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Salander vs. Salander: some thoughts on David Fincher's THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO remake

4:30 PM / Cinema / Reviews / 16 Comments

CAUTION: Massive spoilers ahead. You have been warned.

MÄN SOM HATAR KVINNOR

DIRECTOR: Niels Arden Oplev; SCREENPLAY: Rasmus Heisterberg & Nikolaj Arcel; COMPOSER: Jacob Groth; CINEMATOGRAPHER: Eric Kress, DFF; EDITOR: Anne Østeurd; PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Niels Sejer; CAST: Michael Nyqvist (Mikael Blomkvist), Noomi Rapace (Lisbeth Salander), Lena Endre (Erika Berger), Sven-Bertil Taube (Henrik Vanger), Peter Haber (Martin Vanger), Peter Andersson (Nils Bjurman), Marika Lagercrantz (Cecilia Vanger), Ingvar Hirdwall (Dirch Frode), Björn Granath (Gustav Morell), Eva Fröling (Harriet Vanger), Michalis Koutsogiannakis (Dragan Armanski); RELEASED: February 27, 2009 (Denmark and Sweden)

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

DIRECTOR: David Fincher; SCREENPLAY: Steven Zaillian; COMPOSERS: Tent Reznor, Atticus Ross; CINEMATOGRAPHER: Jeff Cronenweth, ASC; EDITORS: Kirk Baxter, ACE, Angus Wall, ACE; PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Donald Graham Burt; CAST: Daniel Craig (Mikael Blomkvist), Rooney Mara (Lisbeth Salander), Robin Wright (Erika Berger), Christopher Plummer (Henrik Vanger), Stellan Skarsgård (Martin Vanger), Yorick van Wageningen (Nils Bjurman), Geraldine James (Cecilia Vanger), Steven Berkoff (Dirch Frode), Donald Sumpter (Gustav Morell), Joely Richardson (Harriet Vanger), Goran Visnjic (Dragan Armanski); RELEASED: December 20, 2011 (USA)

The other day, I went to see David Fincher's version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO with some degree of trepidation. I'm uncomfortable with the notion of remakes at the best of times, particularly when the original version is (a) only a couple of years old and (b) already of a very high standard. I'd far rather see a filmmaker, particularly one of Fincher's calibre, either tackling new material or at least revisiting an idea that was either flawed to begin with or can be tackled in such a way as to bring something new to the table. All the evidence suggested that this was not going to happen here. True, the material, with its dark themes and general sense of misanthropy, seemed tailor made for Fincher, but then there was already something decidedly Fincher-esque about the original Swedish adaptation, with director Nils Arden Oplev citing Fincher's SE7EN as one of his strongest influences. Similarly, the Swedish version was so true to Stieg Larsson's original novel that, by opting for a similarly faithful approach, Steven Zaillian's script for the American version was destined to mirror Rasmus Heisterberg and Nikolaj Arcel's adaptation almost by default.

In the end, Fincher's adaptation more or less conformed to all my expectations about it. The short version: it's a decent enough film in its own right, and if it was the only version that existed, I might be inclined to view it more favourably. The fact of the matter, though, is that this is NOT the only version that exists. I know certain viewers have chosen to indulge in a form of wilful ignorance by deliberately avoiding the Swedish version, while others have come up with all manner of reasons why comparing the two is a no-no, but the fact of the matter is that I can't unsee the Swedish version, and nor do I see any reason why I should want to. Like it or not, the Swedish verison came along first, and as such any subsequent version needs to do something radically different in order to make its existence seem worthwhile.

And the simple fact is that the Fincher version does no such thing. There is no real reason for it to exist, beyond the obvious money-making considerations and a desire to appease those who can't bring themselves to watch (gasp!) a foreign film, let alone one with subtitles. It's a long way from being as pointless as the American remake of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, which did little more than shift the action to the US and translate the dialogue into English, but that's merely damning the film with faint praise. That's not to say that there aren't individual moments that improve on the Swedish version: in particular, I like Joely Richardson's turn as Anita/Harriet Vanger (even if she is far too young to be playing a character who was supposedly an 18-year-old 40 years ago), and the "what happened to Harriet?" mystery is resolved considerably more elegantly than it was in the Swedish version (both variants help streamline, in their own ways, what was a decidedly muddled situation in the novel). Similarly, I think Zaillian made the right decision to omit Blomkvist's prison sentence, which always felt like little more than a distraction in both the book and the Swedish film. The Fincher version also makes considerably more of Salander's previous guardian, Holger Palmgren, who was entirely absent from the theatrical version of the Swedish film and only briefly glimpsed in the extended TV version. But none of these small improvements elevate the material enough to come even close to justify doing it all over again.

This is particularly true in view of the fact that they don't even shift the location: despite this being an American remake, the action still takes place in Sweden, using the same locations as the Swedish film (as described in the novel). Most of the main players are English or American, and there's something a little farcical about watching a bunch of English and American actors wandering around Sweden speaking English with put-on Swedish accents... with the notable exception of Daniel Craig, who for some inexplicable reason retains his normal speaking voice and therefore seems out of place. This is probably going to sound sacreligious, but I honestly think I would have been more open to the idea of a remake if they'd done something drastic like moved the action to, say, America. It would have given the material a different flavour, and the themes of corporate corruption, institutionalised misogyny and a nation's refusal to come to terms with its chequered past (not to mention the more generalised debates about free will and "nature versus nurture") are universal enough that it could have worked. Instead, by remaining in Sweden, the film almost seems to be keeping the uncomfortable questions it raises at arm's length: it implicitly gives the impression that these problems are exclusively Swedish, thereby making what the story says about us as a society somehow more palatable.

LISBETH SALANDER

Take one look at them and there's no doubt about it: stick them in a room together and Noomi Rapace's Salander would knock seven shades out of Rooney Mara's Salander. Rapace's version of the character is a smouldering, battle-hardened warrior, while Mara's is a fragile, child-like waif whose face, complete with bleached eyebrows, bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Ralph Fiennes in the HARRY POTTER films. Both are, I feel, legitimate interpretations of the character, and there can be little doubt that VISUALLY, Mara more closely resembles the Lisbeth of the books, frequently mistaken for a child and using her unassuming appearance as her most potent weapon. Rapace, on the other hand, looks both older and far tougher - not the sort of person most would assume they could take advantage of.

