Asides

"The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo"

By December 15, 2011No Comments

06

“Playfulness is not neces­sar­ily the first char­ac­ter­ist­ic one might expect from a motion pic­ture about multi-generational seri­al murders, a motion pic­ture that depicts tor­ture both psy­cho­lo­gic­al and men­tal, humi­li­ation of the help­less of all ages, anal rape, and oth­er ser­i­ous mal­feas­ances. And yet there’s a strong streak of film­mak­ing play­ful­ness run­ning all the way through The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, dir­ect­or David Fincher’s extremely deft and cap­tiv­at­ing thrill­er…” Continued here. Thanks, as ever, for reading. 

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No Comments

  • Fernando says:
    December 15, 2011 at 3:14 pm

    You’re spoil­ing us, Glenn. This past day or so has just been a god-danged wealth of riches.

  • Oliver_C says:
    December 15, 2011 at 3:21 pm

    Finally a film which breaks the David Fincher good-bad-good-bad rule?

  • C.D. says:
    December 15, 2011 at 4:54 pm

    There is no such rule.

  • Oliver_C says:
    December 15, 2011 at 5:09 pm

    You’ll be say­ing the Curse of the Odd-Numbered Star Treks does­n’t exist next.

  • Not David Bordwell says:
    December 15, 2011 at 6:07 pm

    Thank God, I thought I was alone in not lik­ing Seven. Or Se7en, whatever.
    But I did like his Alien movie, for the record.

  • lipranzer says:
    December 15, 2011 at 6:18 pm

    I sure as hell hope this is play­ing early enough Wednesday morn­ing that I’ll be able to see it before going to work later in the day (2pm).

  • markj says:
    December 16, 2011 at 10:03 am

    @Oliver C: Abrams effort def­in­itely rein­forced the odd-number Trek curse.
    @Not David Bordwell: Fincher’s Alien 3 is some­thing of a minor mas­ter­piece, espe­cially when watched back to back with Jeunet’s effort.

  • bill says:
    December 16, 2011 at 1:10 pm

    The Curse of the Odd-Numbered Star Treks is dis­proven by the fact that STAR TREK IV is wretched. Nothing but awful “Wow, the past is crazy, what is this ‘pizza pie’ of which you speak?” jokes that just make me want to die. Well, and also there are whales.

  • jbryant says:
    December 16, 2011 at 2:09 pm

    Yeah, STAR TREK IV did­n’t do much for me either.
    I think the even/odd thing is for hard­core Trekkers only. I’ve nev­er seen more than a couple of epis­odes of the ori­gin­al series, so I don’t have any nos­tal­gic invest­ment in the fran­chise. Perhaps because of this, I’ve found even the odd-numbered films to be reas­on­ably enter­tain­ing time-killers.

  • edo says:
    December 16, 2011 at 5:22 pm

    You’re say­ing “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” was bad? Setting aside that I think it’s, uh, kind of great, I’m a little startled that any­one could go so far as to call it out and out bad. Same goes for “The Game” and “Panic Room”, neither of which I think is great, but did very much enjoy.
    “Alien 3”, well, that was out of his hands, and still it turned out pretty compelling.

  • The Siren says:
    December 17, 2011 at 9:36 am

    Glenn! You did­n’t like Se7en?
    I knew there was a reas­on we’ve bonded.

  • Mr. Milich says:
    December 17, 2011 at 11:43 am

    The MetaCritic link­age on your review is for the ori­gin­al Swedish version…

  • Not David Bordwell says:
    December 17, 2011 at 8:46 pm

    OMG, film geek heav­en is hav­ing Glenn Kenny and the Siren con­firm your per­son­al pre­ju­dices in the same post/thread.
    Jeunet’s Alien movie is such a trav­esty. What does it say about a stu­dio when the dir­ect­or of the third entry in your fran­chise won’t talk about the exper­i­ence, and the writer of the fourth dis­avows it?
    As long as we’re on the sub­ject, and with nowhere else to post this thought…
    Does any­one else thing that Ridley Scott’s PROMETHEUS pro­ject looks for all the world like a straight-up remake of Mario Bava’s PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES, whose land­ing sequence he copied more or less shot-for-shot in ALIEN?

  • Oliver_C says:
    December 17, 2011 at 9:59 pm

    Jeunet’s Alien movie is fun­da­ment­ally flawed for the same reas­on as Ang Lee’s ‘Hulk’ (albeit approach­ing it from dif­fer­ent dir­ec­tions): namely, that the science-fiction and comic-book genres are not interchangeable.

  • randy says:
    December 21, 2011 at 9:54 am

    How can I take any review ser­i­ous from somone that did­n’t like s7ven?

  • D says:
    December 21, 2011 at 11:35 am

    The ORIGINAL Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series was so power­ful for me that I refuse to see the REMAKE. There is no one whom can por­tray “Lisbeth” as well as Noomi Rapace did or “Mikael” as well as Michael Nyqvist” did. Their bril­liant work made the entire series. Directors like Finch are in pos­i­tion to take risks with “ORIGINAL” scripts but don’t? and worse, he remakes a great film 2 years after the ori­gin­al film was released?! shame on him. REMAKES are a lazy form of film making.

  • jbryant says:
    December 21, 2011 at 2:01 pm

    Dismissing remakes out of hand is a lazy form of cri­ti­cism. I haven’t seen any of the films in ques­tion, but cinema his­tory is chock full of excel­lent remakes.