Movie Nation

The first thing about “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is that it’s superfluous. The original Swedish films may be subtitled, with actors few outside of Sweden had heard of before they came out. But the shock of discovering the socialist paradise’s dark side — Nazis, perverts, serial killers and libel laws that endanger good journalism — the very Swedishness of the piece, made the films of Stieg Larsson’s books riveting big-screen page-turners.
The story — about an aging industrialist who commissions a struggling journalist, who in turn asks for help from a touchy, tortured and troubled bi-sexual punk computer hack with a huge dragon tattoo running down her back — is dense and textured, lots of characters to keep track of, motives to trace, crimes to discover and an ancient missing person case that leads us into the dark world of Larsson’s creation.
David Fincher’s Hollywood remake has a great cast — Rooney Mara has been nominated for an Oscar for her turn in the title role, Daniel Craig is the gutsy journalist, Christoper Plummer is the patriarch, with Robin Wright, Stellan Skarsgard, Joely Richardson and other Hollywood character players such as Steven Berkoff filling in around the edges.
The new version has Hollywood production values — dazzling production design, amped up action beats, terrific stunt work and the rights to Enya’s “Sail Away.”
But Fincher, in doing what he has insisted is a “new” adaptation, has changed little. For most of the first two hours, you’d swear he even used some of the same locations — the look, feel and tempo of the movies are that similar. He didn’t fix the main “shortcoming” of the original film, it’s pace. This “Tattoo” is even longer.
Craig does his standard Daniel Craig (light British) accent, playing a Swede surrounded by other actors (Plummer, Wright and Mara) who do feign Swedish accents.
Those had to be the issues the more film savvy in Hollywood picked up on when leaving “Tattoo” out of the best picture and best director races. It’s simply not original enough. He had a blueprint and he followed it.
Craig plays journalist Mikael Blomqvist, ruined by an under-sourced expose of a devious, corrupt industrialist. In the original films, he faced jail time over this, which gave the story some urgency that this one lacks. Blomqvist was a condemned man in the first films. Here, not so much.
Plummer is the aging Henrik Vanger, lord of a shrinking industrial empire and patriarch of a disagreeable clan of Sweden’s uber-rich, a man who wonders if one of his own family members killed a favorite granddaughter who went missing back in the 1960s. Vanger hires Blomqvist to re-open the case and find out what happened to Harriet. His search includes interviews with family members (Geraldine James, Skarsgard, Joely Richardson), some of whom had Nazi sympathies back in the day. And they aren’t even the scariest Vangers.

And along the way, Blomqvist takes on an assistant, the alarming, disturbed young woman/hacker who did the Vanger’s investigation of Blomqvist before he was hired for this case. She lives outside the law, a punk covered in tattoos and piercings, hanging out in gay bars and stealing data by any electronic means necessary. She is a ward of the state, at the mercy of a seriously creepy probation officer (Yorick Van Wageninen from “The Way”).
I love the way Mara carries herself in this role (Noomi Rapace was unforgettable as Lisbeth Salander in the original films). Eyes looking down, an almost military cadence to her walking, she has lived most of her 24 years on the defensive. She takes any remark about her eating habits personally.
“I have a high metabolism I can’t put on weight” she snaps, in a rush, any time it comes up.
In going back tot eh books, screenwriter Steven Zaillian has given more a sexual/romantic side to the Blomqvist/Salandar relationship. Very David Fincher. Very Hollywood, too. That robs the film of some of the spiritual connection between these two mismatched personalities, the sense that each is returning a life-saving favor given by the other.
That doesn’t mean it’s not a thoroughly engrossing, entertaining film, one that deserves to be seen by the millions who missed the original Swedish trilogy. But it does tend to make this “Millennium Trilogy” more perfunctory, more reliant on Fincher (“Se7en,” “Zodiac”) to deliver big, graphic, jolting shocks of sex and violence and sexual violence. That renders this “Tattoo” more tawdry than revelatory, more a stunt than an a gritty, eye-opening thriller set in a country best known for its gorgeous blondes, Volvos and ABBA.
And best picture? Best director? It’s certainly better than some of the nominated films. But Fincher & Co. lose points every time this movie is nothing more than a slightly–just ever so slightly — inferior version of the Swedish films.

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For ten years Emma Watson put her real life on hold as played the plucky Hermione Granger in the eight films that brought J. K. Rowling’s wizardly world of Harry Potter to the screen. It made her rich and famous beyond her wildest imaginings.

But it made her live her life “in a very weird order,” she says. “Harry Potter pushed my life back.” Now 22, she finds herself “having a delayed adolescent experience,” a years-late turn at high school, for instance.

