The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
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Tagline: Evil Shall With Evil Be Expelled
Do we need to explain the first book in the late Swede Stieg Larsson’s literary blockbuster Millennium trilogy? Who hasn’t read it already? It’s next to impossible to ride the subway without seeing someone clutching the likes of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo close to their chest. And the Swedish movie adaptations that came out a couple of years ago were also well received. For some, that would have been enough, but how was Hollywood ever going to resist making its own version?
And to be fair to Sony Pictures, they’ve taken the venture pretty seriously, hiring one of the most imaginative mainstream directors on the market in David Fincher. The parts of the main protagonists, Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, went to Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, who supposedly beat out every living actress on the planet for the plum role.
In case you do need a reminder, disgraced journalist Blomkvist is hired to look into the secrets of a family with a Nazi past and investigate a homicide. Salander is not just the researcher helping him, but also a hacker who is one of the more unlikely heroines of our days. Expectations are sky high, and thumbs seem to be up. “He’s not just a great director — he’s an artist with the eyes of a voyeur, and he has made The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo into an electrifying movie by turning the audience into addicts of the forbidden,” writes Entertainment Weekly. “So it’s Mara’s movie for the taking, and she snatches it up in dramatic fashion,” concludes The Hollywood Reporter. And “fans of the book and film should rest easy at how this Dragon Tattoo is still inherently a Swedish tale – set and partly shot in Sweden — and Fincher doesn’t flinch from the sexual violence at their core,” argued Time Out London.
A respectable box office return is all but guaranteed, but can Fincher break his bad luck with the Academy and finally snag Best Director at the Oscars? He’s had so little joy thus far that he may need to employ Salander’s hacking acumen to tilt the vote in his favor.
MORE: 10 Questions for David Fincher
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
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Daniel Craig also pops up in the 3D, motion-capture extravaganza that is The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. Directed by Steven Spielberg (it’s said that Tintin’s creator Hergé wanted only him to helm an eventual movie) and produced by Peter Jackson, you’d imagine the project was in extremely safe hands. And if the powers that be go through all the expense and lengthy post-production to make a sequel, it’s believed that Spielberg and Jackson will swap roles.
Jamie Bell plays the intrepid Belgian reporter Tintin, who, after buying an old model ship from a market trader, gets sucked into an adventure involving the location of a wondrous treasure while meeting a whole host of characters. Some are good (the bumbling inspectors Thompson and Thomson, portrayed by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost), some are bad (Craig’s Sakharine) and some are Captain Haddock, played with genuine gusto by Andy Serkis (and wouldn’t it be wild if he scored two Best Supporting Actor nominations playing non-human roles?).
Tintin looks lovely, and you can see why Spielberg resisted traditional live-action when you witness how he handles the flashback sequence as Haddock recounts the sinking of the Unicorn, which arguably ranks among Spielberg’s top 10 set-pieces. But the critics haven’t given him a free pass. For every rave (Time Out London calls it “the most creative, enjoyable and invigorating blockbuster of the year”), there’s a veritable stinker (EW: “Even a filmmaker as dazzling as Steven Spielberg has to create characters who lure us into their point of view, and the trouble with Tintin is that we’re always on the outside, looking in. What all that motion can’t capture is our hearts”). But as the cliché goes, kids of all ages will love it.
TIME COVER: It’s Tintin Time!
We Bought a Zoo
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For unabashed fans of Cameron Crowe (us included), the past decade has been a tricky time. For whatever reasons (and we’re not getting into the documentaries, which should be considered on their own merits, and not lumped in with his films), neither Vanilla Sky nor Elizabethtown managed to reach the heights of such delights as Jerry Maguire or Almost Famous. It’s almost as if the man who makes the kind of movies that hug the audience was in need of an embrace himself. Will he be back on track with We Bought a Zoo?
Interestingly, it marks the first time that he’s sharing the screenplay duties (with the hotshot Aline Brosh McKenna, who did so much for The Devil Wears Prada, I Don’t Know How She Does It and Morning Glory, among others) so will many hands make light work? Adapted from Benjamin Mee’s memoir — with the action moved from Britain to America — We Bought a Zoo is the tale of a widower (Matt Damon) moving his young family to the countryside to renovate and re-open a struggling zoo. And Benjamin doesn’t just need to learn to interact with the animals but the humans, such as zookeeper Kelly (Scarlett Johansson).
Ironically, there seems to have been some cynicism surrounding a project Crowe told the Washington Post was “a little bit about hope and a lack of cynicism.” This was in response to the unfortunately aired email spat between Dragon Tattoo producer Scott Rudin and the New Yorker‘s David Denby, who broke that movie’s review embargo because, “We had a dilemma: What to put in the magazine on December 5? Certainly not We Bought the Zoo, or whatever it’s called.”
And there are negative appraisals from those who have actually seen it. “Clichés and contrivances and corniness, oh my! With We Bought a Zoo, writer-director Cameron Crowe dives headfirst into the schmaltzy slop barrel,” wrote Slant. But this being the season of goodwill and all, EW was prepared to give into its charms, stating that “it’s basically a Tim Allen movie, only made with taste and feeling.” No matter what you make of the movie, you can’t deny that cinema is a better, brighter place with Crowe involved. Welcome back, sir.
LIST: Top 10 Cameron Crowe Moments
War Horse
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Tagline: Separated By War. Tested By Battle. Bound By Friendship.
It’s a busy week for Steven Spielberg, who has two movies in competition with each other. War Horse is his adaptation of the celebrated play, which has had them gripped both in London’s West End and New York’s Broadway. The world truly is a small place.
Set in rural England and Europe during World War I, War Horse is the story of the incredible friendship between a horse named Joey and the young man (Jeremy Irvine) called Albert, who is able to both tame and train him. Circumstances inevitably dictate that they must go their separate ways and Spielberg focuses on Joey’s narrative, as he changes and inspires the lives of those he meets. And he’s an equal opportunity kind of creature: he doesn’t mind if he comes into contact with British cavalry, German soldiers, or even a French farmer and his granddaughter.
Sounds like the classic kind of Spielbergian story, which is why it’s slightly surprising that it didn’t fare particularly well with the Golden Globes voters. Though it was nominated for Best Drama, Spielberg missed out on Best Director, which presumably lessens his chances come the Oscars. But positive reviews can only help, so he’ll be encouraged by the Daily Telegraph hailing War Horse as “genuine in its emotion, unflinching in its reality, epic in its grandiosity, effective in its performances, and imaginative in its storytelling.” And with the film coming out on Christmas Day, it sounds like a present worth unwrapping.
PHOTOS: Behind-the-Scenes on the Jaws Shoot
NewsFeed’s Flicks Pick: All the big Christmas releases are adaptations of some sort: we imagine the young and big kids will plump for Spielberg, and the couples may choose Crowe, which leaves Fincher’s Dragon Tattoo as the pick.