Tag Archives: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

The Oscars are on tonight, right?

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Blah blah blah I am not excited about the Oscars this year.

I am not excited about trying to celebrate the bleakness that was Film in 2011. There were a few solid, good movies out there and a lot of… Sigh. A lot of trying to grasp at relevancy. A lot of trying to fit in while dumb down. It’s in my DNA to care about the Oscars and to be curious about winners and bitch about nominees and what have you, but the urge is just not strong enough this year to watch. Normally, when this flaccid about the Oscars, I’d at least watch the opening, then turn away, and check back in during the last hour, but this year… This year I’m going to follow Benjamin Light’s lead, and perhaps just keep one eye out on twitter, tumblr, and, shit, I don’t know… Yahoo! news, maybe? Ugh.

But I know. “Another guy bitching about being unenthusiastic about the Oscars.” How boring, right? Believe me, I’ve tried. I’m just not there. But like A. O. Scott said, “Oscar cynicism has become its own special form of Oscar hype.” Too true, I guess.

So anyway, I’m going to put up a thing here of my predictions of winners this year – just cause. Just cause it’s in my DNA, as I said. Review, debate, ponder, ignore, do as you please. Let’s look at the Top 7 Categories of Oscar Interest:

Best Picture

And the nominees are: The Artist, The Descendants, Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, The Help, Hugo, Midnight In Paris, Moneyball, The Tree Of Lie, and War Horse.

Fuck me. I’m not feeling any of this. Y’know, last year they added an additional 5 nominees to the Best Picture potentials and somehow The King’s Speech still beat out The Social Network.

Let’s talk about movies that don’t have a chance here: Midnight In Paris, The Help, and Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close. And Moneyball. I’ve seen Midnight In Paris, and it was okay, a fun little film, Woody doing Woody nicely, but Oscar material? No. Sorry. And that right there, ladies and gents, is the Theme of this year’s Oscars. Moneyball is a solid, good film, but nothing about it is strong enough to win an Oscar. But let’s not shit ourselves, we all know where this is heading: The Artist vs. The Descendants.

I’ve not seen The Artist because I think that I might rather watch paint dry on a mirror. I am enamored by old, classic Hollywood as much as the next amateur film geek sounding off from their internetastic soap box, but I’m not that hard up. The Descendants was a solid film, and it was about cancer and infidelity and bringing a family back together and a girl cries underwater. This is all Oscar material. I want The Descendants to win. I want that (I guess), but I suspect that The Artist will take it. Why? Because I think that the Weinsteins are going to prove to us yet again that money trumps talent every time.

Best Director

And the nominees are: Woody Allen, for Midnight In Paris. Michel Hazanavicius, for The Artist. Terrence Malick, for The Tree Of Life. Alexander Payne, for The Descendants. Martin Scorsese, for Hugo.

The winner will be: Alexander Payne.

I’ve seen some people predict a split and predict that The Descendants will win Best Picture and The Artist will be the Best Director choice, but… Nahh. I can understand an argument in which you judge the Act of Directing to be different from the Completed Product/Finished Film, and yet… those two should be so intrinsically connected that I would think that the Best Director winner would automatically cue you in to the Best Picture winner, but… What do I know? Everything. Nothing. Everything. Nothing! I don’t know.

Best Actor

And the nominees are: Demián Bichir, for A Better Life. George Clooney, for The Descendants. Jean Dujardin, for The Artist. Gary Oldman, for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Brad Pitt, for Moneyball.

Again, I’ll admit that I have not seen The Artist, but I’m not enthused to (and I’ve long nursed a suspicion that you could judge all Oscar movies and their corresponding performances by the trailers, as weak of a suspicion though that may be), and I have my doubts about that being a Best Actor-worthy performance. I haven’t seen Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, only because it wasn’t playing anywhere in a theater remotely around me (thank God it comes out on DVD in March), but I like the idea of Gary Oldman winning, you know, just to fuck with people. IYFF, Hollywood. And Brad Pitt is a solid actor, always, and will someday have a performance that will be more than worthy a Best Actor statue, but to me, that performance wasn’t happening in Moneyball. So… George Clooney.Yeah.

Yeah. Sure. Yeah. That’s my pick for the winner.