In terms of performance, though, there's no contest: Rapace mops the floor with Mara. The greatest strength of Rapace's acting lies in her ability to communicate paragraphs with a look here and an arch of her eyebrow there. Mara is far more reliant on make-up and costume design to convey the character, giving a considerably more one-note performance and coming across more as an angst-ridden teenager than someone truly destroyed through years of systematic abuse. It's not by any stretch of the imagination a bad performance - in fact, it's a very good one and I'd go as far as to say that it's considerably better than what I expected from the star of the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET remake - but it's limited by Zaillian's desire to keep the character a closed book. I read an interview a couple of weeks ago in which he explained that he wasn't interest in giving the character a back-story - as far as he was concerned, only what could be conveyed about the character in the present tense mattered. It's certainly true that the Fincher version makes the relationship that develops between Salander and Blomkvist more tender than that of the Swedish version, but at the same time there's something altogether more human about Rapace's take on the character. Her performance just seems more natural and less affected. With Mara, I'm more aware of her acting, and of the fact that I'm watching a conventionally pretty girl made up to look like Voldemort's little sister.

MIKAEL BLOMKVIST

Whereas Rapace gives the better performance as Salander despite Mara's Salander being physically truer to the novels, the situation is to a certain extent reversed for Blomkvist. It's hardly a secret that Blomkvist, the tireless crusader for justice and publisher of a small left-wing magazine, is a stand-in for Stieg Larsson (albeit a somewhat sexed-up stand-in who appears to be irresistible to women), and the casting in the Swedish version of Michael Nyqvist, who bears something of a physical resemblance to the author, helps underscore this. Whereas Nyqvist easily convinces as a middle-aged journalist who smokes too much and doesn't get enough exercise (again, completely true to the book), Craig not only carries the baggage of being the incumbent James Bond but is far more of a conventional Hollywood leading man, meaning that he never fully convinces as the character as written. Apart from occasionally dangling a pair of spectacles from one ear, he comes across as too slick and unflappable - but that's presumably what Fincher was going for when he cast Craig in the role. Nyqvist's Blomkvist came across as scruffy and slightly clumsy - a bit of a schlub and the more relatable of the two. However Craig, for my money, gives the more nuanced performance. That's not to say Nyqvist was bad, but despite looking the part, there was always something slightly bland about his take on the character, who rarely seemed to react to events with the sort of intensity you would expect under the circumstances. It is, like everything else in this review, a purely personal reaction, and the more I think about it, the less convinced I am that what Craig brings to the table is actually superior. The trouble is that Nyqvist's Blomkvist is instantly likeable (which I assume was the way the character was meant to be depicted) whereas Craig's is rather cold and aloof, a slick operator who you don't really relate to... and given that we see the vile Vanger family and the oddball (understatementof the century) Salander through his eyes, I'm inclined to think that relatability is a fairly important quality for this character to have.

THE REST OF THE CAST

Elsewhere, it's swings and roundabouts as far as the casting goes. Christopher Plummer's Henrik Vanger lacks the frailty of Sven-Bertil Taube in the original, and as a result the emotional intensity surrounding Harriet's disappearance feels lacking (their eventual reunion also feels like a damp squib in comparison with that of the original). Conversely, Joely Richardson makes far more of an impression as Harriet than Ewa Fröing in the original, although that has a lot to do with the increased amount of screen time she is afforded. Michalis Koutsogiannakis is far closer to how I imagined Armanski when reading the books than Goran Visnjic in the new version; ditto Lena Endre versus Robin Wright as Erika Berger. I'd be hard pressed to pick a favourite between Peter Haber and Stellan Skarsgård as Martin Vanger - they're somewhat similar in appearance and both give powerful, understated performances. That said, Martin's confrontation with Blomqvist is botched quite spectacularly in the Fincher version, revealing Martin's guilt far too soon and then completely fudging the central message (namely the notion of a collective Stockholm syndrome, mirroring Larsson's view of society's relationship with those it victimises) during the scene in his torture chamber.

PICTURE AND SOUND

The Swedish version was shot in Super35 for under $10 million (some sources put the figure closer to $7 million). The American remake was shot using the Red Epic and Red One MX digital cameras for $100 million. As such, there were always going to be major differences between the two from a visual standpoint, although the fact that, as previously mentioned, the Swedish film already owed something of a debt to Fincher's distinctive visual style narrowed the gap somewhat. As an unabashed film purist who has yet to see a digitally photographed movie I truly love the look of - and has been underwhelmed by the visual side of all Fincher's prior digital productions - it was probably always a foregone conclusion that I'd end up preferring the look of the Swedish film, but what really surprises me is how little of the 10-fold budgetary increase appears to have made its way on to the screen. (There's little in the plot - ostensibly a traditional Agatha Christie "locked room" scenario - that calls for a massive budget anyway.) There are isolated moments that impress from a visual standpoint - a shot of Salander watching a burning car is particularly striking in terms of both its composition and colour palette - but overall the look of the remake is nothing special, characterised by the usual slick digital video aesthetic and suffering from Fincher's overuse of the "urine filter", something that has plagued his work ever since he moved to digital after PANIC ROOM. The cinematography in the Swedish version, courtesy of Eric Kress, has a more neutral aesthetic, going for understated where Fincher and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth (who also shot THE SOCIAL NETWORK and FIGHT CLUB) tend to go for obvious. (Case in point: most of the outdoor scenes have a heavy blue tint, presumably to hammer home how cold it is. The Swedish film was able to convey that with a natural colour palette.)

As far as the music is concerned, I can't remember anything specific from the Fincher version except the god-awful screeching during the opening titles, if indeed that counts as music. Meanwhile, I have the central theme from the Swedish version deeply rooted in my brain. In the original, the music is of a traditional orchestral variety, working in tandem with the visuals and dialogue to evoke a mood. In contrast, the remake has Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's sonic wallpaper fighting with the dialogue, frequently (and especially in the first 45 minutes, I found) overpowering it and rendering Daniel Craig's mumbling nigh on incomprehensible. People raved about this duo's work on Fincher's previous film, THE SOCIAL NETWORK, when I couldn't see what the fuss was about, and I predict the same will be true of their contribution to this film. As one reviewer put it, more succinctly than I ever could, "How can a director who's worked with proper musical composers like Howard Shore, Elliot Goldenthal and David Shire possibly have signed off on this ambient soundscape of droning and plinky-plonk noises?"

So yeah, aesthetically speaking, the Swedish film comes out on top for me, despite having been made for buttons compared with Fincher's remake. Others can and will disagree: I've seen plenty of comments in various places that describe the Swedish version as looking like a TV movie, to which the only response I can muster is "Did we watch the same film?" If anything, it's the Fincher version, with its flat, grain-free appearance, that reminds me of television.