“The Perks of Being a Wallflower” has been one of her favorite novels. And being Emma Watson, one of the most photographed and adored young women in the world, she could have a hand in getting it turned into a film. No, she wouldn’t be the lead, and yes, she would have to fake her way through a “real” American high school experience. But the young Briton was game

“American culture and American high schools are like another world to me,” Watson says. “I had to do a lot of research just to get myself comfortable with an experience that Logan (Lerman, the film’s lead) and Ezra (Miller, who plays her half-brother) would have absorbed just by growing up in America. I felt very like the outsider.”

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Movie Review: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

In the world of spy fiction, there’s John le Carre, and legions of mere mortals, the men and women who give us “Bourne” this and “Bond” that.
And “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” le Carre’s spin on the days when Britain’s spy service was staggering from one “mole” scandal to another — almost fatally compromised for decades — is his masterwork, a subtle and somber thriller about realistic spies engaged in genuine spycraft.
The Oscar nominated film of it, by the Swedish director of “Let the Right One In,” glories in le Carre’s nuances, the intricate mental work of umasking a traitor. It revels in the long, studied pauses of its anti-hero, George Smiley, a disgraced spymaster working outside of the agency, nicknamed “The Circus,” trying to puzzle out/trip up whichever former colleague was actually working for the Soviets the whole time the rest of his team was trying to win the Cold War.
The film has intrigues, shootings, infidelities and clues — lots of clues — which we ponder, along with the poker-faced Smiley, played with Oscar-nominated perfection by Gary Oldman. It plays rather like its central metaphor — a game of chess, with Smiley matching wits with the traitor and the traitor’s control agent, the infamous and unseen Russian spymaster “Karla.”
The raging, chain-smoking, hard-drinking chief of The Circus, known only as “Control” (John Hurt at his most volcanic) has botched a sting he set up without the rest of the agency’s knowledge. He is forced out, along with his chief lieutenant, Smiley, and dies soon after.
But traces of Control’s suspicions linger — agents and gambits blown, secrets lost. So the officious member of the cabinet (Simon McBurney, perfect) commissions Smiley to sneak back in, out of retirement, and get to the bottom of it.
Smiley doesn’t assemble a “team,” so much as get a couple of fellows he trusts in his corner — chief among them, Agent Peter Guillam, given a brittle, nervous competence by Benedict Cumberbatch.

Is there a mole? Could it be the agency’s new chief, Percy (Toby Jones), or Percy’s pal Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds), his underling Esterhase (David Dencik) or the dashing Bill Haydon (Colin Firth)? And how does the parallel story, that of a betrayed agent (Mark Strong, terrific as always) who now lays low, teaching at a boy’s school, fit in? “Tinker Tailor” hides its secrets well.
It’s the early 1970s, so Smiley resorts to old fashioned breaking and entering — stolen log books and the like — and simple memory, his and others’ — to unravel the mystery.
Oldman’s wonderfully understated performance at times seems a spot-on impersonation of Alec Guiness’s take on Smiley from the 1970s TV versions of “Tinker Tailor” and “Smiley’s People.” His measured cadences, thoughtful pauses and the way he turns every question from an old friend that he’s interrogating (he never lets on that that’s what this conversation is, an interrogation)into a further probing of that colleague’s recollections, is brilliant.
His marquee scene — chatting up the retired data analyst Connie Sachs (Kathy Burke).
Connie: It was a good time back then.
Smiley: It was a war, Connie.
Connie: A war we could be proud of.
My favorite scene is one Alfredson revisits several times over the course of the film, the annual Circus Christmas Party. I don’t recall this being in the book (the Bridget O’Connor-Peter Straughan script is up for best adapted screenplay). But it succinctly gets at Control’s drinking problem, the eggshells his subordinates walk on when he’s around, the various alliances within the Circus and George Smiley’s personal troubles. And the very notion of a bunch of weathered British Cold Warriors bursting into song — the Soviet National Anthem, yes they all know the words, in Russian — is a stitch.
It’s a pity this cerebral spy game wasn’t nominated for best picture, and that film fans accustomed to manic editing/spectacular parkour chases and epic brawls in this spy films may find it slow. But or the rest of us, it’s as close as the movies can get to a great le Carre novel — a deft and delicious brain-teaser of a movie.