I mean, c’mon, he’s the closest we have to real, functioning Hollywood royalty these days.

Best Actress

Glenn Close, for Albert Nobbs. Viola Davis, for The Help. Rooney Mara, for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Meryl Streep, for The Iron Lady (as Maggie Thatcher). Michelle Williams, for My Week With Marilyn.

Sadly I’ve only seen one of the movies that had one of these performances, and because I am a huge dork and Fincher fanboy, it was The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Rooney Mara’s performance was very strong in that film, and equal parts very alien and very, very humanistic, at least compared to the terrible Swedish adaptations of those novels, but I don’t know if I think there’s a Best Actress performance there. And I doubt the Academy thinks so either.

I suspect you’ll see this award go to Meryl Streep, because she does a physical change and she plays the British Godzilla we call Maggie Thatcher, but I’d be okay with either Glenn Close or Michelle Williams winning, especially Michelle Williams, to further propel her along on an interesting career.

Or Viola Davis, just to make people spit out their drink when this award doesn’t go to an old white lady with blonde hair.

But, even still, my prediction: Meryl Streep.

Also, did I read this all right and Shailene Woodley is not nominated for anything? Seriously?

That makes me want to cry underwater, yo.

Best Supporting Actor

Kenneth Branagh, for My Week With Marilyn. Jonah Hill, for Moneyball. Nick Nolte, for Warrior. Christopher Plummer, for Beginners. Max von Sydow, for Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close.

My suspicion/hope: Christopher Plummer. Beginners was, like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, one of those movies that I really wanted to see last year but just never got around to seeing for whatever reason. I have a good feeling about the movie, I guess.

Runner up suspicion/hope: Kenneth Branagh.

Third choice: I don’t know… Max von Sydow? Though, that said, I would strongly like to see Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close win nothing.

Side note: I originally mistyped that was “Extremely Cloud And Incredibly Loose.” Ha ha! Anyway. Here is another picture of Michelle Williams in pseudo-Marilyn mode (because we want those hits to be through the roof on this post):

I doubt Nick Nolte will take it, just because… well, who saw that movie? That’s the one with Bane vs. Uncle Owen, right? Whatever. And JONAH HILL, ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME!?!? I suspect his inclusion here is just the work of some jokester in the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences wanting to see if anyone actually even reads this shit.

Best Supporting Actress

Bérénice Bejo, for The Artist. Jessica Chastain, for The Help. Melissa McCarthy, for Bridesmaids. Janet McTeer, for Albert Nobbs. Octavia Spencer, for The Help.

My suspicion: Man, I don’t have a clue.

Octavia Spencer?

This is a picture of Bérénice Bejo:

And this is another:

Anyway, I have not seen a single one of these movies, so this is a real guess. The Weinsteins want to buy Best Picture awards, so I don’t think they care about Best Supporting Actress awards. And Jessica Chastain… I don’t know. I feel like she’s someone, like Jeremy Renner and Sam Worthington, that somebody in Hollywood really, really, really wants to make happen, so you’re going to see them crammed into a lot of shit. Kind of like how Spielberg adopted Shia LeBeowulf for a while and shepherded him for a while until that plane crashed into the mountain. And Melissa McCarthy? Is her performance worthy of an Oscar or is this someone trying to say that these awards are “relevant” and capable of being “edgy”? You tell me.

I was going to cover both Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay, because I am a writer nerd. I collect all the Screenwriter Trading Cards! But the nominees for Best Original Screenplay are boring as shit this year, so instead…

Best Adapted Screenplay

And the nominees are: Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, and Jim Rash, for The Descendants. John Logan, for Hugo. George Clooney, Grant Heslov, and Beau Willimon, for The Ides Of March. Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, story by Stan Chervin, for Moneyball. Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

My suspicion: Sorkin and Zaillian.

No, I take that back. My suspicion: The crew from The Descendants. Partly because a Google image search for “Sorkin COCAINE” came up with a lot of boring hits, but also because…

The Dean from Community with an Oscar? That’s total LOL worthy. That’s EPIC LOLZ FOR DAZE worthy. There’s an amazing meta-in-joke on a future episode of Community (whatever that looks, tastes, feels like) there. Shit, you might as well just had Jim Rash host the ceremonies this year in character as the Dean from Community. I mean, cause why the fuck not?

