The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

It's kind of refreshing, when watching watching foreign language films, to not
recognise anyone. For all I know, to a Swedish audience, Michael Nyqvist might
turn up with the tedious regularity of Tom Cruise. However, to me, this is a
fresh cast of unknowns, and that's really nice.

The story is set (unsurprisingly) in Sweden, and follows Mikael Blomkvist, a
recently disgraced journalist, who is retained by an elderly businessman to
investigate the disappearence of his niece, who disappeared about 40 years ago,
who he believes was murdered by one of his odious relatives. Also involved is
Lisbeth Salander, a professional investigator/ computer hacker, who is
initially tasked with checking Blomkvist's background, but who can't resist
getting involved in the case. As they dig into the family, dark deeds are
uncovered.

The film is beautifully shot, somber and dark. Blomkvist is a bit of a cipher,
really; the focus is mostly on Salander, who is a great character; a deeply
disturbed computer geek with unpredictable moods, and a tendancy to take
absolutely no shit whatsoever.

There's a strong current of gritty realism; violence, rape and murder are shown
with uncompromising brutality, which some might find difficult to take. More
positively, on the realism stakes, there's a lot of geekery and hacking going
on, which seems more or less accurate. It's curiously refreshing to see
investigators enhance photographs and get results you could plausibly get out
of photoshop.

Overall, you could probably say that the plot isn't exactly original. When all
is revealed, we're more left with the banality of evil rather than the
ingenuity of it. Ultimately, though, the film is as much about the growing
relationship between Blomkvist and Salander, and that's certainly on of the
film's major strengths. A classy film, which I would recommend to anyone who
usually has the patience for subtitles. I know I'm very much looking forward to
the next two installments, which I believe follow soon.

Green Zone

Welcome, class, to the latest in a series of lectures in the course "Modern
History For Short Attention Spans" by Professor Matt Damon. If you recall, last
month, Professor Damon presented his thesis on the fall of apartheid with the
assistance of Dr Morgan Freeman. This month, Prof Damon enlightens us on the
causes of the second Iraq War.

Matt Damon plays a US Army specialist whose role in Iraq is to hunt for and
secure weapons of mass destruction. And thus is getting a bit pissed off with
what turns out to be a constant round of seeing guys get shot whilst securing a
disused toilet factory or digging holes in the middle of the road. He expresses
his displeasure to the top brass, who basically all say "Shush."

CIA bloke Brendan Fraser chips in at this point, because he too is beginning to
believe that the whole WMD thing is a load of bullshit, and between them they
begin poking their noses where they're not wanted. Eventually, this turns into
a big race between Matt Damon trying to arrest a high ranking Iraqi general who
knows what happened, and some special forces dudes with orders to kill the guy.
All at the behest of Pentagon guy Greg Kinnear, who we know is dodgy as all
hell, because he has wire rimmed glasses.

Overall, it's a sort of based-in-fact thing. I doubt anything in the movie is
actually true (without having checked) but the overall message is clear and
something we can all get behind - proof of WMDs was manufactured in order to
gain a reason to go to war, where the real objective was the removal of Saddam
and replacing him with a nice friendly tame democratic regime. So, while I
doubt that the kids in 2050 are going to get shown this film in history lessons
the way they kept forcing us to watch Gandhi when I was a lad, it is a handy
picturebook style explanation for the general audience of how shitty the Bush
regime was. As an action film, it kind of rattles along in an exciting enough
fashion without really engaging you that much. Overall, the fact is somewhat
compromised by the needs of action cinema, and the action is somewhat
compromised by the needs of historical fact.

Shutter Island

Martin Scorsese is in slightly unfamiliar territory here, with a weird
psychological thriller with hardly any Robert DeNiro in it at all. (To the
extent that the guy you think might be De Niro under heavy makeup is in fact
Elias Koteas under heavy makeup.)