THE ADAPTATION

As previously mentioned, both adaptations stick pretty closely to the source material, although of course, given that Larsson's novel is a veritable doorstop, some streamlining was always going to be necessary. It probably helps that a lot of Larsson's description is ultimately redundant - he has a tendency to describe in minute detail what a character is eating and how the room in which he is eating is decorated. (He is also, to borrow an observation made by a critic whose name I've forgotten, the only author I can think of who will tell you the dimensions of a room BEFORE seeing fit to mention that there is a mutilated body lying in the middle of it.)

It's not really a case of one version being substantially more faithful than the other: each makes slightly different decisions as to what to include and what to leave out, without ever straying from the path laid out by the author. Both omit much of the background to the Wennerstrom case (in the novel, much of the first chapter details Blomkvist's fateful meeting with an old friend who passed on the information later used to entrap him) and nearly all of the admittedly tedious back-story of the Vanger clan. Both also greatly pare down Salander's back-story, although more of it remains in the Swedish version than the American. The Swedish version omits Blomkvist's daughter, who in the novel and the remake is the one who identifies the list of names and numbers as Bible references, as well as Blomkvist's trip to London to meet Anita Vanger. On the other hand, the remake jetisons Blomkvist's trip to Australia, where he finally locates Harriet Vanger, as well as the character of Janne Dahlman (whose role as Wennerstrom's mole within Millennium is admittedly sidelined in the Swedish theatrical cut but reinstated for the extended TV version), while the role of Blomkvist's colleagues Christer Malm and Malin Erikson is reduced to that of non-speaking extras.

I think it's tempting to allow oneself to become tied up in knots trying to chart and critique every deviation from the novel, but of course a screenwriter's first duty is not to slavishly retain every minor plot element but rather to tell a compelling story within the constraints of a different medium. And in that regard, both Heisterberg/Arcel and Zaillian do a fine job. Both versions are, for the most part, recognisably Stieg Larsson's THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, and in each case the alterations and omissions, while often very different, are sensible. The Fincher version drags more in the first half than its Swedish counterpart, but once Salander and Blomkvist cross paths things heat up nicely, as indeed they did in the novel. On the other hand, Heisterberg/Arcel had the good sense to greatly simplify and compress events following Martin Vanger's death (in the novel, the action continues for a good 100 pages or so, despite the mystery having ostensibly been solved already), whereas Zaillian allows the film to continue to meander along for another half-hour or so, resulting in a flabby final act that becomes sidetracked by the specific details of Salander's embezzlement of Wennerstrom.

There is, however, one moment that I find unforgiveable: the moment when Salander asks Blomkvist for permission to kill Martin, which is so spectacularly out of character for both Salander and Blomkvist that it makes me wonder if Zaillian truly understood either of them. Salander would never ask Blomkvist for permission to do anything, and Blomkvist would never condone her doing it, let alone give her the go-ahead: both the book and the original film contain a lengthy discussion between the two characters after the fact in which they set out their radically different world views.

CONCLUSION

I suppose what it all comes down to is whether the fact that the remake is closer to the book in terms of certain details really matters. Does the fact that Mara looks more like Salander as described in the book actually matter in the face of Rapace's superior performance? Does having Blomkvist's daughter rather than Salander decipher the Bible references amount to a hill of beans? I'm inclined to think not. I've made it clear that I think the American version is, on the whole, the inferior film. However, the fact is that, even if the two had been neck in neck, that still wouldn't, in my mind, have been sufficient justification to make the same movie twice, let alone with so little time having passed between the two iterations. When it comes down to it, Fincher is far too good a director to be wasting his time treading ground that's already been covered. Here's hoping his next film (and it doesn't look like it will be THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, given the combination of the DRAGON TATTOO remake's failure to set the box office on fire* and his supposed "creative differences" with Columbia Pictures) will be more worthwhile.

* The film is currently being beaten at the box office by SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS, starring Noomi Rapace, and MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL, featuring Michael Nyqvist. There's irony for you.

Review: Deep Red (Blue Underground release)

3:04 PM / Reviews / 23 Comments

The film

1975. The giallo craze that consumed the early part of the decade has run out of steam, with Italian audiences turning to macho crime thrillers and sex comedies where once they flocked to lurid whodunits with names like A LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN (UNA LUCERTOLA CON LA PELLE DI DONNA, Fulci 1971) and WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? (COSA AVETE FATTO A SOLANGE?, Dallamano 1972). Dario Argento, after effectively launching the craze with his first film, THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (L'UCCELLO DALLE PIUME DI CRISTALLO, 1970), has bowed out of the race after completing his "animal trilogy" of gialli to make the ill-fated historical comedy THE FIVE DAYS OF MILAN (LE CINQUE GIORNATE, 1973). For many filmmakers, returning to the genre in which he made his name after so visibly falling short when trying his hand at something new would be something of a climbdown. Not so for Argento: with DEEP RED (PROFONDO ROSSO to use its original Italian title), he delivers the giallo to end all gialli and, at the time, his best film.

The plot is typical giallo fare: English pianist Marc Daly (David Hemmings), living in Italy, witnesses the bloody murder of his neighbour, psychic Helga Ullmann (Macha Méril). Earlier Helga, while giving a demonstration of her abilities at a parapsychology conference, had tuned into the thoughts of a killer in the audience, claiming to be able to identify them. Convinced that Helga was on to something and that something about the crime scene doesn't quite make sense, Marc teams up with a bolshie journalist, Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi), to track down Helga's killer before he himself meets a sticky end...

As you've probably already surmised, it's not really about the plot, although DEEP RED does have an unusually good one by giallo standards. It's largely a re-tread of that of THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, once again pitting a foreign artist adrift in Italy against a deranged serial killer and presenting him with an inexplicable puzzle relating to his witnessing of the initial murder, the significance of which he can't yet grasp. Marc Daly is cut from very much the same cloth as Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante) in the earlier film, although to his credit he is somewhat more aware of his own foibles and actually seems to emerge from his ordeal having learned something about himself. Rather than simply regurgitating the story wholesale, Argento and co-writer Bernardino Zapponi use the by now familiar giallo template as a loose springboard from which to launch a variety of audacious set-pieces, frequently revolving around (but not limited to) the gruesome extended murder sequences for which Argento had become known. The use of Helga's apparently genuine psychic abilities as a plot device, meanwhile, foreshadows Argento's full-on embracement of the supernatural with his next film, 1977's SUSPIRIA.

