Plot:
Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is a journalist in trouble. Not only has he just been convicted of libel, but the magazine he edits is experiencing financial difficulties because of it. But then he gets an offer from Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), rich retired business man. Vanger wants Mikael to research his great-niece Harriet’s disappearance 36 years ago, in the hope that he can discover something new. At the same time Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), young borderline researcher, gets the job to look into Mikael and his libel case.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is in almost all counts the better movie compared with its Swedish predecessor. Too bad they messed up the ending.

The movie had me straight away with the opening credits (that are frankly amazing) and the soundtrack that is completely awesome right from the start – and continues to be the entire time. If yout thought the Social Network soundtrack was great, wait till you hear this one.

And then there’s of course the cast to drool over. Daniel Craig is fantastic, Ronney Mara is really good (though she isn’t quite as brilliant as Noomi Rapace, admittedly) and David Fincher works them to perfection.

And the pacing and the script really are much better than the original. The rape scene was not as bad as I thought it would be, Steven Zaillian has a better handle on Lisbeth as a character and they managed to stick to the book more closely.

In fact, everything was extremely fantastic – until the last two minutes or so where they turn the entire power dynamic between Mikael and Lisbeth completely on its head. It was always Mikael trying to get more from Lisbeth and then suddenly it wasn’t anymore – and Lisbeth as much as the film suffer from that.

Surprisingly I did not care at all about the changed solution for the murder mystery – but those two minutes bothered me A LOT. But since it’s a pretty small flaw for a film otherwise made of awesome, I’m willing to forgive.

Summarising: Watch it.

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Also, did I mention how much I hate this poster for the film?

It puts Lisbeth in an extremely vulnerable position (naked and held, and not lovingly) – with the only guy she trusts (apart from her first guardian) – and no sense of control or strength from her at all. Complete fail for a character who fights for every bit of control over everything she can get her hands on.

Plot:
Charley (Anton Yelchin) just went from geek to at least moderately cool, with the help of his girlfriend Amy (Imogen Poots). So when his former best friend Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) tries to convince him that Charley’s new neighbor Jerry (Colin Farrell) is actually a vampire, Charley shugs it off. But then Ed disappears and Charley starts to investigate. Soon he really does discover evidence that Jerry is a vampire. And since that discovery threatens Jerry, suddenly everyone Charley holds dear is in danger.

Even though I didn’t like the original all that much, I thought that I would give this one a shot for its cast and I actually hoped that a modernization might make it more accessible if you don’t have the nostalgia factor. Unfortunately that didn’t work out.

David Tennant is fantastic as usual; and it was great to see him in a role like Peter Vincent that is so very different from what he normally plays. He is definitely the best part of the film and the rest of the cast – not even Anton Yelchin – can really keep up with him. Though that is more the problem of Charley’s character than his acting chops.

And I don’t understand how they managed to make Colin Farrell as unsexy as he was. Seriously, he managed to be sexy as fucking Bullseye but when he plays a seductive vampire, suddenly there’s not even a spark?

We get to see way too little of Toni Collette, but Imogen Poots and her Amy surprised me in a very positive way. I liked the both of them a lot.

But I just didn’t care about the whole film at all. I didn’t care what was going to happen to these people or the vampires or whatever. And the soundtrack was really, actively bad. I have never heard such a thing. The movie just doesn’t really have many redeeming features.

Summarising: A fail.

Plot:
Charlie (Jesse Bradford) is a business student and the epitome of a nice guy. One day he meets Jordan (Elisha Cuthbert), pretty and incredibly drunk. He saves her from falling in front of a subway train and then carries her home when she passes out in the station. After that Jordan turns Charlie’s entire life completely upside down with her erratic behavior.

This movie could have been quite nice – if Jordan hadn’t been the most grievous instance of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl that I have encountered in my life. That immediately reduces the film to mediocre, max.

The movie starts off quite nice: they way they recapped Charlie’s life so far was beautifully done and reminded me of Pushing Daisies in its aesthetics. (It’s also the only time the movie felt like it was made by Yann Samuell.) Unfortunately the entire awesome this movie had to offer was spent in these first five minutes.

