The Ghost Writer
Bolstered by synchronicity, 2010
Joe McCulloch
LOOK OUT; HERE I SPOIL THE NAIL-BITING THRILLS
So yeah, this is a Roman Polanski picture shot in early 2009 and based (quite closely, I understand) on a 2007 novel by co-screenwriter Robert Harris, and, granted, only the post-production was completed with Polanski literally under house arrest, sure, BUT, y’know - it’s also about a successful public figure/artist type more-or-less confined to his handlers while prosecution mounts and irate moralists froth over horrible things he did in the past, having allowed his doggish ardor to link him with a woman ultimately connected to sinister and destructive political-legal forces.
And, while few avenues of analysis seem more blatantly facile than reading a movie as representative of its director’s personal travails -- particularly considering the disconnected nature of the source material, to say nothing of the collaboration necessitated by a $45 million exhibit of the medium -- it’s worthwhile to observe that the Ghost Writer is fundamentally about reading and processing narratives, and divining their ugly, personal secrets. This is a low-key thriller, its score jaunty with strings up front and its pace kept leisurely, at first, almost winking at the audience when an early bit sees hired scribe Ewan McGregor literally fall asleep reading the latest draft of a political autobiography ‘by’ Pierce Brosnan, cleverly cast as a fictional Tony Blair by way of James Bond’s charismatic cultural cachet. The last ghost writer… DIED!! But he left… SECRETS!! An hour & change and one encounter with 94-year old character actor and former Mr. Freeze Eli Wallach as ‘the crazy man down by the shore’ later, McGregor is conducting tense Google searches linking Brosnan to a sinister American think tank and the CIA - it all seems a bit easy, and, in the end, it turns out it is, to Our Man’s dismay.
There is, of course, a complicated woman: Brosnan’s wife, initially the middle ground between the movie’s crazed, murderous protestors and various oily sympathizers -- Prof. Think Tank all but snakes out a forked tongue as he declares the younger generation so much more puritanical than their elders, an especially charged line -- but ultimately the masterfully directed agent of Brosnan’s and McGregor’s ruin. She is the true Ghost Writer of the title, the author of one man’s illegal acts and another’s misdirected heroic struggle against That Monster the Media Hates, and -- I guess unsurprisingly -- adored by Polanski’s eye, lavished with troubled character shading, certainly a fine protagonist in her own life contrasted with Brosnan’s smarmy, self-righteous publicity posture, a director who isn’t shit without a good screenwriter.
There is never any doubt that what he did was repulsive, so the film is both massively self-pitying and self-loathing, eventually launching itself into straight-out genre hysteria, as McGregor arrives too late at the ridiculous, cheesy true nature of his manuscript and on a dime the movie shifts into overdrive - nail-biting close-ups of hands passing a note, a defiant champagne glass raised to a supervillain, and a dark car zooming out of nowhere to smash the project into its one-shot denouement of papers -- information -- fluttering away, the whole thing perhaps unknowable. It’s the victory of canny tricks over realist investigation, fitting enough for a movie that frames Britain’s supplication to poisonous U.S. foreign policy as a soured, creepy love affair. The context is epically gross and fascinating, perhaps so much that you doubt it’s really there, that things really mean what you suspect they might, and for this kind of film, exactly about that, its either dead craft genius or a dread damn miracle.
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Directed by Sweden's # 1 David Fincher Fan, 2010
Tucker Stone
TIME TO RUIN SOME SURPRISES
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is the made-up-for-everybody-else title given to Steig Larsson's Men Who Hate Women, the first in a trilogy that was published posthumously after Larsson's heart attack. The books--two of which have been released in America, the third of which will arrive in May--are hugely successful, in no small part to the still en vogue popularity of Swedish crime novels in translation. Like Henning Mankell's Wallander series, Larsson's books have an unexplainable critical cachet in America that ill serves any reading of the actual text. They're competent thrillers, pleasantly engaging books about depressive overthinkers and the nasty crimes they run across, but it's their settings that are removed from American crime fiction, not their style, rarely their mysteries, and certainly not their tribe of stock characters. (In Larsson's second book, one of the primary villains turns out to be a gigantic white man who is all but impervious to physical damage, and if you haven't run across one of those before, you've never read Ellroy or seen a karate movie.)
The film version of Tattoo doesn't skimp on importing the book wholesale--this is Christopher Columbus does Harry Potter stuff here, you can tell that everybody was terrified of What The Fans Would Say--making for a murder mystery movie that's a good bit longer than that genre ever fucking needs. Thankfully, the filmmakers were smart enough to dump what was clearly the most problematic of the book's many subplots--no, Ingmar, the movie doesn't feature its middle aged financial journalist bedding every woman he comes across, you'll have to rely on your bookmarks for that--but it still crashes around into multiple problems with its attempts to incorporate every little slice of first timer Larsson's extended potboiler.
That's not really a bad choice, when it comes down to it. Dragon Tattoo is a fast read, but a lot of that is a dumb read, with far too much attention placed on talking about how cold it is in some parts of Sweden (very) and what color everybody's jacket is (bright). Still, the books are affectionately termed "The Millennium Trilogy", making it a bit odd how little of the film pays attention to the magazine of that name, which shows up in the epilogue of the film after not having been seen since the opening minutes.