MPAA Rating:R for violence, some sexuality/nudity and language
Cast: Gary Oldman, John Hurt, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Mark Strong, Ciaran Hinds
Credits: Directed by Tomas Alfredson, scripted by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, based on the John Le Carre novel. A Focus Features release. Running time: 2:07

It takes little away from the quirky, deadpan comedy “Sleepwalk with Me” to say it worked better as a stand-up monologue. The monologue was exquisitely-timed and drawn out. The film, for a film, is short and droll. It’s slight. And the dead spots, the routine observations about love and the stand-up comic’s life, stand out more.
“Sleepwalk With Me” opens Friday at The Enzian.
Comic Mike Birbiglia’s nightmarish sleepwalking routine gained its greatest fame as a segment on public radio’s “This American Life,” and in adapting it to the screen, he’s merely added recreations of events that were perfectly vivid in our minds’ eye, thanks to the magic of radio.
On the screen, though he manages a few novel touches (he breaks the fourth wall and narrates his story), the mannered “This American Life” style of delivery — intentional stammers and pauses, aka “Ira Glass-itis” — seem even more precious. As charming as the film often is, the laughs in a ten minute “bit” are thin and drawn out in an 80 minute movie.

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“Sound of My Voice,” earlier this summer, reminded us that time travel is one corner of science fiction where you don’t have to break the bank to tell a convincing, thought-provoking tale on screen.
“Safety Not Guaranteed” is a quirkier, funnier and more romantic variation on a time-travel theme. It’s a sci-fi story of regret, and an indie film with Duplass Brothers touches.
No, the “Jeff, Who Lives at Home/Comfy Chair” guys didn’t write or direct it. But they produced it. Mark Duplass co-stars in it. And director Derek Connolly and writer Colin Trevorrow give it that that offbeat, bemused Duplass Brothers no-budget “mumblecore” tone.
Darius (Aubrey Plaza) is a twentysomething cynic, alone, unloved, unhappy and underemployed in her internship at Seattle Magazine. They have her stocking toilet paper in the bathrooms, and that’s got her down.
“I just expect the worst, and try not to get my hopes up.”
Her chance to prove she’s better than that comes when star reporter Jeff (Jake M. Johnson of “No Strings Attached”) spies a classified ad in the local paper. Some anonymous tinkerer is looking for a partner to join in him or her on a trip back in time. “This is not a joke,” the ad declares. You need to provide your own weapons. “Safety not guaranteed.”
Jeff heads off to a sleepy corner of the Washington coast, dragging virginal interns Darius and Arnau (Karan Soni) along. The interns stake out the post office box the ad refers to. And tactless, shallow Jeff sets out to do a little time traveling of his own. This town is where his first great flame ended up. He wants to catch up with an old girlfriend.
Darius spies the time traveler and takes her shot at signing on to be his partner. Kenneth (Mark Duplass) is a genuine eccentric, a grocery store clerk who babbles on about physics to clueless colleagues, the sort of nerd-kook who challenges potential time travelers with “Can you look fear and danger in the eye?”
The most charming scenes here involve Darius clumsily working her feminine wiles on hapless Kenneth, batting her eyes and peppering her speech with his brand of crackpot aphorisms.

“There’s no sense in nonsense.”

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It begins with a disaster, a huge one witnessed not from a distance, not via the safety of a TV news report, but up close and personal.

The horror of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 is made intimate, so awful that you recoil from the screen, ducking as tree limbs and shards of debris are hurled at you and the onscreen victims in “The Impossible.” The effect is akin to being stuffed into a washing machine filled with brown water and about 400 things that can poke, puncture, slice and lacerate you.

While you don’t drown.

Then, stripped, battered, injured and doomed to infection, you try to save yourself and then others. You look for help. You find yourself depending on the kindness of strangers, people who don’t speak your language who are suffering and lost, too, for your very survival. And having children in your care, you try to cling to your humanity as you all cling – barely – to life.

“The Impossible” is a vivid recreation of a disaster made moving by a stellar cast, a gripping, “How will this end?” script and all-too-real special effects and sets. You’ll feel you’re in that oceanic washing machine with Naomi Watts, grieve for her chances of survival and cry over the life lessons she struggles to pass on to her son (Tom Holland).

A Christmas vacation in Khao Lak, Thailand turns terribly wrong for a family of five, headed by Maria (Watts) and Henry (Ewan McGregor), English teachers living in Japan, enjoying the sun and surf until that December morning when the world was turned upside down and washed away within minutes.

Miraculously, they survive the tidal wave. But they’re separated – dad with two small boys of five and seven years, mom with twelve-year-old Lucas. We follow their stories, separately, each looking for and despairing of finding the other, each facing the awful reality that they may be the last members of their family.

For Maria, that takes on extra urgency as the film unfolds. She’s badly hurt, and the struggle to get Lucas and a small boy they rescue along the way to safety becomes the thing that drives her even as we see her pallor change, her own death become imminent.

