The unnecessary remake of "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" is neither as good as the novel nor the Swedish film made from it. David Fincher is a capable director, but there may be less to his talents than meets the eye. You can take this movie scene-by-scene and call into question many of Fincher's choices. The director seems to be aware that the story is almost too familiar. However, anyone not knowing what the book is about may have trouble following the first hour of a tediously long feature that never fully engages the audience.
Let's focus on the sexual assault of the pierced, tattooed and emotionally scarred heroine Lisabeth Salander. The passages in the novel describing her horrific rape appall the reader. You sense Salander's terror and you feel compassion for her. In the Swedish film, it's a comparable sensation. In Fincher's version, I didn't feel anything other than the fact that Fincher was exploiting the sequence. He didn't elevate the content. The scene was clinical, and since Fincher hadn't really established the persona of Lisabeth, there's no sympathy from the audience, which is inured to this kind of violence from years of exploitation of women in the movies.
Fincher is not an empathetic director; he's a voyeur. He uses the same unsentimental coldness for both the rape of Lisabeth and her revenge against her therapist. It all exists to titillate. Yes, Fincher has made interesting films, but to me, he never really appreciates the needs of his audience. He doesn't fully engage the moviegoer. He makes them wait, peeking along with him, and then he delivers his signature jolt, if there's going to be a jolt. There are times when they want to understand what's going on, but there are other times when they crave being taken on an emotional ride. Fincher doesn't build up that sense of dread that a director such as Roman Polanski will drop into his movies.
Millenium magazine journalist Mykael Blomkvist is equally as strong a character as Lisabeth, but here he's portrayed as a super-sleuth. Blomkvist has become a detective, rather than a focused investigative reporter. In the novel, he's sloppy and loves women and can be lazy. Not in the film. The material about the future of the magazine seems to be an afterthought. Daniel Craig is merely passable as Blomkvist. Rooney Mara can't do anything new with Lisabeth because Noomi Rapace did such a brilliant job in the three Swedish films.
Too much of the movie is in shadows. Snow does not create shadows. It creates bright light and crispness, the same kind of crispness we saw in the Swedish film. It's as if Fincher highlighted the first few sentences of specific paragraphs and filmed them. There's no depth to the characters, no depth to his movie.
Tintin buys a model ship, the Unicorn, at an outdoor market. Soon, nefarious men are murdering and kidnapping to get a hold of the model because it holds clues to the location of a vast treasure. Tintin joins forces with Captain Haddock, the drunken chief of an old cargo ship, and we encounter pirates and sheikhs on this whimsical adventure.
The movie has been produced using motion-capture techniques. I'm not that much of a fan of the process, but I think director Steven Spielberg gets it right. He beautifully replicates the exquisite drawings from the original "Tintin" comics, which were hugely popular in the 1930s and were created by Belgium's Georges Prosper Remi, who wrote and drew under the name Herge. Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish's screenplay keeps things flowing. "Tintin" is thoroughly enjoyable.
Steven Spielberg also directed "War Horse," and here his sense of playfulness has been tossed out the window. This is a dour, often dull film, written by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis and based on a novel by Michael Morpurgo. A boy and his horse live on a dirt-poor farm in England. We lose sight of the boy for a while, as the horse goes off to World War I, where cavalry charges and mustard gas turn this war into both an anachronism and a horror show.
The boy, who ends up a young man on the frontlines, is acted by a bland Jeremy Irvine, so uninteresting that he never allows for any sympathy. Spielberg may have recognized this because everything in his overlong movie relies on the audience weeping for the cruel things that happen to the horse during the war. Spielberg did the battle material better in "Saving Private Ryan." He surely realized this was the case.
"War Horse" is a bit unfocused and certainly not for children. The one true saving grace is the cinematography by Janusz Kaminski, which makes you realize how vivid movies can be.
Once again, Tom Cruise heads up the team of problem solvers. This time around, he and his group of daredevils include Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg and Paula Patton. The story circles the globe and revolves around a madman looking to rocket a nuclear-warhead into an important American city.
Brad Bird directs with an understanding that people go to these films to see the mission accomplished without too much psycho-dramatic clutter. Josh Applebaum and Andre Nemec wrote the smooth and entertaining screenplay.
Cruise overacts in his usual gung-ho manner, but he's less annoying in this much-better edition. The sandstorm chase in Dubai is as good as any action sequence I've seen on-screen. Renner, Pegg and Patton are worthy elements of an exciting film that is utterly believable.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Jan. 3 2012 |