That being said, Larsson's books do have one ringer, and it's unsurprising that the film version of the first novel has the same: Lisbeth Salander, the only-in-fiction hacker savant female who ended up getting defacto title status when the rest of the world refused Larsson's original name for his novel. Lisbeth is about as far removed from realistic as is possible without the ability to reshape time with her fingers--besides being capable of accessing any computer short of NORAD (she has a fat friend called Plague who can handle that), she's got a photographic memory, is trained in kickboxing by world class fighters, and she's got that weird kind of autism that only exists when people are made up by writers. Oh, and she's got a horrifying background of rampant physical abuse, full tilt molestation and happens to be bisexual.
Okay, enough about the book--after all, the movie understands why people liked the story, and it wasn't because of Larsson's author-as-character middle aged Casanova. It's because of Lisbeth, and while it takes a while for Noomi Rapace to get going, when she does, she doesn't disappoint. Early in the film, she's a complete cipher, dressed up in an outfit that looks like (because it was) it was jacked out of a middle aged man's fantasy version of a goth girl. She sleepwalks through a couple of scenes, and then, amidst all of her male counterpart's intercut scene- & plot-setting, she's raped. Not once, but twice. The film isn't even at the first hour mark.
Both of the scenes are horrifying, cut in a way that at first ignores any titillation, throws in some jump cuts of gruesome documentation, and eventually concludes with static shots of the nasty aftermath--Noomi shoving a soap encrusted fist into her own mouth, her limping across a bridge without cleaning any of the blood off--and they were grueling enough that three of the couples in the theater got right the fuck up and bailed out. What comes next though--and yes, we're thinking of you, Fake Mark Millar--is a weird little triumph, a nasty testament to the weirdness that is Larsson's overly-attributed character. She sets the guy up, she knocks him down, she stretches him out, and then she shoves a ten inch plug in his ass.
She steps back. She looks at it.
Then she kicks it in as hard as she can, twice, just to drive the point home.
In the hours before she leaves, she tortures him, tattooing his flesh as he writhes around, listing his crimes across his torso. The camera goes apeshit, initially operating like hidden security footage, eventually swooping in, closer and closer, watching him scream, worshipping her bloody hands, her bored expression, her absence of malice. There's never a later scene where she questions what she's done, you never follow her into a shower and watch her try to scrub herself clean. She had a job to do, and that's all. She leaves him there, she walks away. In the book, he was covered in piss, shit, blood, vomit, and he laid like that for days before she returned to set him free, a decision that she is forced to regret in the next book. In the film, they never mention him again. He doesn't matter to her anymore, he was just a thing she had to punish, a thing she decided to teach. There's no reason to expend more screen time in his presence.
Those scenes aren't what the movie is about, and while that's fortunate for those uninterested in watching a movie about the raping of rapists, it's unfortunate for the rest of the film, which is an altogether predictable mystery focused on an unbelievably under-imagined serial rapist/killer whose only claim to originality is that his particular kill room is a brightly lit one that looks like an industrial restaurant kitchen. Noomi gets in her licks--she's a regular demon with a four iron--but too much of the film's real estate gets burned off in the hours it spends watching its stock characters typing words on computers and staring at black and white pictures. There's a brilliant sex scene where Noomi's armpit hair and boulder shoulders point to America's lie about what all attractive women look like, but the film delivers its punch early on, and by the end, you just don't care anymore.
This guy too?
Fine.
As long as she kills him, we're square.
Capitalism: A Love Story
Michael Moore keeps getting fatter, 2009
Matthew J. Brady
Michael Moore's movies would be better if he stayed off screen, at least outside of the occasional cut to him earnestly and compassionately questioning some interview subject about the ongoing atrocity that is their life. There's some compelling stuff here, from the opening comparison of modern America to Rome just before its fall, to the history of corporate greed run amuck (with some especially good digs at Ronald Reagan), to portraits of inexplicability like the how-can-this-possibly-be-legal trend of corporations taking out life insurance policies on their employees or airline pilots not being able to survive on annual salaries of less the $20,000. But every time Moore tries to get all "wacky" and pull some stunt like wandering around Wall Street with a sack bearing a dollar sign on the side and asking banks for the bailout money back, he undermines the serious message and makes himself look like a buffoon. It's too bad, since he provides plenty of negativity about our financial state of affairs, but also some positive reporting, like spotlighting grassroots movements in which Miami evictees move back in to their foreclosed houses and refuse to leave, or laid-off factory workers in Chicago staging a sit-in until their company provides them with severance pay. For a supposed man of the people, Moore can be really fucking narcissistic, but when he gets out of the way, he's got some good stuff to say. Too bad the only people listening will be those who are already far enough to his side of the political spectrum to put up with his shenanigans.
The Last House On The Left
Hey, The Guy From Breaking Bad, 2009
Tucker Stone
The dumbest, and ultimately best, scene in this film is near the beginning, when the soon-to-be-raped-in-grisly-fashion teenage female stares out at the lake, works herself into the best impression of Sternly Felt Adult Commitment her childlike face can muster, and then strips off all of her clothes and swims out to a buoy.