Lucas, a frightened, confused and rebellious kid, has staggering responsibilities thrust on him. Mom’s “I’m scared too,” is hardly consolation. He might be all alone in the world at any minute, with no way of reaching even distant relations in the aftermath of this cataclysm.

Meanwhile, Henry frantically searches for Maria and Lucas, struggles to keep his boys with him even as evacuations threaten to pull them all out of the area and remove any hope he has of finding his wife and missing son.

The genius of Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona’s approach is the myopia here. Bayona (“The Orphange”) lets us see only what the victims see. The chaos of the aftermath, First World survivors hurled into the Third World abyss with everybody else there, is stark and alarming. What they don’t know, not being able to get information, to find loved ones, to let relatives know they’re alive, is maddening.

Bayona spares us little in the detail of the injuries, the ocean that victims vomit up days later.

And Watts, in the best performance in an already illustrious career, makes us feel it all. Maria is never so stricken that she cannot see past her own misery, never more heroic than when she distracts her son by charging him to “Go help people, you’re good at it.” Fading in and out of consciousness, fully aware of her own fate, she’s determined to leave Lucas, if she has to leave him, with that one last life lesson.

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It’s something to see, all right — this “Dark Knight Rises.”

An epic finale to the Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale “Dark Knight” trilogy, it has the summer’s best effects, the summer’s highest stakes — Gotham City armageddon — the summer’s sexiest villain and the biggest comic book movie thrills and best comic book movie chills of this cinema season.

It’s a film of awe inspiring set pieces and jaw-dropping stunts — less of this “Avengers/Spider-Man/Transformers” digital effects overkill. It’s topical, morphing the “Occupy” movement into a few choice messages about the few who take from the many, but taking anarchy to its logical extremes.

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“Skyfall” is far and away the best, and the most British of the Daniel Craig-James Bond movies. Director Sam Mendes (“Road to Perdition”) gets Bond back to the basics — bullets, babes, big time bad guys and bawdy humor. And the result is an entertaining romp, an old spy school Bond film that reigns in the more violent and Germanic Bond of Marc Forster’s CHECK films.

In the film’s opening gambit, Bond bites the bullet. He’s accidentally shot while wrestling with a generic villain on the roof of a train speeding through Turkey.

Since he’s chased this guy, by car and motorbike through the crowded bazaars and narrow streets of Istanbul (and “Taken 2”), M (Judi Dench) is willing to risk a trigger-happy fellow agent, played with a sexy pizazz by Naomie Harris, best known as the less sexy witch of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies.

What Bond was trying to nab was a compuer hard drive with a “list” on it. Some supervillain with Wikileaks tendencies wants to expose spies. Bond getting “killed” means that he’s failed. And that M has failed, too. The fallout for 007 is an obituary. For M, it’s a political raking-over-the-coals, where she’s called an “old fashioned” relic of a bygone era, “the golden age of espionage.”

“We can’t keep living in the shadows,” her new boss, the intelligence minister (Ralph Fiennes) tells her. “There are no more shadows.”

We, of course, know better. When MI-6 is hacked and bombed, Bond comes back from his babe-and-beers and drinking games (very Indiana Jones) to save the day. Except he’s gotten old. He’s lost a step. And he couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with a Walther PPK. No matter, M won’t have anybody else.

The biggest problem with the first two Craig Bonds — both films were huge hits — was the villains. This time, Oscar winner Javier Bardem shows up as a murderous hacker with a Julian Assange blond mop top. And he brings the pain — and the homoerotic undertones — OK, OVER-tones.

The writing — three screenwriters pitched in — is jokier, crisper. The “Bond Girl” is played by the ultra-exotic Bérénice Marlohe

And there’s a new quartermaster, “Q” — played by waif-thin Ben Whishaw in a radical re-interpretation of a witty role that has been beloved by fans of the series for nearly 50 years.

Yes, this year marks 50 years of James Bond films, and Mendes & Co. use the film as an excuse to joke about age and trot out old props and older actors (Albert Finney). So much of it works that it’s as if Craig’s been dying to give this guy a lighter touch, and makes the most of it.]

The finale is straight out of John Wayne’s “Rio Bravo,” and the violent set pieces — ranging from Shanghai and Macao to Parliament and the bunkers of London — are blandly predictable.

But that’s kind of the point here. This is action comfort food, from the brand of gun and martini recipe to the quips and coital interluds. It’s all good, clean, British fun. “Skyfall” — the bloody title means little within the context of all this — ensures continuity in that comfort food, that as long as there’s a Britain, there will be a Bond, James Bond, to look after her interests.

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