I read something somewhere the other day that said that they suspect that Alexander Payne develops his projects based on where he could film them, and that made me LOL hard.

Runner up guess: The duo who adapted John Le Carre.

Closing thoughts: The Ides Of March, based on the play, Farragut North, was an okay film, but just okay. Clooney and Gosling and Phillip Seymour Hoffman and even Evan Rachel Wood were all just okay in it. There wasn’t a whole lot to chew there. Sadly, I feel like The Ides Of March are more out of place here than even Moneyball is. Also, I don’t think the guy that wrote Star Trek: Nemesis (which, you’ll remember, or not, starred Tom Hardy as Captain Picard’s clone) should be allowed to be nominated for an Oscar. Sorry, bro.

Final category: The Host.

Billy Crystal? Ugh.

This seems like a direct continuation of The King’s Speech winning last year. A return to the tired and the slightly boring. Granted, the Oscars is always a conundrum, and a study in contradictions. The old classic Hollywood vs. the new, the exciting, the experimental. And I think the celebration of those sides is always lost, or the mix is always wrong. The artists who are always pushing this medium forward aren’t being celebrated and encouraged and appreciated like they should. Last year’s debate of The Social Network vs. The King’s Speech was really about the New vs. the Old, and guess what? Boring won. (I’m going to guess that perhaps Weinstein $$$ didn’t hurt that debate tipping to one side over the other.)

Okay, and I don’t hate Billy Crystal, with all the changes they made and their attempts to “revolutionize” and update the Oscars, they’ve basically already said they’re in trouble. An infusion of new blood wouldn’t be such a bad thing. I’m sure there’s equally vanilla hosting options out there, ones that are still something new to this operation. Maybe. Maybe not.

Anyway, Brett Ratner producing was just too bizarre, as was the idea of Eddie Murphy hosting, which would’ve been interesting, but ultimately a pipe dream. An insane, fascinating pipe dream, but Eddie’s gotten too weird with his ego lately. Maybe he could have co-hosted with Scary Spice? Or maybe not. Speaking of Eddie and Scary Spice…

Benjie Light and I discussed this before, but I don’t think that James Franco and Anne Hathaway being chosen as hosts was necessarily a bad choice, but the bad choice was to make them work (with an unfair division of labor because Franco was obviously stoned the whole ceremony and Hathaway was trying to compensate) with the same tired staple of Bruce Villanch jokes. There’s got to be better, edgier, and quite frankly, smarter and safer host choices out there. At least a host that can pick their own joke writers. A Jon Stewart, perhaps? Or Tina Fey? Donald Glover. I’m just spitballing here, but I’m liking it.

Anyway. Tonight’s the night. Let’s see where we end up…

Your opinion is wrong

Posted by Benjamin Light on

Hidden Indicators of Bad Taste: 2011 Movie Edition

 

Clarification is always necessary. If you hold the viewpoints of one of the things on this list, or you sorta liked or kind of agree with some of the things mentioned, it doesn’t mean you irrecoverably have bad taste. But you might.

 

“Bridesmaids” is Oscar-Worthy

 

A thoroughly lazy and mediocre comedy. Too long, too many stretches where you feel like you’re watching a tossed-out SNL sketch idea get beaten into the ground. I probably wouldn’t hate this movie so much if it weren’t for the ridiculous praise it gets from lazy bloggers and media people. Oscar-worthy? Be fucking serious. There is a fallacy I see a lot of writers fall into, especially those writers who live in LA, where when something is successful its inherent quality becomes this unquestionable given. This is not a well-made movie. It’s standard Apatow hackery, just with more girls this time. And put away your aspirations of Feminism, it’s a movie about weddings and stupid wedding bullshit, about as gender-stereotyped as you can get.

 

So is “Drive”

 

This movie reminded me so much of all the bad LA crime film knock-offs that exploded out of the woodwork in the mid-90s after Pulp Fiction came out. Oh look, it’s a an overly-stylized troubled anti-hero in a cliched heist plot where there’s lots of over-the-top violence and some scenery chewing by cast-against-type comedy actor playing a mob bro. But the main guy doesn’t talk much, cause the director read a book about Sergio Leone once! And there’s an against-the-grain soundtrack! And… … Why the hell are so many critics in love with this movie? I’m baffled. The visual style evokes a freshman film school student discovering the low-light setting on his Canon 5D. I really wanted to like this movie, but the longer it went on without any discernible substance, the less I did.

