The Adventures of Tintin

My only previous experience with Tintin was seeing a few episodes of the cartoon when I was a kid. They made enough of an impression though that I was interested in seeing the movie as soon as I heard about it, especially based on the amount of talent involved in its creation. Directed by Steven Spielberg, produced by Peter Jackson, written by three talented British writers, and starring a pretty solid cast. It's actually a pretty darn small cast - if you don't count the bad guy's many henchmen, the film has only a handful of characters with real roles, and there are all of maybe two women who have any lines at all. But it's not really a film focused on dialogue, or subplots, or anything that doesn't relate directly to the central quest. If there's ever a movie that earned the term "breakneck pace", it's this one. It stomps on the gas pedal in the opening minutes, and never lets up until it's all over. Even the exposition scenes are packed with action and visual trickery. That and the fact that the script crams together elements of three different Tintin stories lends the movie a sort of rushed feeling, like there was just too much adventure to get through and not enough time. But while it can be tiring by the end, the movie is so packed with charm and fun that I couldn't help but enjoy it the entire time.

Jamie Bell stars as Tintin, a young European journalist (Bell is British, though in the original books he's Belgian) who frequently gets involved in larger-than-life adventures when following a story. He finds a scale model recreation of a famous lost ship, and when he refuses to sell it to a man played by Daniel Craig named Sakharine, he gets kidnapped and brought on board a boat. There he meets its captain, Haddock, played by a drunken and bumbling Andy Serkis, and the two (along with Tintin's dog Snowy) escape, attempting to find the treasure that Sakharine is really after. The treasure ties into Haddock's family history, and he and Tintin become unlikely friends on their quest to solve the mystery of his past. Serkis gives quite a fun performance, even if he resorts to rhyming exclamations a bit too often. Bell fits well as Tintin, it's fun to see Craig play a villain, and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are once again a likable pair as Thompson and Thomson.

Of course I haven't really mentioned the fact that the film is animated, or any of the controversy around that. I've seen numerous people complain about the realistic look the movie goes for, rather than exactly mimicking the original art style. There have also been repeated references to the uncanny valley, though I've come to accept that people will now complain about it every time something animated even attempts to resemble reality. Maybe some people really are instinctively put off by any computer animation that isn't completely cartoony, but I was able to watch this entire film without noticing anything that really bothered me. The movie walks a very fine line by obviously being animated but still having extremely detailed nuances in the texture and animation of its characters, but I thought they pulled it off for the most part. I also think they really took advantage of the animated medium, especially in the crafting of the action scenes. There's a heck of a lot of them, and almost every one manages to do things that real life action wouldn't. The highlight of the whole film is a chase scene in a single take, through a Moroccan city and with numerous different characters involved at various points in both the chasing and being chased. Obviously being animated makes such a scene feasible, but even with that caveat, it's still a complete marvel of planning, design, and coordination to pull it off. That it isn't quite the film's climax is a symptom of the fact that the creators might not have known when enough is enough, but it's still a great scene. The last moments of the film are pretty explicitly setting up a sequel, and I hope the movie is successful enough for one to get made, because they did a great job of establishing a really fun and endearing setting, and I'd like to see Peter Jackson take his turn at the wheel.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

If you started looking closely at the structure of the story of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, you could probably find a number of flaws and weird issues with it. It takes a long time for its two leads to meet and the plot to really get going, and there's a very long final section after the film climaxes before it actually sputters to an end, which might work in a book, but seems unnatural in a movie. But there are times when the effect that a film has goes beyond how well its story adheres to standard conventions of the medium and the odd little things stop bothering you. The script for this second film adaptation of Stieg Larsson's book is definitely flawed, and it's hard to say how much of that is the fault of the book itself. But everything else about the movie helps elevate the material and create a movie that's not quite my favorite this year but darn close. Everything from David Fincher's impeccable direction to the work by people like the cinematographer and editor to the outstanding performances from basically everyone in the cast to the once again pitch-perfect music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