If Argento's third giallo, FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET (4 MOSCHE DI VELLUTO GRIGIO, 1971), showed him to be growing increasingly disinterested in narrative and increasingly dedicating himself to the visuals and other technical aspects, DEEP RED is the film with which he finally cuts loose and embraces style for style's sake. That's not to say that the script isn't strong - it is, and I suspect we primarily have Zapponi to thank for that - but Argento allows the plot to meander, frequently forsaking it to indulge in, say, a debate about the different positions men and women occupy in society (culminating in an arm-wrestling contest to see which is the weaker sex) or an extended exploration of a crumbling old mansion. It's as if Marc, the archetypal foreigner abroad, has stumbled into some sort of strange otherworld where the streets are utterly deserted at night, the bar from Hopper's "Nighthawks" painting is mysteriously transposed on to the Piazza Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale as if torn from the canvas, landmarks from Turin and Rome intermingle in a single unidentified city, and it somehow seems utterly logical to launch an investigation based on no more than the ramblings of a murdered psychic. Meanwhile, the Kafkaesque machinations of the police - more concerned with non-functioning drinks machines and organising "sit-ins" than solving the case - suggest that there's not much room in this world for logical deduction.

While Argento is unquestionably the real star of the show, cranking up the stylisation to the point of excess and revelling in all sorts of seemingly unmotivated camera angles, movements and cutaways, a lot of the credit for the film's success must go to David Hemmings and Daria Nicolodi, who turn in assured and amusing performances and seem to have genuine chemistry together. Their relationship (the precise details of which are never spelled out - do they or do they not have sex?) has been described as the sweetest Argento has ever portrayed, and must surely be partly attributed to Argento's relationship with Nicolodi at the time (it's quite amusing to watch the treatment of Nicolodi's characters becoming increasingly nastier with each film as their relationship deteriorated). There's a case to be made that Gianna, who beats Marc at arm-wrestling, saves him from a burning building and does the lion's share of the investigative legwork, is the film's true hero, and her presence marks a significant shift in Argento's attitude to his female characters. Whereas in the animal trilogy the only women Argento graced with more than the most cursory characterisation were his villainesses, the relationship between Marc and Gianna eventually evolves into a partnership of equals, with Gianna prefiguring the tough-yet-vulnerable female protagonists Argento would favour in much of his later work. (It's telling that, since DEEP RED, the bulk of Argento's protagonists have been female.)

While I personally consider SUSPIRIA to be Argento's crowning achievement, I can at the same time completely understand why so many hold this up as his masterpiece. It's unquestionably the greatest giallo ever made, a perfection of the formula by the man who effectively launched the craze. In many ways, it's a shame he couldn't have left it at this, as his more recent forays into giallo territory have tended to be limp and derivative - futile attempts to recapture former glory that fail to do anything to advance the genre. Still, allow DEEP RED to stand alone and its status as the king of gialli - and Argento's status of the king of giallo DIRECTORS - is clear for all to see. It's a stunning piece of work, the best of its kind and one of the best movies ever made, regardless of genre. 10/10

Image quality

Blue Underground's BD version of DEEP RED arrives a few months after the UK release by Arrow Video. Reviewing that release back in January, I was disappointed by the image quality, chiefly on the grounds of what looked like poor quality scaling from a sub-1080p source and the stucco, noise-like quality of the grain. I expressed slight surprise at this at the time, given that my impression, from having previously viewed the 2005 WMV-HD DVD release from Italian label Medusa, was that the master, which the two releases shared, was a reasonably good one. Much to my surprise, there were instances in which, despite its woeful bit rate, the grain was actually rendered better on the WMV-HD version than on the Arrow BD. As far as this new edition goes, they do say that third time's a charm...

First things first, let's be abundantly clear about one thing: despite claims to the contrary, the BU release is NOT a brand new scan of the film. It's the exact same master that was created in 2004 (as far as can be ascertained under cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller's supervision) and used for both the 2005 Medusa WMV-HD and the 2011 Arrow BD. So, going ahead, we need to bear in mind that we're talking about a master that's somewhere in the region of seven years old - not something that would normally fill me with confidence. With that being said, I'm more than happy to concede that the results here are good - in places strikingly good. The scaling artefacts that plagued the Arrow release are gone, and more importantly the grain is rendered throughout with far more precision. In terms of detail and quality of encoding, it's every bit the equal of Blue Underground's earlier BD of THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, with the tight close-ups Argento has such a penchant for showing ample fine detail. Wider shots can tend to look a little soft, but I'm confident that this is simply down to how the film was shot. That said, the source material seems to have been in slightly worse shape to that of BIRD, with noticeable positive (black) and negative (white) print damage throughout (once again casting doubt on the claim on the back cover that the film has been "newly transferred... from its original camera negative) and, during the final ten minutes or so, some intermittent discolouration, with the tint fluctuating between the slightly yellowish look of the bulk of the film and a more sickly green hue. I must confess to not having noticed this when I watched the Arrow version (presumably I was distracted by its other problems), but looking at it again it's definitely there.

I've weighed in in the past on the grain that can be seen in many of the HD transfers of Italian films of this vintage, and its authenticity or lack thereof. Once again, I have to confess to being slightly suspicious that something odd is going on. The grain does at times have a decidedly noise-like quality, particularly noticeable on white or otherwise very bright areas of the screen. On the other hand, the grain in darker areas largely looks very natural, particularly compared to its messy rendering on the Arrow BD. Back when I wrote my review of that release, I attributed most of its problems to compression. Now, however, I feel more inclined to suspect that the blame may lie with a clumsy attempt to degrain the film. It would certainly fit with their modus operandi: INFERNO and PHENOMENA were both heavily degrained, so the idea that they would choose to leave the significantly grainier DEEP RED alone seems a little implausible. Whatever the reason though, it's clear that Blue Underground's handling of the master is vastly superior to Arrow's, giving this new release a clear win. 8/10

Deep Red (Blue Underground release)
studio: Blue Underground; disc country: USA; region code: ABC;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 2.35:1

A quick note on the two versions

Like the Arrow release, Blue Underground's version includes two cuts of the film: the full-length 126-minute Italian "director's cut" and a shorter 105-minute English export version. Both are included on the same disc but are separate files rather than being seamlessly branched. Surprisingly, the improved quality of this release allows us to see that the primary source for the HD master appears to have been a print of the export version. When scenes not included in that version arrive, the master switches to another print. There is no obvious difference in quality between the two sources, but shifts from one print to the other that occur mid-scene are noticeable: in a couple of instances, the image softens briefly during the switch, whereas a couple of frames end up being dropped at the beginning of the shot where Marc and Gianna return to Gianna's car after Helga's funeral. This probably also explains why Blue Underground have managed to get their hands on high definition English-language opening and closing credits (Arrow had to make do with standard definition ones). And, in case anyone was wondering, the image of Marc staring into the pool of blood behind the closing credits is not the awkward freeze-frame from the old Anchor Bay DVD (re-released by Blue Underground a few years back).