The music, swelling and heaving much like her youthful breasts (captured in close-up), her graceful strokes pounding against the water, she grabs ahold, pulls herself up, looks at her digital watch:
It's a personal best.
The rest of the film never catches hold of that scene's brilliantly over-the-top earnestness. Weirdly enough, it tries--but nobody wants to watch earnest rape, especially when it exists to mechanically produce revulsion and disgust in such a degree that the remainder of the film's post-horror scenes will have the audience cheering along as Tony Goldwyn and Monica Potter frantically kill their way through Garret Dilahunt's rape-happy murder crew. It's not that the revenge-for-sexual-assault twist can't work--see Dragon Tattoo for that--it's that nobody in the film ever really buys into what they're doing, except for the victim, who buys in so hard that she'll make your stomach churn. It's not even the fault of the actors involved; except for Aaron Paul, everybody in this film is stuck saying some of the dumbest shit on the planet, the worst off being the Evil Rape Woman who keeps bitching about rich people and actually uses the term "silver spoons". Everybody ends up fucked here, none more so than Sara Paxton, who apparently spent 17 hours filming the rape scene and was then sequestered to the job of Lay Around And Act Like She'd Been Raped for however long it took to film the rest of this piece of shit.
The Children Are Watching Us
C'mere and watch me kiss your mamma, ya goofy crybaby, 1944
Tucker Stone
Up until the last scene, this little slice of Italy is an all around charmer. It's another installment in the genre called Watch A Marriage Disintegrate, and while it wouldn't have been a tremendously novel idea to focus on "how does the kid take it" even if the movie had been filmed on a banana peel by a prodigious band of uppity chimps, the kid is cute, he cries well, and there's an entire scene shot in that classy circling images of faces talking style that's bang on fantastic. (And despite it being an Italian film, the requisite Aged Mother as Demonic Joy Vampire scene gets dispensed with in less than five minutes of screen time. That's always a plus.) The final scene though--it's just a bewildering twist, a weird little change-up that comes so far out of left field that it would probably get treated as post-production interference if the film were made today. Here, it comes across like the director never quite got what his pre-Dogma writer was trying to get across, but he figured he'd better shoot the fucker as writ and call it quits. It's a bad call, and considering how much better a previous minute plays--when the father flees down gigantic staircases, as his son weeps and begs him not to go, literally running "as fast as his fat legs can carry him"--it reads as a slice of Too Bad, So Sad. Still a pleasant enterprise, but a masterpiece it ain't.
-Matthew J. Brady, Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone, 2010
My main problem with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo wasn't even so much that they mystery was boring-that I could sort of abide-it's that the entire story was built on plot holes. Not just one or two, but it's like...there are points where the film is like "We know this doesn't make sense, just ignore it" but writes that on a humongous neon sign that's impossible to ignore. There are lots of points where if someone behaved rationally the story would have ended. A lot of it was a classic idiot plot and it made me absolutely furious to sit through.
Posted by: Chris Jones | 2010.03.25 at 22:16
You're totally on the money. I'm not going to play the "book was better" card, but the thing is--the book is fucking LONGER, and it adds in enough subplots that you can't help but wonder how some of them are going to finish out. It's like one of those Vertigo comics where the art isn't very good, the story is dumb, all the characters talk the same way, but you still want to see the part where the wolverine rip-off and the jean grey rip-off finally hook up and have rip-off sex, because you have enough free time and it's asking less time of you than it would take to watch Moonlighting.
Watching it onscreen though--i don't remember thinking "boy, those local cops were really bad at their job for forty straight years", but that's the first thing I thought when I walked out of the movie.
Posted by: Tucker Stone | 2010.03.25 at 22:21
Even littler things than that, though!
Like, why would you sneak up really quietly to a house, all dressed in black, not making a sound, and then purposefully break the window?
If you were a sniper, why would you wait to shoot somebody while they were amidst tons of foliage, and then, when your target is in an open area, and he has FALLEN DOWN, and is RUNNING IN A STRAIGHT LINE, why wouldn't you take that shot?
Why would one of the best hackers in the world use an iBook?
If you were shoving somebody underwater with a humongous, heavy motherfucking oar, wouldn't that leave a really obvious mark? Wouldn't that not get chalked up to "tripped while tipsy"?
If you were a serial killer who prided yourself on efficiency, would you talk your victims ear off for a million years and get time for the police to find you because you were detailing HOW EFFICIENT YOU ARE AT MURDERING PEOPLE AND THAT'S WHY YOU DON'T GET CAUGHT?!?!?
My brother and my mom adored that movie, they were angry that I hated it and I was just as pissed off at them that they thought it was "amazing". Even without the plot holes, the cinematography was obnoxious, the acting never rose above serviceable and, like you said, it's like the mystery was hand picked out of a Writer's Guide to Mystery Cliches. "Overrated" doesn't even do it justice, it was just a godawful movie, period.
I will agree, though, those were some sweet rape scenes.
Posted by: Chris Jones | 2010.03.26 at 00:19