There are some bells and whistles, but at its core Dragon Tattoo is a mystery story. I started trying to write a quick synopsis here, but it quickly got too long, so I'll try to make it more succinct. Daniel Craig plays Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist who agrees to look into the apparent murder of a girl forty years earlier, a member of a family that runs a large business in the country. Rooney Mara plays Lisbeth Salander, another journalist and an unfriendly, possibly psychotic girl who's been a ward of the state since childhood. Eventually they both end up working on the case together, though not before there's a lengthy sequence ending in a very satisfying revenge as a long way of establishing who Lisbeth is and what she's willing to do. The film is somewhat disjointed up to this point, but once the pair get really cracking on the mystery it picks up, with a suitably creepy series of twists and revelations leading to a tense and thrilling conclusion. That the film goes on for a while after that conclusion is mostly irrelevant.

As I mentioned, the cast is quite strong, with film veterans such as Christopher Plummer, Robin Wright, and Stellan Skarsgård turning in solid supporting performances to help drive things forward. Craig is good in pretty much everything, and he is nicely out of his element as the middle-aged Blomkvist, who occasionally gets in too deep for his own good. The star of the show really is Mara though, having the tough job of portraying both an eminently skilled researcher and hacker and a highly vulnerable and damaged woman, and making them be the same person. There's a lot of tough material, and she nails all of it. It just wouldn't be the same movie without her succeeding as totally as she does. I questioned Fincher's decision to tackle material another filmmaker had already brought to the screen in apparently fine fashion, but while I still haven't seen Niels Arden Oplev's version I can't imagine it being this memorable. It's a Fincher movie through and through.

Movie Update 15

A bunch of movies this weekend, as several were about to disappear from my Netflix streaming queue. Let's get right to it.

Bananas


One of Woody Allen's earliest films, starring him as a sort of a deadbeat who moves to a South American country in the middle of a revolution after his activist girlfriend dumps him. This movie was quite strange to me, as it mixes Allen's natural film technique and some pretty Woody Allen jokes like the giving and receiving conversation with a lot of really silly and over the top gags that don't quite fit. Stuff like his dad making him assist on a surgery when he's saying goodbye or the whole courtroom scene would feel more in place if the whole thing was a wacky spoof like Airplane!. I did enjoy the movie, though. Lots of great gags prop up a simple story.

Defiance


On the one hand, Edward Zwick should be commended for finding a way to tell a story about a Jewish resistance against Nazi occupation in Belarus with a Hollywood budget. On the other, after seeing movies with similar subject matter like Come and See, I kind of wish he had taken a smaller budget and just made a slightly better movie. I respect him for focusing on unexplored parts of history in his work, but Defiance as a whole feels kind of whitewashed. It's a pretty decent movie, but too much is just standard American war movie stuff. Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber give very good central performances, and their Belarusian accents sounded pretty good even if I still don't like the compromise of having a non-American character speak with an accent rather than his actual language. Really nice cinematography, too.

Jerry Maguire


This movie had a huge impact on popular culture at the time, and was nominated for a bunch of awards, but I don't think it really holds up as a great film. It was on AFI's list of the top 10 sports movies, but they must have been stuck at 9, because it's not actually a sports movie. Yeah, Tom Cruise plays a sports agent and a big part of the movie is his relationship with Cuba Gooding Jr's wide receiver character, but it's much more a romantic comedy, and a story about a man learning how to connect to people. He could have been in almost any other kind of business and it would have been the same movie. There are several iconic lines in the movie that are kind of entertaining to watch unfold, especially when Cruise is overselling them. The whole movie is sort of overly sappy and emotional, but it's slick and amusing enough to keep it watchable for most of the time it's on. Gooding is really quite entertaining too, though it doesn't strike me as the typical award winning performance.

