Month: December 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

LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Twilight and the Return of Women’s Blockbuster Films

[Editor’s Note: The post below appears today on the front page of The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty. When The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo hits movie theaters on December 21st, it will be the second major female-led franchise movie released in just over a month. The first, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part I, has already earned over $640 million dollars worldwide since its November 18th release and has become the third-highest grossing movie of 2011 (after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 and Transformers: Dark of the Moon – and on a lower budget than those films). The remarkable success of the Twilight film series, with over $2 billion in worldwide ticket sales to date, proves that audiences will show up to see tentpole movies built around women. Now with the upcoming release of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the spring/summer 2012 openings of Mirror Mirror, The Hunger Games, and Snow White and the Huntsman, audiences are being offered a run of female-oriented big-budget films unlike anything they’ve seen in recent years. After decades of lavishing resources on male-led action and comic book movies, Hollywood is finally making an effort to give women and their stories the blockbuster treatment.

Greta Garbo in "Queen Christina."

In doing so, the film industry is hearkening back to what was once a strength of classic Hollywood: the blockbuster women’s film. Such films were high-quality productions that elevated the unique psychology, heroism and romance of women’s lives to the level of epic entertainment. The great era of this kind of women’s film was in the ’30s and ’40s when movies like Greta Garbo’s Queen Christina, Vivien Leigh’s Gone with the Wind, Marlene Dietrich’s The Scarlet Empress, Joan Crawford’s Mildred Pierce, Greer Garson’s Mrs. Miniver, and Bette Davis’ Jezebel enthralled audiences. Whether they told historical or contemporary stories, such films offered a ‘blockbuster’ vision of women’s lives – both in terms of the resources the studios devoted to them (A-list directors and casts, big budgets) as well as in the importance they placed in their heroine’s emotional journeys. Such films were a mainstay of classic Hollywood, filling box office coffers and building the careers of talented actresses. Further, these films inspired both women and men, for they successfully transformed the unique emotions and experiences of women into works of art with universal significance.

The success of classic women-led films is reflected in their status as some of the highest grossing films of all time. According to Box Office Mojo’s list of the all time highest grossing films (all figures are domestic, adjusted for inflation), Gone with the Wind (1939) is still number one with an astonishing U.S. theatrical total of $1.6 billion dollars. The Sound of Music ($1.13 billion), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs ($867 million), and Titanic ($1.02 billion) also figure in the top ten list – and one could argue that Dr. Zhivago ($988 million) and The Exorcist ($880 million) owe much of their success to their strong female characters, as well. The success of these films shows that women and their stories have been a compelling draw in many of the biggest movies ever made.

Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, however, the action movie rose in prominence – and a genre that naturally favors men over women took over Hollywood. The success of the male-oriented action film was used to justify spending less money on women’s films, and women were increasingly relegated to lower budget romantic comedies and dramas. This led to a vicious cycle in which the modest budgets given to women’s films led to modest box office returns that were then used as an excuse to spend even less on women’s films – completely contradicting the evidence of the successful women’s films of the classic Hollywood era. While some fine movies were made in this period – Norma Rae, Julia, An Unmarried Woman – much of the heroism, glamor, and romance that had characterized the great women’s films of the ’30s and ’40s was lost.

Kate Winslet in "Titanic."

There was a brief resurgence of the blockbuster women’s film in the ’80s with Out of Africa, Terms of Endearment, and comedies like Romancing the Stone, but this promising trend petered out in the early ’90s. By the late ’90s, the film industry’s downgrading of women’s importance in the movies was such that when Titanic became a massive hit in 1997 – a film very much built around Kate Winslet and her emotional journey – the film’s success was instead credited to Leonardo DiCaprio and to the film’s special effects.

