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.

Thor

The truth is, Thor is kind of a silly premise for a movie, and it's a bit difficult to reconcile it with the rest of the Avengers project. Marvel characters in general, at least the most famous ones, all have fantastical origins, but at least they're based in some sort of scientific premise. Spider-Man, the Hulk, and the Fantastic Four were all hit by some sort of radiation. The X-Men mutated. Iron Man uses amazingly advanced technology. But Thor is literally a god or god-like being from another dimension. He's part of the grander, weirder, more out-there side of the Marvel tapestry, a side that has gone mostly ignored in major films to this point. I liked the few Thor comics I've read and have high hopes for The Avengers next year, so I was hoping Kenneth Branagh and his cast could pull off some pretty difficult material reasonably well, and I was satisfied by the results. Thor isn't exactly great, but it's a lot of fun, and considering the degree of difficulty one of the most successful comic book super hero adaptations to date.

The key to Thor's success is that it's funny. With the figures of an ancient mythology transformed into extradimensional aliens who wear science fiction plate armor and ride rainbow bridge lightning bolts to other worlds, the whole thing could have failed just by being too silly. But there's a lot of humor intentionally injected into the story, which allows a lot of the goofier moments to slide on by and just be part of the fun. If the movie took itself too seriously, it could have been a disaster, but the tone is just right to get away with it. Most of the significant characters get a chance to tell a joke or two, and while a few moments still come off as funny without trying, they don't do much to harm the story.

The film jumps back and forth between two locations: Asgard, where Thor's allies try to unravel Loki's plot to overthrow him, and a small town in New Mexico where Thor meets a trio of scientists and tries to recover his lost powers. I enjoyed the New Mexico side of the movie more, because that's where most of the fun was, including a lot of solid fish-out-of-water humor and an exciting confrontation with the intimidating and well-executed Destroyer. Chris Hemsworth is surprisingly outstanding as Thor, pulling off his entitled arrogance without making himself unlikable, and gradually realizing what it takes to truly be noble. It's obvious he wasn't cast only because of his looks. The scientists are played by Natalie Portman, Stellan Skarsgård, and Kat Dennings, and the group dynamic between all four is pretty fun. The romance angle seems a bit forced because of the short time scale the story is operating on, but it works out okay because Portman and Hemsworth make a good team. Thor struggling to understand human society is probably the best part of the movie, and I could have sat through a lot more of that.

On Asgard, the movie is more like a slightly stranger version of The Lord of the Rings. There's a power struggle between Thor and Tom Hiddleston's Loki, as they both wish to prove to Odin, played with enthusiasm by Anthony Hopkins, that they are fit for rule once he steps down. Thor fights a bunch of frost giants with Sif and the Warriors Three, Idris Elba's Heimdall is a complete bad-ass, and the movie's version of Loki's plotting and realization of his past is fairly interesting. The two sides of the movie come together near the end as the action climaxes and Thor ends up back where he was, but of course with a tease that he'll return next year. There's a decent amount of legwork done to continue the set up for The Avengers, both as part of the central plot as SHIELD sets up camp around Thor's immovable hammer and in the requisite tease after the credits. Nick Fury and Hawkeye make cameos, and we learn what classic doohicky will prove important down the road. I thought the movie integrated the overarching stuff with its own plot better than say, Iron Man 2 did, and while the visual effects and action weren't amazing, they were adequate enough. The real strength here is the cast, and the film worked best when the focus was on the actors instead of the more fantastical stuff, which was okay but got in the way just a bit. And now we're only a couple months away from the next step in this crazy journey.

Good Will Hunting

Good Will Hunting didn't really work for me until Robin Williams was introduced. The opening scenes have an almost amateur vibe to them, hinting at talent from the performers and the production crew but not working quite right. Too much of that stuff has been parodied and referenced endlessly, and some scenes just flat out look terrible, like the ill-advised slow motion fight scene. It just feels like it's of a time and that I missed the boat on enjoying it while it was fresh.

But then Williams comes along and suddenly the whole movie gets a lot better. His performance is totally outstanding, and that's part of it. But everything else seems better too, like a switch has been turned on. It seemed like the script by stars Matt Damon and Ben Affleck was trying too hard at first to establish their story about Will Hunting, the genius from a broken home who could do anything if he got over his personal troubles. But after the fight, Will's only way to avoid jail time is to do math work at MIT where he was a janitor and see a therapist. Williams is the one who sticks, and from there they develop an interesting rapport at the same time that Will gets involved with a Harvard student played by Minnie Driver. The two storylines work well in tandem, as Williams tries to help Damon push through his barriers at the same time that he's attempting to do the same on his own.

The super-genius stuff almost feels tacked-on actually. It provides a reason for why Will's crippling personal issues are particularly devastating, not just to him but to the good he could do for the world, and also a couple opportunities for memorable, intricate monologues. But I didn't find it as compelling as the therapy or relationship stuff, or even just the scenes where he's hanging out with his regular Joe friends. Apparently the script started out as a thriller about the government trying to recruit a genius before it turned into what it is in the movie, so that part is actually the original seed of the whole thing. Still, it's not why I liked the movie. Williams deserved his Oscar, Damon is generally good as well, and while I had issues with some of what Gus Van Sant did, it's not a bad effort. I definitely liked it more than I thought I would after the first twenty or so minutes.