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a US Marshal set to investigate the disappearance of
a woman from Shutter Island, a maximum security facility which even the staff
don't seem to have decided whether it's a secure hospital or a prison. Anyone
who's played Arkham Asylum on the 360 or PS3, though, is going to recognise it
immediately.

Everything is clearly very suspicious and dodgy from the outset, with Ben
Kingsley playing a very dubious head psychiatrist. It transpires that DiCaprio
has ulterior motives for taking the case, believing there to be an unpleasant
government conspiracy, connected to the guy who killed his wife, who is
supposedly locked up here.

Things clearly get more and more bizarre, with the island lashed by storms, and
DiCaprio troubled by dreams and hallucinations of his wife, and his experiences
at the liberation of Dachau. By the end, you'll be spending a little bit of the
credits wondering what happened here today.

The film has one big weakness, and that's Leonardo DiCaprio. I'm not going to
call him out and exactly call him *crap*. That wouldn't be fair. He's about as
good in this as he ever is, and when he's at his best, he's not bad. This,
however, is a tense psychodrama where his character goes through hell and back,
questions his sanity and identity, and faces demons from his past the equal of
anything you'll see in cinema. "Not bad" isn't going to cut it here. For some
reason, Scorsese has decided that DiCaprio is his new go-to all purpose actor,
but for my money, he's not got the range, and he renders what should be an
incredible movie just an average one. If you had, and I'm really just picking a
name off the top of my head here, Philip Seymour Hoffman in this role, it'd
have been an incredible film. The script's there, the direction is there, the
supporting actors are there, it just needed a huge performance in the middle.
However, it only manages to be as strong as its weakest point, and that means
overall, the film is Not Bad. Which is a shame.

Invictus

On February 11th 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison. In 1994, he was
elected president of South Africa. In 1995, the Rugby World Cup was held in
South Africa, their first participation in the tournament since the lifting of
the boycott.

If this list of facts made you say "Yeah, I know" three times, you'll have some
idea of how I felt for the majority of the movie. As biopics go, if you were
remotely conscious of world affairs in the 90s, this will all be very familiar
territory to you. I imagine that it'll all come as big news to the under 25s
and the Americans, though.

As it goes, it's a pretty competent biopic, if a bit sentimental. Morgan
Freeman does an alright job, but hardly disguises the fact that it's Morgan
Freeman in a Nelson Mandela wig. Matt Damon plays the Springboks captain
Francois Pienaar, but he's got a much smaller part than I had expected.

Much is made of Mandela's commitment to convincing the nation to get behind the
Springboks, though to be honest, the detail of how that was achieved was a
little sketchy. Likewise, much is made of the Springboks commitment to winning
the tournament (despite piss poor test performances) but how they did that is
also quite sketchy. I mean, sure, everyone was *committed*, but hell, I imagine
the Ivory Coast team was committed too.

So, we get Mandela being very Morganfreemanesque, the bonding power of sport
being shown in microcosm among Mandela's mixed race security detail who are
wary of each other at the start and predictably hugging by the end. And we get
to watch some actors playing some very sloppy looking rugby, and expecting us
to believe that we're watching a top class rugby match. There really is too
much of that. The last 20 minutes of the film is a potted recounting of the
1995 World Cup Final, Springboks vs All Blacks, and that just gives us 20
minutes to see a) actors can't play rugby very well, b) an actor playing Jonah
Lomu is nowhere near as intimidating as Jonah Lomu, and c) that the 1995 world
cup final was a bit of a snooze fest with no tries, six penalties and three
drop goals. Bit of a nail-biter in extra time, but basically a bit of an
anticlimax. New Zealand later claimed the team was suffering from food
poisoning, and I can well believe it.

I guess if you're not familiar with the events, this is actually quite an
important film. However, I personally felt that the detail was glossed over in
favour of romance, so this isn't a film that's going to be of deep interest to
those interested in either modern history, or world cup rugby.