Because then Charlie meets Jordan and Jordan really has issues. There are several instances when she crosses from MPDG to actual psychopath. But her issues are so much only there for Charlie’s character to develop that the film never acknowledges Jordan’s need for some serious therapy.

The twist was completely foreseeable, the dialogues frequently ridiculous (“Your healing was off by one day?” Seriously?) and there’s not much that really worked.

So even though Jordan was an awful character, she at least saved the film from being completely forgettable. Because if it hadn’t been for her suckiness, the film would have been completely bland.

Summarising: Annoying, but there are wose films.

Plot:
Elizabeth (Cameron Diaz) dreams only of one thing: marrying rich and never having to work as a teacher again. She seems to have achieved her goal, but then her fiancé dumps her. So Elizabeth takes up teaching again and sets her mind on a new pair of boobs – that is sure to bring her the success she seeks. And when she meets Scott (Justin Timberlake), heir and new teacher at her school, she seems to have found her next target. But that puts her directly in competition with Amy (Lucy Punch), who is basically the exact opposite of Elizabeth.

I didn’t expect much of this film and therefore wasn’t really disappointed. It’s okay, it even made me really laugh a couple of times, but other than that it was pretty meh.

The parts that really worked were where they made fun of this certain stereotypical type of teacher (that despite the exaggerations feels very realistic): well-meaning, square but convinced that they’re swimming against the current and are completely alternative, also thinking that they are open and know so much about the world while saying the most prejudiced things. Plus, they never get that they’re completely uncool. Both Lucy Punch and Justin Timberlake played that wonderfully and the movie really gets some nice punches in.

Jason Segel is also really good and Cameron Diaz is quite funny but both their characters just don’t achieve the heights that Scott and Amy do. They really are the best thing about the film.

I have to admit that I’m a bit torn about Elizabeth as a character: Yes, she is every bad stereotype about women wanting to marry rich and just thinking about getting bigger boobs and leading a lazy life and using her sexuality to get everything that she wants rolled into one. But they also cast her as the protagonist of the story and made her the character to relate to, so they nicely undermine the evilness of those stereotypes. Which is pretty cool.

Deep and thoughtful entertainment is something else and it really didn’t need to be any longer than it was. But then again you don’t always need depth and it wasn’t any longer, so that worked out fine.

Summarising: Watchable.

Plot:
Cheyenne (Sean Penn) is a rock star in retirement living in Ireland who divides his time between  his wife Jane (Frances McDormand) and his fan Mary (Eve Hewson). But when he hears that his father is about to die, Cheyenne makes his way to the US – only to find out that he is too late. But he finds out that his father has been hunting a Nazi who has been tormenting him during WWII. And suddenly Cheyenne finds himself on the same hunt.

The movie is much like its protagonist: charming, funny and peculiar. But the whole Nazi-hunting story feels tacked on and runs too long. Still, it’s all worth it for Sean Penn in that role.

Sean Penn was completely fantastic. He rocked that role so freakishly hard, I don’t even have words. Frances McDormand was great, too. And I totally enjoyed the chemistry and relationship Cheyenne and Jane had – it felt very realistic and completely unique. I loved watching them.

That’s probably also why I just didn’t enjoy the movie as much as soon as it left Ireland and Jane behind. I just missed their relationship. Another part of it was that I wanted to find out more about Mary and her brother Tony and their connection to Cheyenne and that just never really got cleared up – instead they went Nazi hunting apropros à nothing.

Also, I thought that the ending sucked pretty hard. Not only the way the whole situation with the Nazi was “resolved”, but also that the Tony thing remained a mystery (unless I totally missed the hints). Also, as soon as Mary’s mother told Cheyenne that he never smoked a cigarette in his life because he never grew up (say what?, btw), I knew that by the end of the film, he’d have one. And lo and behold, what happened? Exactly.

But other than that I did like the film a lot. It was funny and had nice dialogues and wonderful, stunning cinematography. And it had a pretty good heart.

