The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Okay, well I’m a pretty big David Fincher fan, though I will admit that occasionally rarely does he make a misstep or a boring film.  The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is the closest Fincher has ever come to making a traditional (read: mainstream and marketable) movie, and it was showered with praise and awards nominations.  Why not go back to that well, especially after the awesome mainstream success of a non-traditional film like The Social Network?

Honestly, TGWTDT is not a mainstream movie in the traditional sense, but much like everyone read “The Da Vinci Code”, seemingly everyone has read the book by the late Steig Larsson on which it was adapted from.  However, unlike “Da Vinci”, Larsson’s book is actually decent enough (although I still maintain that the translation in the first book was far too literal to provide anything substantially powerful), and back in Sweden, his trilogy of books were made into a fairly successful movie trilogy.  Which begs the question: why was Fincher’s movie even made?

Honestly, I’ll gladly take Noomi Rapace’s performance over Rooney Mara’s and the European filmmaking (read: more ballsy) over the semi-sanitized American version.  It’s a good enough movie, but that’s all Fincher’s direction and Daniel Craig / Mara’s chemistry/acting.  The worst thing we’ll probably ever get from David Fincher is that the movie was only very good.

4 / 5

The Adventures of Tintin (2011)

Firstly, I have to admit that I’m losing the passion for this.  Once I accomplished my #movieaday goal last year, I became less and less interested in watching movies just for the sake of keeping this streak alive.  Now I’m on a terrible work schedule that directly conflicts with me being alive, and I’ve seen the pool of my movies I’ve banked dwindle down to 3 or 4 movies ahead of the day.  I have no idea if this blog is viewed daily by people aside from the links I post on my Twitter, but living up to the title of this blog is becoming less and less of a priority for me.  The other option is just re-posting a whole bunch of my old reviews, but that seems disingenuous to me if I’m not actually watching them again.  Just mentioning all this in case you don’t see daily updates here anymore.  On to the movie.

I’ve been playing a lot of Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception on my PS3 lately, and that is the easiest comparison I can make to Tintin: it feels like I’m watching Uncharted: The Movie.  Not because the motion-capture animation used by Tintin is so close to the near-realistic graphics of U3, not just because of the similar Indiana Jones-esque plot lines and treasure hunting themes.  (I am aware that Tintin has been around for decades before all these things I’m making comparisons to, but I’ve never read one of the comics)  No, it’s mostly because both of the projects feel that they strove so hard for realism that when they have ridiculous set pieces and controller schemes/character movements that it all feels so very manufactured instead of organic.  I hope someone out there knows exactly what I mean by that, I’m tired of talking about it.

Generally speaking, the mocap animation is freakishly well-done, and definitely standing on the uncanny valley line.  Tintin (Jamie Bell) looks weirdly like a very young Simon Pegg, and then Pegg and his chum Nick Frost show up as detectives, making it weirder, and one of the characters that Andy Serkis plays and voices sounds like it’s Gerard Butler voicing him and it was all so off-putting to me.  I don’t even know if kids would love this movie, as I thought it was decent enough, but ultimately unsatisfied by the whole experience (much like my Uncharted 3 feelings), which is fairly odd for me when it comes to Steven Spielberg-directed films.

3 / 5

Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

When the budget for your movie is around $163 million, there is going to be a lot expected out of box office returns.  While a $174 million dollar return is nothing to sneeze at, it’s not exactly what the numerous big time producers expected from Cowboys & Aliens and I think I have narrowed down where they went wrong.  If you’re going to have a movie starring Olivia Wilde and have her naked at some point but not show it, well that is going to turn off a lot of your potential audience.  Hell, even straight women want to see Olivia Wilde naked.

Directed by Iron Man‘s Jon Favreau, Cowboys & Aliens is all about an amnesiac cowboy named Jake (Daniel Craig) and putting together the mystery behind how he found himself out in the country with a weird bracelet on his wrist.  Jake goes to the nearest town, stirs shit up and finds himself at odds with the local rich cattleman, Woodrow Dollarhyde (Harrison Ford).  Then even more shit happens and Dollarhyde’s son Percy (Paul Dano) is abducted by aliens and a mission is launched to rescue Percy and all the missing townspeople.  Olivia Wilde is the mysterious Ella, who may be more than she appears which is a pretty phenomenal thing in and of itself.

It’s a textbook high concept popcorn movie, based on a graphic novel.  It is everything that a summer blockbuster should be, but a bit grittier than something stupid like Independence Day or Armageddon with high quality actors.  I enjoyed it, though while the concept is fairly unique, it’s an altogether predictable picture.  Definitely worth a watch.

3.5 / 5