This mindset has led to another trend in contemporary Hollywood: the rise of the comic book movie. With the comic book movie, the film industry has became preoccupied with producing a never-ending stream of films based around male adolescence and coming of age. That’s fine for men, but there’s little there to relate to for women. On the rare occasion when a woman plays the lead in a big-budget comic book or video game movie – say Angelina Jolie in the Tomb Raider films, or Milla Jovovich in the Resident Evil films – her role is little different from that of a man. This is a shame because women are capable of a lot more on the big screen than simply wielding violence.

Women’s life experiences are different from those of men. We wish to be leaders and to achieve success in the world, but in our entertainment we also want romance, adventure, and emotional catharsis. When the Twilight movies came along, they answered this need beautifully. Twilight‘s highly traditional storyline of a young woman falling in love with and taming a dangerous man has appealed to women for generations and dates back to the 19th century Gothic novel and beyond (as I describe in my analysis of the literary and mythological themes in the Twilight series). One sees this storyline in everything from the fable of Beauty and the Beast to novels like Jane Eyre and Gone with the Wind. Ultimately, this storyline serves as a metaphor for a woman’s heroic quest to overcome the forces of evil and find love and fulfillment in the world. Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Twilight and the Return of Women’s Blockbuster Films

LFM Review: Pope Joan

By Joe Bendel. She was a figure of anti-Catholic lore largely but not decisively debunked by Protestant scholars. For centuries millions truly believed in the existence of a legendary female Pope. Indeed, enough references could be found in various sources (before you ask, this definitely includes Martin of Troppau’s Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatorum) to provide Donna Woolfolk Cross the hooks on which to hang a speculative novel about Johanna Anglicus, the woman who would be Pope (allegedly). The most likely apocryphal and very definitely controversial story comes to television when director-co-adapter Sönke Wortmann’s Pope Joan (trailer here), debuted this past Sunday on ReelzChannel.

Like the other Joan, the life of Johanna (not yet known as Anglicus) will be short but epic. Her father is a priest from Britain who came to convert the godless Saxons. Unfortunately, most of his zeal is reserved for terrorizing his family. Despite her natural aptitude and general thirst for knowledge, he refuses to allow her any formal education. However, through the intercession of an unusually progressive Bishopric, Johanna eventually begins her studies at the Cathedral school, while staying as a guest of Count Gerold. She quickly forms a deep emotional bond with the Count, but not so much with the Countess.

War will soon disrupt their lives, but it offers Johanna the opportunity to assume her younger brother’s identity and take his place in a monastic order. There she will begin her ecclesiastic career, living in constant fear her secret will be revealed.

Pope Joan is not exactly a love letter to the Church (there was only one at the time), but not all of the clergy depicted are intolerant Savonarolas. In fact, at critical junctures of her life, Johanna is championed or protected by many men of the cloth, usually of the older and wiser variety. Frankly, one of the most sympathetic characters is Pope Sergius II, whom Anglicus (as he/she is then known) loyally serves. Still, her dogmatic father is so unremittingly abusive, it makes several of the early scenes punishingly difficult to watch.

Despite the gender-bending element of Anglicus’s supposedly suppressed story, Pope Joan is not really preoccupied with psycho-sexual issues. Instead, it is a more traditional feminist critique of an old world social order that afforded little or no opportunities to women. It does so with healthy doses of war, pestilence, and intrigue.

John Goodman in "Pope Joan."

Having previously played an acting president on The West Wing, an unlikely British monarch in King Ralph – and the mother of all governors, Huey P. Long – John Goodman rounds out his resume with the portrayal of a Pope. While he somewhat stands out amid the European cast, his larger than life presence fits Sergius nicely.

Continue reading LFM Review: Pope Joan

The New Trailer for The Dictator; Film Debuts May 11th, 2012

By Jason Apuzzo. The first trailer is now out for Sacha Baron Cohen’s forthcoming comedy, The Dictator, and for the most part I like it. Cohen has obviously thrown political correctness out the window, and at first glance it looks like this film could be hilarious. Take a look, and judge for yourself …

Posted on December 14th, 2011 at 12:38pm.