Summarising: generally mixed but ends up on the good side.

Plot:
Nasser-Ali (Mathieu Amalric) is a violinist who recently lost his violin. Unfortunately he can’t manage to find a new one that satisfies him and so he descends into a deep depression and decides to die by refusing to eat. While he wastes away, he  revisits important episodes in his life and imagines his kids’ futures. But maybe his depression has less to do with his violin and more with the woman he met on the street and  who didn’t recognize him?

Poulet aux prunes is a visually stunning film – especially every time they mix it up with animated sequences – and has a nice sense of humor. But Nasser-Ali is such an asshole that I couldn’t really enjoy the film.

Mathieu Amalric always plays these guys that are actually assholes, but are supposed to be, if not exactly heroes then at least sympathetic. But where Michael Fassbender excels, Amalric always falls slightly short of the mark. And since I didn’t like the protagonist of this film at all, it made me impatient with his story. Even more than that – the way he treats his wife actually had me hating him.

This lack of connection with Nasser-Ali also made me not care in the slightest about the tragic ending of his love story with Irâne. So that part of the whole thing completely fell through for me.

But apart from that the film was really nice. As I said, I really enjoyed the visuals. Reminded me of Jeunet or Samuell with its color schemes, but it was especially beautiful whenever they mixed in the animated sequences.

And I also enjoyed the movie’s sense of humor and there were many very nice moments. Overall it just wasn’t enough.

Summarising: could have been good, but somehow wasn’t.

Plot:
Juliette (Patricia Clarkson) comes to Cairo to visit her husband who is working there for the UN. But when she lands, instead of her husband, it’s Tareq (Alexander Siddig) who picks her up. Tareq used to work with her husband, who is caught up in Gaza. As Juliette waits for her husband to return, she starts to spend more time with Tareq and their sympathies for each other deepen.

Cairo Time was a beautiful, well-written and perfectly acted film that I enjoyed much more than I thought I would.

I went into the film fearing that it would get boring – it is rather long and it doesn’t have much in the way of plot, so that’s a rather reasonable expectation I think. But though the movie is paced rather slowly, it never for a minute gets boring or long.

I credit Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Siddig for that. Patricia Clarkson was absolutely fantastic and completely owns the entire film with her performance. And Alexander Siddig achieves unprecedented levels of sexiness. It is frankly astonishing – he never did anything for me in DS9 and then he shows up in this film, much too thin for my taste and slightly out of my usual age range, and takes my breath away.

Additionally, the script is really excellent. Unfortunately, Ruba Nadda is a much better writer than she is a director. That makes for the weakest point in the entire film – sometimes the scenes are set in scene just a tad clumsily, if well-meaning, like in a school play.

But Patricia Clarkson, the great pacing and the wonderful cinematography more than make up for that. The film is chockful of beautiful images and stunning pictures. And to round it all off, it has a wonderful soundtrack.

Summarising: I loved it.

Plot:
Wade Hunnicutt (Robert Mitchum) dominates not only his entire family but basically his entire town, where he has slept with almost the entire female population. His wife Hannah (Eleanor Parker) tolerates it and compensates by doting on their son Theron (George Hamilton). But when Theron tries to get out from under his mother’s wing, he turns to his father and his father’s loyal employee Rafe (George Peppard) and gets his first hunting lessons.

I went into the film not knowing much about it [I had totally forgotten why I wanted to see it and therefore reserved a ticket - I didn't even know the general plot anymore], so I wasn’t entirely certain what to expect. That means that for the first bit of the film I was a bit unsure because nothing much happened. But once I realized that this was just a family story and stopped waiting for the big events, I absolutely fell in love with the film.

Even though the movie was definitely made and takes place in the 60s*, it managed to not be misogynistic, nor particularly sexist. I mean, yes, of course, it definitely had the morals of the time but all the female characters were just as well-rounded as the men and just as much to be taken seriously.

Though I have to admit that I loved none of the characters as much as I loved Rafe. Despite naturally having the morality of somebody who grew up in the 50s, he is pretty much the ideal man who could come out of that situation. He’s just a really good person.