 

Andy Serkis deserves a nomination for “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”

 

No he doesn’t. Also, his Gollum was totally over-rated. If you think that’s good acting and not just scenery chewing, you’re probably amazed by the performances in high school plays too. Plus, he’s just providing a rough draft, there’s an army of animators and effects people working on every frame of his performance to make it better.

(Note: I did not see “Attack the Block” nor do I intend to, but judging by the way Harry Knowles and his acolytes gush about it, I’m just going to assume that it actually sucks.)

 

The Swedish version was better

 

No it wasn’t. It had all the quality and production value of a Lifetime channel movie. Noomi Rapace was a formulaic goth chick straight from central casting. You’re just saying that because you think pretending to like foreign films makes you more cultured. Fincher’s version is so well made that you kinda regret just a bit that his talents aren’t being put to use on better source material.

(The 2012 version of this is going to be “‘The Hunger Games’ is just a ‘Battle Royale’ rip-off.” It isn’t, and despite my distaste for Jennifer Lawrence, it will probably be much better than the supremely over-rated “Battle Royale.”)

You could have it all.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Mad linkage:

What happens when the scary predictions of speculative fiction start to come true earlier than expected?

I guess you could say that I’m excited to see A Dangerous Method.

Best Coast and WAVVES.

An interesting interview with Steven Soderbergh about Contagion.

Did Chris Martin cheat on Gwyneth Paltrow?

J.J. Abrams is doing some cool new shit.

Science fiction magazines and The Joy Of Sex.

from here.

Noah Baumbach is developing Jonathan Franzen‘s The Corrections as an HBO series.

Post-apocalyptic porn. Sure, why not?

Matthew Fox could be in some trouble.

Saturn is beautiful.

The critics of Joan Didion.

This is Peanut St. Cosmo’s new favorite picture on the internet.

What does clitoral stimulation do to your brain?

Post-Sept. 11 Saudi Arabia is modernizing, slowly.

Mos Def will no longer be Mos Def.

Kitty Ravenhart’s selection for The Best Of Yahoo Answers.

Did you drain your balls at DragonCon?

More leaks from David Fincher’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

from here.

“A guy jerked off to me in the subway and the NYPD didn’t do a thing.”

I feel like with each passing day I’m a little more amazed that The Avengers movie is happening.

The beginning of the end for Yahoo?

Johnny Depp to star in another fucking remake, this time of The Thin Man.

Female blogger threatened with defamation suit after writing about TSA rape.

Jeff Tweedy and the Black Eyed Peas.

Tech company to build science ghost town.

A new story by Haruki Murakami.

Very cool fan art.

A huge list of deleted scenes that are awaiting you on the new Star Wars blu-rays.

Yelping with Cormac McCarthy.

NYC bans dogs from bars.

A movie about Keith Richards?

Reality as a failed state.

Immigrant Song.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Look at this:

A bootleg look at the trailer for David Fincher’s upcoming adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Finally. Perfect timing too since I was just watching The Social Network again tonight with a friend. A NSFW work trailer (because of Rooney Mara nudity) for “the feel bad movie of Christmas.” I’m definitely excited.

Also, That’s Karen O’s voice on the cover of the Led Zeppelin song, which is an interesting addition to the soundtrack. And what do you think of Rooney Mara’s look as Lisbeth Salander?

Binary day.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

from here.

Today is 10-10-10!

Mad linkage:

Douglas Adams and the answer to the ultimate question.

Susannah Breslin on This Recording.

John McTiernan is going to jail.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master delayed indefinitely.

Remembering David Bowie’s Station To Station.

Anthony Bourdain is writing a graphic novel “about ultraviolent food nerds.”

Great new albums coming out of the Milwaukee music scene.

David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King gets a release date.

This is some ridiculous bullshit.

John Gabriel’s G.I.F. theory.

from here and here.

More actors added to David Fincher’s version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Bob Woodward on President Barack Obama.

Are tests biased against students who don’t give a shit?

Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe.

