Day: December 22, 2011

LFM Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

By Joe Bendel. For a while, Lisbeth Salander was like Scarlett O’Hara with a nose ring. Every actress claiming to be under thirty who was not in contention for the role should have fired her agent. Eventually Rooney Mara was chosen to follow in Noomi Rapace’s footsteps. It was one of several odd choices that produced David Fincher’s surprisingly straight forward remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (trailer here), which opened Tuesday in New York (a few hours earlier than first announced).

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Lisbeth Salander is a difficult woman to get to know. However, the hacker for hire can find out all there is to know about anyone else—for a price, of course. Her latest target she actually finds sort of interesting: Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist just found guilty of libeling a controversial businessman. Based on Salander’s vetting, Blomkvist has been hired by retired industrialist Henrik Vanger to solve the decades old disappearance of his favorite niece Harriet.

Still grieving the loss of the teen-aged girl, the old Vanger finds little comfort from the rest of his ghoulish clan, many of whom were (and continue to be) open National Socialist sympathizers. With a large, ugly family full of suspects to check out, Blomkvist has his work cut out for him, but he will find an unlikely ally in Salander, once she has dealt (severely) with some of her own personal issues.

Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander.

As fans of the series already know, Blomkvist and Salander soon suspect the disappearance of the Vanger niece is part of a hitherto undetected pattern of serial killings. Indeed, anyone who has seen Niels Arden Oplev’s Swedish Tattoo will find no surprises in Fincher’s remake. All the villains and shocking revelations remain exactly the same.

Frankly, Fincher’s approach to the material is nearly identical as well, delving into lurid family secrets to find grisly thrills. Nor does he shy away from the forerunner film’s two infamous inter-related scenes involving Salander and her so-called legal guardian. Yet, despite the cool dark vibe, Tattoo is not particularly Fincheresque. Compared to Fight Club and even The Social Network, it is far more conventional than auterist.

In terms of casting, Daniel Craig is a perfect fit for Blomkvist, looking like the slightly younger and more attractive brother of his Swedish predecessor, Michael Nyqvist. He is very convincing as the world weary journalistic everyman with an edge. In contrast, Rooney Mara is impossible to buy into as Salander. To put it bluntly, she looks like a horrendously made-up little girl rather than a grown woman, which might be in keeping with the source novels, but simply does not work on-screen, especially in her more harrowing scenes.

Christopher Plummer and Daniel Craig.

If you are going to remake one of the Salander films, Tattoo is the one to do. It features the most intriguing mystery that best stands alone. Wisely, Steven Zaillian’s screenplay downplays Blomkvist’s leftist ideology, but it also waters down the subplot involving Sweden’s Nazi-sympathizing past, which gave Oplev’s version some of its distinctive seasoning. Still, when Blomkvist and Salander’s investigation starts humming along, it is easy to get caught up in the film’s energy.

Fincher’s Tattoo is certainly a professionally crafted film. Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth gives the film an icy, grey look that perfectly represents Sweden. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s electro-industrial-ambient score is also eerily effective, largely establishing an independent identity for the film by itself. Still, considering how closely this Tattoo parallels the original, one wonders why they bothered to remake it. Critically miscast in a key role, Fincher’s Tattoo is a watchable but unnecessary remake. An acceptable compromise film during the holiday season but not worth standing in long lines for, Tattoo opened Tuesday in New York at the AMC Empire.

Posted on December 22nd, 2011 at 11:18am.

YouTube Jukebox: Jeff Beck and Imogen Heap

By David Ross. Every ten years or so Jeff Beck emerges from manorial seclusion to prove why he’s the fifth best guitarist in history (so says Rolling Stone this month). His most recent groundhog cameo was his 2007 live set at Ronnie Scott’s in London, which the BBC, making itself useful for once, preserved for posterity. The highlights are Beck’s pair of unlikely duets with the arty poetess Imogen Heap. Always at his best with a strong vocal foil – Rod Stewart being the original case in point – Beck found his match in Heap. She’s as melodically sly as he is, and there’s something weird and entrancing about her great height and beauty – her regality – as it were stooped to the earthly traffic of the blues chestnut “Rollin and Tumbling” (above).

Beck and Heap radically reverse themselves on Heap’s own “Blanket” (here). Seeming to grow darker with each listening, the song is a confession of decadence in the nineteenth-century vein, a confession of forlorn and weary compensation for the loss of something irreplaceable. If music is the only possible sanctuary–the blanket of the song’s title–the song’s dreamy washes of electronic sound evoke the kind of world from which sanctuary is necessary: a floating world of pattern recognition and virtual light (to borrow phrases from William Gibson), of Calatravian airport terminals and glass needles spiring above Asian cities. The song’s irony is that the narrator can express her alienation from this world only in the tonality of its ennui; if music is a sanctuary, it’s a compromised one.

Posted on December 22nd, 2011 at 11:17am.

Hamlet Reincarnated: LFM Reviews The Prince of the Himalayas

By Joe Bendel. Shakespeare famously wrote in As You Like It: “all the world’s a stage.”  That includes the “Roof of the World” as well. In an act of sheer cinematic bravura, Sherwood Hu moves the Danish tragedy to the high Tibetan mountains, taking invigorating liberties with the Shakespeare play in the process. Appropriately, Hu’s The Prince of the Himalayas (trailer here), will have its premiere American theatrical engagement exclusively at the Rubin Museum of Art (home to the largest collection of Himalayan art in the West and some of the City’s finest film and jazz programming), starting this Friday.

Returning from his studies in Persia, Prince Lhamoklodan is distressed to learn he just missed his father’s funeral. He is also put-off by the news his uncle Kulo-ngam will become the crown-regent by marrying his mother Namn. Indeed, one ceremony closely follows the other, as his school chum Horshu observes. However, it is the ghost of his father who confirms Lhamoklodan’s suspicions, setting him on a bloody course of vengeance.

So far, so Shakespearean. Yet Hu has several surprises in store for viewers, most notably his decision to make the Himalayan Gertrude and especially its Claudius, the sympathetic core of the film. We learn rather early Kulo-ngam always loved Namn, but his not so dearly departed older brother cruelly intervened. As a result, Lhamoklodan comes across as one of the harsher, more spiteful Hamlets ever seen on-screen. Conversely, the ethereally beautiful Osaluyang is one of the most heartbreaking Ophelias. She also reaches rare heights of madness in a role often required to discretely slip into the water off-screen or off-stage in many conventional productions.

Borrowing elements from Macbeth and Sophocles, Hu’s adaptation of Shakespeare is inspired, but hardly slavish in its faithfulness. He arguably remains true to the spirit of the original play (although you probably would not want to argue the point with Harold Bloom). Without question, though, the Tibetan mountains and tundra must be the grandest, most expansive setting for any staging of Hamlet. If there is any misstep in the Himalayan Prince, it is that of over-scoring. The vast spaces of the Jiabo kingdom call out for eerie silence rather than prestige picture orchestrations. Continue reading Hamlet Reincarnated: LFM Reviews The Prince of the Himalayas