The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: A Twisted Hero for Twisted Times

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Directed By: David Fincher

Written By: Steve Zallian, based on the novel by Stieg Larsson

Starring: Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgard, and Robin Wright

Director of Photography: Jeff Cronenweth, Editors: Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, Production Designer: Donald Graham Burt, Original Music: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

Rated: R for hard violence, rape, and all the other stuff to support your anti-holiday cheer.

            The pitch-perfect sequence in David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is also one of the most unmemorable sequences in the film. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is led around the yard outside the mansion of millionaire Henrik Vagner (Christopher Plummer), who has changed Blomkvist with investigating his family. Henrik explains each member of his family, where they live, and who talks to who. But Mr. Fincher’s camera refuses to let our eyes process this information. He cuts to shots of each home of each family member, and refuses to orient the spatial relationship of these homes to each other, just that they all surround each other. This reflects not only the script’s suggestions that the closest people to us are often the ones that hurt us the most, but more so, Fincher’s deconstruction of the investigative process. The textual information is displayed concretely and without flourish, but because the director refuses to reinforce each detail with visual information, we remain lost to the mystery.

            If Zodiac, Fincher’s cult classic masterpiece about the true-life serial killer in San Francisco, was all about making audience as obsessive as the characters solving an unknown case, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo does the opposite. The answer to the central mystery is slapping us in the face, but because Fincher constantly disorients us with his bold and anti-genre compositions, it remains more of a character piece. And thus, the American director of Fight Club and The Social Network has done the best job he can in adapting the tepid, international best-seller by Stieg Larsson. Why the Swedish novels became an extravaganza still remains something of a mystery—the narratives are built on the same twist-heavy lackluster prose that launched Dan Brown, but include intense violence and rape as well. Perhaps thought, that comes down to the film’s titular character, here played by Rooney Mara (last seen breaking up with Mark Zuckerberg in the opening of The Social Network).

The Adventures of Tintin: The Tingles for Adventure, Drunkard and Canine in Tow

The Adventures of Tintin

Directed By: Steven Spielberg

Written By: Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright, and Joe Cornish, based on the comics by Hergé

Starring: Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Toby Jones

Editor: Michael Kahn, Art Direction: Andrew Jones and Jeff Wisniewski, Original Music: John Williams

Rated: PG for comic book violence and fun.

            There’s one man you can’t keep your eyes off of in The Adventures of Tintin, and he’s not even on screen, and this time not even behind it. I’m of course referring to the film’s director, Hollywood wonder-boy Steven Spielberg. His presence looms large in this adaptation of the comic books by Hergé, who, while world-famous, remains mostly anonymous to American viewers, myself included. But its Mr. Spielberg’s camera—how he uses it and how he constantly reinvents the rules of modern cinema (many of which, he wrote)—that remains the constant thrill of Tintin. It’s also the downfall of his film.

            Mr. Spielberg is no stranger to adventures, and Indiana Jones seems to be in the town over from wherever globetrotting Tintin, a young and peppy journalist with an ache for adventure, must be. But here the craftsman takes on new challenges; not just the added dimension of 3D (something I really only noticed in the weight of my wallet), but going for full-scale animation. The Adventures of Tintin isn’t a classically animated world—Mr. Spielberg used the aide of Avatar director James Cameron, as well as producer Peter Jackson, to use the WETA studios and shoot the whole film in a digital landscape with actors carefully monitored to bring their performances to the cartoonish caricatures. But there’s something lifeless in Tintin, and its not just the odd uncanny valley look of the film’s characters, but its lack of a true adventure spirit, which instead feels calculated and often standard, that the reveals and boyhood adventure that has marked so much of Mr. Spielberg’s career remains absent.

Cowboys & Aliens: A Close Encounter Showdown at Sunrise

Cowboys & Aliens

Directed By: Jon Faverau

Written By: Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Mark Fergus, and Hawk Ostby, from a story by Fergus, Ostby, and Steve Oederkerk. Based on the comic book by Scott Rosenberg.

Starring: Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Adam Beach, Paul Dano, and Keith Carradine.

Director of Photography: Matthew Libatique, Editors: Dan Lebental and Jim May, Production Designer: Scott Chambliss, Original Music: Harry Gregson-Williams

Rated: PG-13 for cowboy action and alien action, often in the same shot!

            While the West was won over a century ago, and the Western was lost at the end of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, the last decade or so has been sprinkled with films revisiting the lost genre of American can-do-ism and outlaw values. It’s probably the most American of American film types (though recent examples from countries like Australia and even South Korea have challenged that dominance), and yet it is one that is now a place of brooding melancholy in The Assassination of Jesse James, uncontrollable violence in No Country for Old Men, or soulless capitalism in There Will Be Blood. What can we possibly do to revive the great part of the West—the part of lore and myth?

            If you’re a big Hollywood studio with producers like Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard behind you, the only answer could possibly be aliens (perhaps Transformers, though that’ll be another day). And thus here comes Cowboys & Aliens, which is exactly what you would expect, a Western mashed together with a science fiction action flick that unapologetically borrows tropes from the two genres when needed to make for an entertaining flick. This material is hardly groundbreaking, but it’s more or less inoffensive under the care of Iron Man director Jon Faverau. If anything, Cowboys & Aliens is a case of perfected haggling—you get exactly what you paid for.