A Night at the Opera


This is the Marx Brothers' follow-up to Duck Soup; their first film at a new studio and without their brother Zeppo. The plot is less out-there than Soup's, featuring Groucho, Chico, and Harpo as a few guys who travel with an opera company to America and try to help a down-on-his-luck singer score with someone else in the company and get the break he deserves. What really interests me is how the brothers continue to be giant assholes to everyone, even if they don't deserve it. The only people resembling antagonists here are the boss who doesn't want to give the singer a job until he has a better reputation, and a man who is his rival professionally and personally. But the first is just making a smart business decision, and the second never really does anything wrong, he just has more status as a singer and is also attracted to the same beautiful woman. It doesn't matter though, the film considers them the bad guys, and they get their shit ruined by the brothers constantly. The crowning moment comes at the end when the boss finally agrees to sign their friend, and while Groucho and Chico are debating the contract, Harpo tears open the boss' tuxedo jacket for no reason. God, I love the Marx Brothers.

Scarface


Most people probably don't know that the Brian De Palma film starring Al Pacino is actually a remake of this, which is loosely based on the life of Al Capone. It comes right out at the beginning and denounces both organized crime and the government for not doing a better job of fighting it, and then tells the story of a man's rise to prominence and eventual downfall in the 1920s underworld of violence and illegal booze. It's an early film by Howard Hawks, and I think I would have liked it a lot more if it wasn't for Paul Mini's performance as the titular character. I really can't stand it. Tony Camonte bounces around, getting overly confrontational, pursuing his boss' girlfriend while flipping his shit when his sister so much as looks at a guy (what, is he hoping she'll join a convent?), and generally acts like a jackass. I'm aware that crime movies are built on their central figures being bad people, but they're supposed to be redeemable or at least likable in some way so we don't get annoyed whenever they're on screen. It's something they just hadn't figured out yet. Important and fairly well made movie, but a hard one to enjoy.

Casino Royale

Finally, the last one of these. And hey, it's the best one in the series. We go back to the beginning of Bond's career, to his very first kills which earn him his 00 status. From there it's the opening credits, which depict Bond fighting a lot of dudes instead of ladies made out of strange substances dancing, helping clue the audience in that this is a bit of a different Bond than we're used to. I've been told that Craig's take on the character is closer to the one found in the original novels by Ian Fleming; cold-hearted and ruthless instead of a playful scoundrel. In some ways he's actually a better person than the one we're used to, though. The old guy would do anything and everything to get with almost any girl he met, while this one stops romancing a married woman after getting the information he needs, and only has sex after he's fallen in love. He's pretty brutal when it comes to his job, but he still has some sort of moral compass, or so it seems. And you can't give him total credit for leaving the first encounter early, since it was necessary to stop an airport bombing. But you get my point, right?

Elsewhere, the movie still holds up for the most part. All the poker scenes in the second act could have been a big momentum killer, but they're exciting enough on their own, and when interspersed with all the stuff like angry Ugandan militants with machetes and self-applying a defibrillator, it's a pretty darn good segment. The reintroduction of Felix Leiter was welcome (Wright is the first guy to have the role in consecutive appearances), and the development of the relationship between Bond and Vesper is the best in... well, probably ever. After a torture scene that is brutal without being explicit yet still entertaining, the third act has some slightly clumsy dialogue before the final betrayal and large action scene in a collapsing building. The whole sequence is pretty effective, and completely sets up the mindset and character arc for Bond in the next movie. It's nice to see the character be used like a person instead of just a vehicle to some snappy jokes and outlandish action, and there really isn't much about the film that doesn't succeed. And with that, this stupid project finally comes to a close.

James Bond stats
Theme song: "You Know My Name" by Chris Cornell
Foreign locations: Prague, Madagascar, Bahamas, Miami, Montenegro, Italy
Bond, James Bond: 2:20:00
Martini shaken, not stirred: 1:14:15 (full recipe), 1:31:15 (unspecified), 1:33:40 (poisoned), 1:43:30 (named the Vesper)
Ladies seduced: 1
Chases: 3
Kills: 11, plus explosion victims
Non-lethal takedowns: 4

Quantum of Solace James Bond stats
Theme song: "Another Way to Die" by Jack White and Alicia Keys
Foreign locations: Italy, Haiti, Austria, Bolivia, Russia
Bond, James Bond: Not uttered
Martini shaken, not stirred: 51:15 (six)
Ladies seduced: 1
Chases: 4
Kills: 13, plus explosion victims
Non-lethal takedowns: 14