Al Pacino to play Phil Spector.

Shia LeBeowulf wants to play Karl Rove. Suck it, Frankie Muniz!

Doctor Who is coming to America next season (and is going to face Nixon).

Scientists explain the parting of the red sea.

Rob Liefeld is writing a script about the founding of Image comics/the comics boom of the 90s. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!

Yoda’s cousin: Night Eyes.

Leave a few tools in the toolshed.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Just a quick word on three books that I’m currently reading…

The first:

Krakatoa: The Day The World Exploded by Simon Winchester, which is about, as you probably guessed from the title, the explosion of Krakatoa on August 27, 1883. Winchester is one of my favorite authors of general non-fiction, and I’d highly recommend his The Professor And The Madman, one of his accounts of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.

from here.

Anyway, I could say quite  a bit about both of these books, but the book on Krakatoa just felt timely, what with the eruption in Iceland a few months ago. And Krakatoa was an explosion that significantly changed the world in quite a few ways, both lower the temperature of the planet much like Mt. Tambora and “the year without a summer,” but Krakatoa also affected the way we look at our world and us. For the first time, the “global village,” as Marshall McLuhan would say, was assembled through technology such as the telegraph and news traveled faster to and from more remote places, and in this particular case, that news was that the world wasn’t all that it seemed, and that our relationship with nature could be quite fragile in places.

The second book:

Love And Sex With Robots: The Evolution Of Human-Robot Relationships by David Levy. At first I thought this was going to just a silly little read, but it’s actually quite fun and interesting, dealing not just with human/robot couplings, but with mankind’s long history of emotional attachments to our technological creations, and our seemingly continuing return to synthetic love and how it can be as important to us as “the real thing.”

And, obviously, this is something we’ve talked about before here.

But it brought up things that I didn’t know before, which is embarrassing in a regard, but talking about the creation of the vibrator, the book brings up the word hysteria pretty much translates from the Greek as “womb sickness.” For a long time prior to the early 1900s, many woman would suffer from a “madness” due to “sexual dysfunction” and it would be the job of a doctor or a midwife to essentially bring them to paroxysm or orgasm to cure them.

And, of course, coincidentally, one of our favorite writers, Tracy Clark-Flory, would link to a similarly related article, “Turn Right, My Love” from The New York Times on her tumblr the other day:

Unlike my wife, my GPS voice is completely subservient. She gives me something I want and doesn’t ask anything in return. All I have to do is plug her in every now and then and she’s happy.

Our relationship is all about me.

And therein lies the boon to my marriage. Having someone around whose sole role is to serve me gives me what I want as a man (efficiency and attention) while not threatening what my wife wants as a woman (kindness and equality).

People are just so weird. It’s wonderful. Anyway, the book opens with a quote from this 2006 article from The Economist, talking about South Korea is pushing to have domestic helper robots in every home in it’s country by 2020 and then quoting Henrik Christensen, the chairman of the European Robotics Network…

Probably the area of robotics that is likely to prove most controversial is the development of robotic sex toys, says Dr Christensen. “People are going to be having sex with robots in the next five years,” he says. Initially these robots will be pretty basic, but that is unlikely to put people off, he says. “People are willing to have sex with inflatable dolls, so initially anything that moves will be an improvement.” To some this may all seem like harmless fun, but without any kind of regulation it seems only a matter of time before someone starts selling robotic sex dolls resembling children, says Dr Christensen. This is dangerous ground. Convicted paedophiles might argue that such robots could be used as a form of therapy, while others would object on the grounds that they would only serve to feed an extremely dangerous fantasy.

So, the question is: When do we start falling in love with our tools and how does that reflect our own personal reality and view of the world around us?

from here.

Oh, and the third book:

I haven’t actually started reading it yet, but it looks like I’m about to take the leap and join the rest of America in reading this. Who else has read this? What did you think?

I know Benjamin Light said he saw the Swedish film version of the first book in the trilogy – The Millennium trilogy, which is a name I like – and that he wasn’t crazy about it. I think they’ve already finished the third film over in Sweden, and any second now we should hear about casting for the American version of the films (which will still be set in Sweden), which will be interesting in a way similar to creation of an American version of Let The Right One In. I can’t wait to see K-Stew sneer her way through this one.