Audio quality

We get a myriad of sound options which vary depending on which cut of the film you're watching. The full-length Italian version offers up Italian DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1, Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround EX and Dolby Digital 2.0 mono, as well as a hybrid Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround EX track which plays most of the film in English but reverts to Italian with English subtitles for scenes where no English audio exists. The English export cut, meanwhile, features English DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1, English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround EX and English Dolby Digital 2.0 mono. English subtitles are provided for the Italian cut, and English SDH, Spanish and French subtitles for the English cut.

One disappointment for me is that the hybrid track is only available as a 5.1 remix, meaning that there's no way to watch the full-length version of the film in English mono. That said, it's a fairly subtle remix, with little in the way of noticeable rear channel effects and no out of place sound effects. Too bad it's lossy. Otherwise, it's all good, with the Italian DTS-HD MA track sounding by far the most impressive, particularly in terms of Goblin's driving score. Despite its jarring nature, I prefer to watch the film in its hybrid form so I can at least hear David Hemmings' own speaking voice MOST of the time. If you're less bothered about losing Hemmings' voice, though, or you dislike the film constantly shifting between English and Italian, you can't go wrong with either the 7.1 Italian remix or its mono counterpart. And, if you're one of those viewers who prefers the brisker (but considerably less thematically rich) export cut, the same choices apply, except in English.

By the way, I know that some people criticised the Arrow release on account of its subtitles seeming to run ahead of the video by several frames. While I can't claim that this troubled me unduly, there's no doubt that the subtitles on the Blue Underground disc are noticeably better timed. 8/10

Extras

No question about it, this release looks pretty limp in the extras department when placed alongside the Arrow release. That version had a commentary and new interviews with Argento, Nicolodi and Claudio Simonetti. This one has... a couple of grubby-looking trailers, a reheated 11-minute interview with Argento, Zapponi and Goblin from the old Anchor Bay DVD, and a couple of music videos, one of which (and the disc's sole new feature) is a "live studio" performance of the title theme, recorded in 2010. It's a very underwhelming line-up, particularly given the film's importance, and it's hard not to feel disappointed that Blue Underground didn't make the effort to either record some new material of their own or at least licence some of Arrow's more impressive line-up (as they did for their release of Fulci's CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD). 3/10

Overall

Lest anyone be in any doubt, this release of DEEP RED is by far the best the film has ever looked on home video and, despite the paltry extras, is undoubtedly the version to own. While I suspect that the age of the master and the technical limitations that were in place when it was created have resulted in the image quality not reaching the heights that would have been possible with a new scan, it's certainly no slouch, and viewers can now confidently throw away their DVD copies, safe in the knowledge that they have been well and truly superseded. 8/10

I Spit on Your Remake

12:38 AM / Reviews / 7 Comments

Note: in the interests of coherence, this review refers to the original 1978 film by its original title, DAY OF THE WOMAN, and the 2010 remake as I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (the title by which its predecessor is also best known).

No two ways about it, Meir Zarchi's DAY OF THE WOMAN is as far from a perfect film as you can get. It's grubby, ugly, clunky and in places downright silly, and everything about it shows a lack of experience on both sides of the camera. There's also a certain sense of honesty to it, though - an emotional rawness that shines through the clunky dialogue, dodgy acting and general lack of spit and polish. So while I would in no way describe it as the best exploitation movie ever made (or even the best rape revenge movie), everyone with at least a passing interest in the seedier side of cinema owes it to themselves to see it.

Enter the remake, which in the grand tradition of modern re-imaginings of classic (or at least reasonably notorious) horror movies of the 70s and 80s spruces things up with a slicker script, more polished visuals and a fresh-faced, good-looking leading lady who wasn't even born when the original was released. The leading lady in this case is Sarah Butler, who prior to I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE mostly appeared in television guest roles. She's arguably the best thing about the remake in the same way that her predecessor, Camille Keaton, was the best thing about the original. She doesn't go anything like as far as Keaton in terms of on-screen nudity or the sheer level of violence to which her character is subjected, but she plays the part with conviction and, for a mainstream actress, seems fairly gung-ho about it all (certainly more than Sara Paxton in the recent remake of THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, for instance).

Beyond Butler's surprising ballsiness, it's pretty much as you would expect. The same basic plot is followed - young aspiring author Jennifer Hills ventures out into the country to write her novel, is set upon and raped by a band of local nogoodniks, survives against the odds and knocks them off one by one - but with the odd tweak here and there to keep us guessing. There are five rapists this time rather than the usual four, there's more build-up to the actual sexual assault Jennifer endures (the initial abuse is more psychological this time round), and her ultimate revenge is considerably more elaborate... and far-fetched too, which is quite an achievement considering that Keaton's Jennifer convinced one of her attackers that she actually enjoyed being raped by him, persuaded him to join her in the bathtub, hacked off his genitals and left him groaning "That's so good it hurts!" The deaths are also thematically appropriate to how each rapist treated Jennifer, and the various protracted deaths are accompanied by witty quips from Ms. Hills, which are delivered with the appropriate degree of venom but feel overly cute (the original's straightforward "Suck it, bitch!" they ain't). The grimy, quasi-documentary look of the original is replaced by pristine digital photography with a bleached-out colour palette, fast cutting and even the odd hint of CGI. It does the job, but it looks like every other film of its kind.

It's also, when all said and done, relatively toothless. The psychological torture Jennifer undergoes in the early scenes is pretty nasty stuff, but the actual rapes themselves are fairly tastefully done, if indeed any rape scene can be done tastefully. Whereas the rapes in the original tended to take place in wide shots with the camera unblinkingly capturing the whole thing, the equivalent scenes in the remake consists of lots of tight close-ups of eyes and faces, and at one point the director, Steven Monroe, even fades to black, sparing us the worst of the ordeal - something Zarchi would never have done. While there's something to be said for leaving things to the audience's imagination, the unflinching nature of the original's depiction of Jennifer's ordeal somehow felt more honest. Here, it's clear that it's all just movie magic, with the technique overshadowing the horror of what's actually happening. Even the nudity is carefully choreographed. A backside here, a nipple flash there - Butler, despite being game for a lot more than your average American actress, doesn't have Keaton's lack of self-consciousness in front of the camera. Again, it all just adds to the sense of artificiality.

Where the film really fumbles, and the director makes some questionable choices, is with regard to the aftermath of the assault. In the original, we rejoined Jennifer fairly quickly and got to witness her pulling herself together - including, crucially, piecing together the pages of her novel that her attackers ripped up. Although this was an admittedly cheesy metaphor, it summed up Zarchi's good intentions, and made it clear that what we were watching was very much a story told from the victim's point of view. The remake goes down the curious route of focusing on the rapists during its second half, keeping Jennifer as a largely off-screen presence. Because we don't get to witness Jennifer recovering physically and coming to terms with what has happened her, the emotional core feels like it has been ripped out. It also gives the impression that the director is more interested in the villains than his supposed heroine. Again, there's a place for this sort of approach, but this film is not trying to provide a reasoned insight into the twisted mind of a rapist - it's a gory revenge fantasy in which a rape victim takes matters into her own hands.