The cast was excellent. Especially Eleanor Parker and George Hamilton. Robert Mitchum was booming and overbearing, which was quite good for the role but it got a bit much sometimes.

The thing that really blew me away though, was the cinematography. Absolutely fantastic. And it all culminates in a scene that is one of the most brilliant scenes I have ever seen. [SPOILER] When Wade is shot and we get to see the shadow first, then the open cabinet – it was one of the tensest, creepiest things ever. [/SPOILER]

Summarising: It’s a sappy film, but of the most excellent kind and a wondeful classic.

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*ah, the 50s/60s, where even the most passionate kiss happens with a closed mouth and enough pressure to break a neck.

Plot:
Sam Bowden (Gregory Peck) is a successful lawyer with a nice family. But when Max Cady (Robert Mitchum) – who Sam got convicted with his testimony for attacking a young girl – is released from prison, Max starts to threaten Sam’s entire life and family. He stalks all of them, but particularly Sam’s daughter Nancy (Lori Martin), but always just within the law – until he forces Sam to resort to desperate measures.

Despite the excellent performances by both Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck, that movie was a bit slack and underwhelming.

The film lives off the scenes were Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum take each other on verbally. [Is that as suggestive as I think it is? If so, I'm sorry. Though, actually, they both really aren't hard on the eyes* so it could be worse. And it's not all my fault - if the movie would be watched by the youth of today, there would be legions of slash fanfics out there.] Their dialogues are pretty damn fantastic and both of them deliver perfectly.

Unfortunately otherwise the script is rather forgettable. And so fucking sexist. I mean, the 60s really weren’t the world’s most feminist time but this movie really suffers from passive damsel in distress syndrome. The women really don’t do anything except be protected, by men of course, and get attacked. Also by men. Damn frustrating.

You just really notice that the movie is quite old. That is not all bad – the sexual assault, for example, was really constrained (there’s no actual nudity and he doesn’t even touch her breasts directly) and yet completely tense and effective. But sometimes it was just laughable. The way it’s established that Max is not a good guy? He walks past a librarian, makes her drop a few books and then HE DOESN’T HELP HER PICK THEM UP! *gasp*

Since – as you might know – I like to compare original versions and remakes, I’ll try to watch the remake soon. I’ll be interested to see whether they were able to update it to a more modern sensibility.

Summarising: didn’t age particularly well, despite the very good performances.

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*Though honestly, the fashion at the time… Gregory Pick with his long legs and the pants up to his nipples looks like he is made of about 90% pants. Not sexy.

Plot:
Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace) is recovering in a hospital from the events in Flickan som lekte med elden and awaiting her trial for murder. Mikael (Michael Nyqvist) asks his friend Annika to represent her in court, while he tries to do everything in his power to acquit Lisbeth and to show how there was a conspiracy against her which started when she was 12 years old. He also provides Lisbeth with the possibility to write her own autobiography – something which will hopefully help her in court.

After Flickan…, Luftslottet som sprängdes is definitely a step up again, though the first one definitely remains the strongest of the three films.

Luftslottet and Flickan are much more closely connected with each other than with Män. They are basically one film, though Luftslottet is definitely the better half. And you get the strong impression that they were shot back-to-back, too [maybe they were, I don't know]. That’s the kind of connection you should go for in sequels and I enjoyed that a lot.

Unfortunately they also continue the weaknesses of the second film – it was less riveting than Män, it had this overwrought conspiracy that just got too much for my suspense of disbelief. But as soon as we hit the court room, the movie found its step and it got really tense and very good.

And the cast continues to convince, unsurprisingly. Noomi Rapace has my fully respect and while I still maintaint that Michael Nyqvist doesn’t really look the part, he plays it – so that’s already halfway there. And I really liked Aksel Morrisse and his character.

In any case I feel sufficiently prepared for the David Fincher version – and I look forward to seeing The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But then I’ll also be happy to take a break from the material.

Summarising: Solid.