Quantum of Solace

On its own, Quantum of Solace is a solid action movie, but it works much better when viewed as the second part of the story started in Casino Royale. In a way, they're very different films, but their differences make the arc of Bond's character much stronger. Royale was fairly long, and not full of the goofy villains and over-the-top action scenes that characterized Bond movies for a long time. It had some pretty good action, but the focus was on the spy thriller stuff. By comparison, Solace is significantly shorter and pretty consistently violent, with a new chase or brawl seeming to occur every fifteen minutes or so. You see some of the shaky-camera treatment in these segments that has plagued Hollywood action for too long now, and it can hinder comprehension of some really complex and entertaining scenes, but Marc Forster didn't go overboard with it. Still, you get the feeling that if the old filmmakers from the medium's begining who were apprehensive to do any jump cutting at all saw one of these movies, their heads would probably explode.

Daniel Craig's Bond is the most interesting treatment of the character that I've seen, and he's a big part of why I've been enjoying this reboot so much. He still has moments of humor and suaveness, but he really hasn't reacted too well to the events of the last movie and the coldness he treats the world with fuels the shift towards more action than we saw before. There's a lot of running time spent showing Bond fight people, but everything that happens makes sense with the character and what he's trying to do, so it's better justified than a lot of the big budget summer movies that come and go every year. The movie starts to introduce a shady evil organization that has its fingers in everything, and you can see how it's all leading to something a bit closer to older Bond movies, but Forster and the producers still make a good effort to keep it more grounded in reality and a bit darker. There's nobody with iron teeth or a bullet lodged in their brain, and the bad guys are controlling the world more subtly than SPECTRE ever did. It's a new James Bond for a more modern age, and Craig is apparently closer to Ian Fleming's original character than guys like Roger Moore ever were. I look forward to where they take the series from here.

The Invasion

I didn't really expect to see this movie, I just sort of did. I wasn't totally against it, since I like movies about aliens, and if nothing else, there are worse people you could watch for an hour and a half than Nicole Kidman. I remember watching the 1956 version some time ago, and liking the idea. It was like a good, long episode of the Twilight Zone, focusing on an interesting premise and disturbing atmosphere in lieu of a bunch of special effects, and it worked quite well. The Invasion goes the same route, with a few good effects shots to set it up, but most of the tension and excitement comes from just watching normal people try to escape from emotionless shells of their former friends and family.

Most of the problems came from the ways they changed it from the original. They really avoided the whole alien aspect; the antagonist is an alien invasion in the sense that they are a form of life that was not created on earth, coming to take it over, but there are no pods or any of the other science fiction elements that make it a little more entertaining, in my view. It played a bit like just another thriller, when it could have been more interesting than that. With the horror/thriller angle comes the annoying flashes-of-images-with-loud-noises that masquerade as something actually scary and plenty of unbelievably dumb actions taken by the main characters. Kidman is a psychiatrist who holds her own intellectually at dinner parties, but still does things like just sit around when she's supposed to be avoiding sleep, as opposed to, I don't know, doing anything at all to keep herself occupied.

Daniel Craig is fine as the love interest, he's a good actor who can bring some respectability to any part he plays. He and his doctor coworkers are working to find a cure for the epidemic that's taking over the planet, which is explained much more scientifically than it was in previous incarnations. I don't understand the point of this, the audience is fine with the alien spore just working, we don't need medical terms we don't know thrown at us, and when they stumble upon possible cures quite easily it just seems less believable than if they never tried to justify it in the first place. This all leads to a disappointing ending which just isn't as effective as the original's.

The first movie used the premise to comment on topical issues like McCarthyism, and like other remakes, The Invasion updates it to say some things about Iraq. When they've taken over, the aliens bring peace to the world, ending wars and struggle, and it makes a point that maybe the world is better off with everyone turned into conforming, hollow citizens. The protagonists are trying to save the true nature of humanity, but is it really worth it? It's an interesting question which does a lot to make up for a lot of the movie's other deficiencies. It's reasonably exciting and entertaining throughout. There are some dumb moments, but you can just laugh at it and move on. If it's not the best movie in the world, it was at least enjoyable while we were watching it.