And ultimately, that's what I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE is. In spite of its flaws, DAY OF THE WOMAN ticked all the boxes required to function as a shlocky exploitation flick while at the same time managing to be something more than that. The remake is both too tame to function as pure grindhouse sleaze and too trashy to be taken particularly seriously. It's perhaps worth a look if for no other reason than to see how they actually managed to turn one of the most infamous "video nasties" of all time into a polished piece of workmanship, but the original, warts and all, is the one that will last. 5/10

And so the winner, as correctly predicted by Trond, is Jennifer Hills.

Book review: Faithful Place

10:28 AM / Reviews / No Comments

FAITHFUL PLACE by Tana French; Hachette Ireland; 2010; 448 pages

Tana French is an author with an amazing ability to choose exactly the right words to conjure up a particular mood. Although I found certain plot developments a little hard to swallow, I was majorly impressed by her second novel, THE LIKENESS, and immediately sought out its predecessor, IN THE WOODS, which turned out to be even better.

She also manages to keep her material fresh by, although setting each in the same fictionalised representation of Dublin, focusing on a different protagonist in each book. In THE LIKENESS, IN THE WOODS' protagonist, Rob Ryan, stepped aside in order for his detective partner Cassie Maddox to assume centre stage; in FAITHFUL PLACE, the focus shifts to Cassie's former boss, undercover detective Frank Mackey, a man with a deeply troubled past.

Twenty years ago, he and his girlfriend Rosie Daly planned to run away from Faithful Place, the underprivileged Dublin street where they were born and grew up, and start a new life in England. Rosie never showed up to their arranged meeting place and, thinking he had been jilted, left on his own and had no contact with his neighbours or his belligerent family... until he gets a phone call, telling him that Rosie's suitcase has been unearthed in a derelict house in Faithful Place. The discovery of the suitcase leads to the discovery of a young woman's body, and Frank reluctantly returns to the place in which he grew up to face his family, his past, and the truth about what happened to Rosie...

In a recent interview, French spoke about her desire for crime fiction to be taken seriously as literature rather than a red-headed stepchild, and this is very much apparent in her writing. FAITHFUL PLACE, like its two predecessors, tackles complicated but universal themes, in this case notions of roots, family and the extent to which these govern who we are. The central mystery (who killed Rosie Daly and why?) is, perhaps understandably, marketed as the focus of the novel, but in reality French's interests seem to lie primarily in Frank and his relationships with his family, in particular his parents, his moody older brother Shay, and his young daughter Holly.

The presence of the latter is somewhat problematic, for Frank's interactions with Holly prove to be a little too sickly-sweet. Writing young children is tricky: if you don't get the register just right, they won't be remotely believable. Make them too mature and they'll sound like worldly-wise mini-adults; don't make them mature enough and it'll seem as if they have learning difficulties. French's characterisation of Holly seems to veer between the two: at times, she seems unnaturally perceptive, while on other occasions she comes across as improbably dim.

The biggest flaw, however, comes in the form of the murder-mystery element. While it's clear that writing a paint-by-numbers whodunit is the last thing on French's mind, that doesn't excuse the glaring obviousness of the killer's identity (and is something that a writer like Denise Mina, who skilfully juggles both the thriller element and her chosen theme, would never allow). There are only ever two (or at most three) plausible suspects, and Frank latches on to the perpetrator when there's still a good 40% of the novel to go. Right until the end, I was expecting (and hoping for) a last-minute twist in which it was revealed that the actual killer was someone completely unexpected, but it didn't happen. With a whodunit, I like to either have the rugged pulled out from under my feet completely or at least work out the solution at roughly the same time as the protagonist. Neither happens here, and it means that the novel ultimately fails as a mystery, which is rather problematic as that's at least partly how it's marketed.

As for Frank himself, he lacks Cassie Maddox's quirky individuality, but he's considerably less self-pitying than Rob Ryan. He also has a dry sense of humour, which is always a good thing. The lack of any characters from the first two novels (apart from Frank and a pathologist who has appeared in all three) leads to FAITHFUL PLACE feeling rather disconnected from its predecessors (Frank was very much a tertiary character in THE LIKENESS, whereas Cassie was IN THE WOODS' most significant character after Rob), but that's not necessarily a criticism - more an observation. As with Cassie in THE LIKENESS, French uses Frank's promotion to centre stage to give him more depth: he was very much a cipher in the previous novel, a colourful character whose primary purpose was to move the plot forward.

And of course French writes beautifully. Her skill with prose is utterly enviable, and her grasp of the written word does succeed in papering over some of the elements that feel a bit thin - such as the aforementioned whodunit aspect. FAITHFUL PLACE may not be up to the standard of the author's previous two novels, and when all said and done it lacks their sense of quirky originality, but I still highly recommend it, and I now find myself eagerly anticipating her next novel... and hoping I won't have too long to wait.

Book review: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

2:46 PM / Reviews / 1 Comment

Two things are clear about the final published instalment in Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST. First: that while the first part, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, functioned adequately as a standalone novel, HORNETS' NEST and its predecessor, THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, must be taken as an interwoven pair. Second: that, had he not died so prematurely, Larsson would undoubtedly have continued the series.

With Larsson deceased and the legal rights to the series (seemingly including a partial draft of the fourth novel, currently in the hands of his long-term partner, who was shut out of the publishing deal by Larsson's brother and father when they inherited his estate) a contentious mess, it seems pointless to speculate about there being any future instalments any time soon, meaning that a series that was never intended to be a trilogy must now be taken as such. This is a frustrating situation, because it means that a novel that in many ways feels like a mere stepping stone on a much larger journey now has to serve as the concluding instalment, which it admittedly does to some extent in terms of the Lisbeth Salander storyline. At the same time, though, a number of loose ends remain, perhaps most notably a lengthy subplot involving Blomkvist's colleague and on-off lover Erika Berger taking a job with a rival publication and being subjected to a campaign of terror perpetrated by a sadistic stalker. This storyline, which runs for a good two-thirds of the book before being resolved, has no real bearing on the main thread (the Salander/Zalachenko business) and I wouldn't be surprised if the makers of the film adaptation excised it completely (I haven't seen the film yet, so I'm only guessing). In the context of a much longer series of books, however, I'm sure it was intended to serve as the setup for some broader arc that will now never be revealed.

The plot picks up from where THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE ended, so if you don't want to know how that book turned out, stop reading NOW.

