (Dany Verissimo). Leïto almost rescues her, but the cops double-cross him, he goes to jail, and Lola is enslaved by Taha. (We'll come back to that.)

Meanwhile, in a more respectable part of Paris, we meet Capt. Damien Tomasso (Cyril Raffaelli), a cop who's infiltrated a criminal Spanish roulette operation? I don't know; something like that. Something gambling-related. Damien arrests the head Spaniard and, um, kills like twenty guys? Because that is a correct end to an undercover operation. Once Damien's bad-ass cred is established, the movie partners him with Leïto; the two of them are sent to B13 to disarm a bomb that Taha has stolen from the French government.

This movie is not that great. The plot is generally thin and yet still sometimes confusing. The characters and stakes are established in ways that ensured I would not care about them. The acting ranges from workmanlike to atrocious (I'm looking at you, Marc Andréoni). But--and this is a big "but"--there is PARKOUR. If, somehow, in this day and age, you do not know what parkour is, look it up on YouTube. You're welcome. Also, cancel all your plans; you will be watching parkour videos for the next week or so.

Raffaelli's stuntwork as Damien is good, and I enjoyed the set piece that introduces his character, but the real star of the action (and thus of the movie) is Belle. His chase scene at the beginning of the movie is so great. Sorry to wimp out on describing it, but if I say, "He leaps out a high-rise window onto a rope," it is not nearly as cool as when you see him leaping out a high-rise window onto a rope. I wish B13 were all parkour chase scenes, strung together with the bare minimum of dialogue. Parkour porn, in short.

But it is not that. Instead, it tries to be a real movie with, among other things, a real lady storyline. Bad decision. Listen: you cannot have your one and only female character spend the majority of the film being drugged and raped. I don't mean the only female character of note. I mean, truly, the only female non-extra onscreen. This movie is very much like Tennessee Williams, in that it hates women and is totally gay. Leïto and Damien spend their acquaintance 1) fighting in order to form an emotional bond, 2) handcuffing each other to things, and 3) basically doing it. I approve of all of that, but I wish action movies could be super gay without driving women into the cave of rape and irrelevance. If you will it, Luc Besson, it is no dream.

While we're on the subject of "me complaining about this movie's problems," B13 also has a slight case of Iron Man-itis. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I do not want action movies preaching to me about nonviolence or the democratic process. It draws me out of the world of flying people and whizzing bullets and back into the world where high body counts are horrifying, not entertaining. The scene in which Damien speechifies at the defense minister is B13's equivalent of the press conference where Tony Stark declares he has "more to offer this world than just making things that blow up." First of all, no, you don't. Second, shut up. Don't burden me with an excursus on your highly selective morality; it ruins the amoral fun of the movie.

My "liked it" rating may be confusing in light of the preceding paragraphs, but, in the wise words of my roommate Mary, "Parkour always deserves seven stars."

- 3 stars