* SPOILERS FOR THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE *

Lisbeth Salander and her estranged father, Soviet defector Alexander Zalachenko, are rushed to hospital in the aftermath of the carnage that ensued at Gosseberga, Zalachenko grievously wounded by Salander and Salander with a bullet fired by Zalachenko embedded in her skull. The charges against Salander are numerous and, assuming she survives the injury that by rights should have killed her immediately, she is at the very least looking at a lengthy stretch behind bars for attempted murder. That Salander went to Gosseberga to kill her father is in little doubt as far as the reader is concerned. However, the events of the previous two novels have repeatedly demonstrated that Salander, from a very young age, has been a victim of judicial injustice, part of a concerted cover-up by a rogue off-shoot of the security service who deemed protecting their asset, Zalachenko, more important than Salander's well-being (it's a long story). The dice are loaded, and they don't favour Salander. If she's to get out of this, she and her ragtag allies are going to have to be every bit as unscrupulous as the men who want to lock her away for good.

This is the perfect setup for a tense and gripping story. Unfortunately, Larsson makes the same mistake he made in THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, which is that he never gives us any real reason to fear for Salander. In the previous novel, her seemingly superhuman ability to avoid detection ensured that we never really believed the police would catch her. Here, Salander is so calm and collected and has so many aces up her sleeve that the same applies. The "one woman against the state" theme is also undercut by the sheer number of people she has fighting her corner. For someone who has repeatedly been set up as an outsider who has been betrayed at every turn, it's rather amazing how many people will risk their careers, reputations and in some cases lives for her. Once this becomes clear, we essentially spend 500-odd pages waiting for the inevitable to happen, with Larsson nailing his political colours to the mast and leaving the reader in no doubt as to the point he is trying to make:

"...When it comes down to it, this story is not primarily about spies and secret government agencies; it's about violence against women, and the men who enable it."

That's not a quotation from an introduction or review of the book, by the way. It's an actually line of dialogue spoken by one character to another. Subtlety is to Larsson what fairness and balance are to Fox News. And yet...

...and yet I couldn't put the book down. THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST is a frustrating read, more satisfying for its individual components than when taken as a whole. As with the previous novels, it's easy to pick holes in the storytelling, to make fun of the wooden dialogue and soapbox-style posturing, to point to all the sections that could have been deleted without anyone missing them in order to get the thing down to a more manageable length. But when you're staying up till four in the morning, turning each page with unabashed impatience and salivating for the next plot turn (even though you can guess well in advance what it will be), who the hell cares? The Millennium trilogy is quite rightly described as a literary phenomenon, and there can be nothing more phenomenal about it than the fact that so many millions of people around the world have embraced these three rambling, quirky and at times downright clumsy Swedish doorstops.

And yes, I was ultimately satisfied. The Salander storyline reaches its conclusion and a line can finally be drawn under nearly three decades of uncertainty and injustice. Ancillary though it is, the Berger subplot is also interesting in its own right and feels as if it came from a very real place (because of Larsson's tireless investigation of extreme right-wing groups, he himself had good reason to fear for his life, and it's not hard to see parallels between Berger's situation and his own). There's a certain dissonance to the novel as a whole, and if you go into it expecting it to neatly wrap up every thread introduced in the two previous novels, you are likely to be sorely disappointed. However, if you approach it with an awareness of its faults and an appreciation for what Larsson was trying to do, however clumsily, I suspect that, like me, you'll be deeply sorry to bid farewell to Lisbeth Salander, the world's first Asperger-suffering, photographic memory-imbued, bisexual goth computer hacker and crusader for justice.

Book review: The Girl Who Played with Fire

11:54 AM / Reviews / 1 Comment

Yes, it's better than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. How much better you find it to be will depend on your ability to once again slog through a considerable quantity of Stieg Larsson's observations about trivia that have nothing to do with the plot, such as (anti-)heroine Lisbeth Salander's newfound fascination with mathematics, in particular trying to figure out Fermat's Last Theorem.

Some things never change.

The novel, the second instalment in Larsson's posthumously published Millennium trilogy, opens with Salander holidaying in the Caribbean, where she becomes caught up in the destruction caused by Hurricane Matilda and simultaneously manages to prevent an absurdly convoluted murder attempt. It's all quite thrilling, but this 60-page episode has no bearing on the actual narrative of the book. None whatsoever. You could literally (as the makers of the 2009 film version did) cut it out entirely and no-one would be any the wiser.

When it finally gets going, though, The Girl Who Played with Fire turns out to be considerably more engaging than its predecessor. There are two reasons for this: the timeline and the subject matter. Whereas Salander and her unlikely accomplice, Mikael Blomkvist, spent the bulk of the first novel investigating a 40-year-old crime that may or may not have actually occurred, The Girl Who Played with Fire, while still drawing on the past, unravels primarily in the present, with Salander framed (or was she?) for a triple murder and on the run from both the authorities, convinced they are looking for a deranged psychopath, and a shadowy group of sinister individuals who have reasons of their own for wanting her to disappear off the face of the earth.

Larsson uses this tale to once again lay into the pillars of society, this time indicting not only investigative journalism but also the police, the sex trade and the health care service, with particular attention paid to the treatment of those deemed mentally ill. We see how Salander's murky past comes back to haunt her as every scrap of information about her his dug up and used to justify the vilification of her as the most depraved maniac Sweden has ever seen.

The frenzy only intensifies when Salander's on-off girlfriend, Miriam Wu, enters the picture, as Larsson really turns up the heat and lays into his targets with abandon: now Salander is painted by the press as the stereotypical mad lesbian killer. She's not merely crazy and violent, damn it: she has sex with women! She's a threat to the very moral foundation of society! A theme running throughout the novel is the notion that even a society as supposedly liberal and open-minded as Sweden will invariably fall back on old prejudices when the status quo is threatened.

What's particularly interesting about all of this is Salander's reaction. She isn't remotely surprised; she barely even gets angry, except when Miriam is harassed by the paparazzi. It's as if she's so used to society ill-treating her that she simply accepts being framed for a triple murder as something that was bound to happen sooner or later.

Unfortunately, we never really fear for her. The problem is that Larsson sets her up as an almost superhuman entity. He presents her as a master of disguise, capable of going undetected despite there being a nationwide manhunt for her and able to hack into any computer system. He also, in the 200 or so pages before the story proper gets going, sets up a situation in which she is allowed to live very comfortably and in perfect anonymity, almost as if she was planning for the whole thing. On some level, I suspect he did this to plant a seed of doubt in the reader's mind, suggesting that Salander could just possibly have carried out the murders and set the whole thing up months in advance, but it never really convinces. It removes a lot of the tension, turning the hunt for her into little more than an inconvenience. It's telling that one of the few genuinely tense moments in the book (and it is truly tense) is when Miriam is kidnapped. Unlike Salander, Miriam is not superhuman and we do genuinely fear for her safety.

Salander also disappears from the narrative for the majority of the second act, which presents problems of its own. While I'm increasingly coming to agree with Joan Smith's assertion that Salander is "not so much a character as a revenge fantasy come to life", she is by a considerable margin the most interesting figure in the trilogy, and the narrative drive suffers when she isn't there. We never really doubt her innocence (well, as innocent as Salander can be - it is made clear on numerous occasions that she would kill if she felt she had good reason to do so), but the characters who end up carrying the can throughout the novel's middle stretch are a rather uninteresting lot. The man leading the hunt for Salander, Inspector Bublanski, is a bland but ultimately well-meaning plod, while his underlings run the gamut from capable career woman (aren't they all, in Larsson's writing?) Modig to one-dimensional homophobe Faste. And of course Blomkvist is Blomkvist. He's still shagging his way through the entire female population of Sweden (this time he adds Harriet Vanger to his impressive roster) and he still seems to serve as a sort of wish fulfilment fantasy for Larsson. Most damagingly, Blomkvist and Salander never actually appear "on screen" together until the very end, robbing us of the unique partnership that was Dragon Tattoo's most interesting aspect.

And yet it's still a great read. For all its strodgy prose and the nagging sensation that what you're is reading is a first draft in desperate need of trimming, it is - like its predecessor - a brilliant page-turner. It's impossible not to barrel through it, eagerly anticipating what will happen next, and the final page concludes on such an open-ended note that the natural course of action will be to plunge straight into the third and final part of the trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

PS. Towards the end of the novel, there is a scene in which Blomkvist breaks into Salander's apartment and successfully guesses her security code: "WASP". Those who read the first book will understand the significance of this word. The notion that someone so security-conscious would go with such an obvious password and then be surprised when someone who knows her well guesses it is a little too much to swallow. In the real world, the only people who use "meaningful" passwords are the complete amateurs who think they're being really clever by choosing the name of their dog or favourite sports team. I mention this because, in a novel which includes both a man who conspires to kill his wife and collect the insurance by engineering that she be swept away by a hurricane, and a giant who is impervious to pain, it was for me the single least plausible moment.

BD review: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

11:55 PM / Reviews / No Comments

I have nothing but admiration for Pixar's Wall-E and its push for realism, and I'll even grudgingly commend the heavily flawed 9 for its attempt to tell a darker, more mature story than we're used to with North American animation, but it always strikes me as something of a missed opportunity that so few animated movies, CG or traditional, fail to take advantage of the innate opportunities afforded by their medium - namely the opportunity to indulge in outrageous, broad acts of comedy that would be impossible in the real world. To that end, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs may very well bear the distinction of being the first CG animated feature to not be ashamed of being a cartoon.

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Book review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2:59 PM / Reviews / 1 Comment

In its original Swedish, the title of the first part of Stieg Larsson's posthumously-published Millennium trilogy is Män Som Hatar Kvinnor, a literal translation of which is "Men Who Hate Women". It's unclear precisely why the English translation was titled The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, although perhaps the publishers believed the original title to be too off-putting in its pointed aggressiveness.

In any event, misogyny is a theme that weaves its way throughout this lengthy but densely plotted crime thriller, along with broader motifs of corruption and the abuse of power. This first instalment introduces us to Mikael Blomkvist, journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium and an outspoken critic of mainstream investigative journalism. As the story begins, he has just been convicted of libel, making accusations about a rival publisher but being unable to back them up. With his reputation in tatters, Blomkvist is contacted by Henrik Vanger, head of the Vanger Corporation, with an employment offer for what initially appears to be a futile endeavour: to dig into the dynasty's mysterious past and uncover the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Vanger's granddaughter Harriet forty years ago.

So far, so Agatha Christie. It's the conventional "locked room" scenario, with the suspects - all members of the Vanger family - marooned on an island at the time of Harriet's disappearance. Larsson is (was) clearly a fan of the novels of Christie, Conan Doyle et al, and these, in addition to the works of everyone from Astrid Lindgren to Val McDermid to Enid Blyton, are referenced copiously throughout the novel. At times it gets a little too arch: Blomkvist is so acutely aware that his situation parallels that of many a crime thriller that Larsson comes dangerously close to breaking the fourth wall (shades of Scream and "It's as if we're in a horror movie"). Still, it's an intricately constructed mystery and one that does reach a genuinely satisfying and (to me at least) unexpected conclusion...

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BD review: The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)

4:00 PM / Reviews / 1 Comment

My first review in aaaages...

For better or for worse, the new version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three has to stand on its own feet, if for no other reason than that the bulk of its target audience will have never even heard of the 1974 original, much less actually seen it. As such, when I sat down to write this review, I told myself I wouldn't simply compare one version against the other. In the end, however, I can see that this is precisely what I have done. In a way, it was unavoidable. For every misstep in the 2009 version, there is a corresponding point in the 1974 version where that mistake is avoided, and while the remake does expand on certain elements that were underdeveloped in the original, it's hard not to see them as ultimately superficial. Taken on its own terms, The Taking of Pelham 123 is a reasonably competent thriller, but if you want some meat with your gravy, you would be advised to check out either the 70s original or the very similar Inside Man.

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Book review: The Likeness

10:30 AM / Reviews / 1 Comment

The Likeness by Tana French; Hodder, 2008; 698 pages

About ten pages into The Likeness, I realised it was actually a sequel of sorts to a book I hadn't read, In the Woods. I have an unfortunate tendency to start at the wrong end of a series and work my way backwards, and this tradition shows no sign of abating. In any event, The Likeness focuses on one of In the Woods' secondary characters - Cassie Maddox, a Dublin detective who transferred out of the Murder Squad after suffering a breakdown at the end of the previous novel and now works in Domestic Violence. Prior to joining the Murder Squad, we learn that she also enjoyed a brief stint working undercover, where she and her boss at the time, Frank Mackey, devised an identity, Lexie Madison, which she used while investigating a drug ring. Flash forward to the present day, and she receives a call from Frank, summoning her to a secluded cottage in the countryside and the scene of a fatal stabbing. The victim is a young woman who not only bears such a striking resemblance to Cassie that they could be twins but is also carrying ID which identifies her as Lexie Madison.

Who killed "Lexie"? Why does she bear such a resemblance to Cassie? And how did she come to assume the identity of a woman who never existed? In attempting to answer these questions, Frank hits upon a daring and reckless idea: pretend that Lexie never died but was merely seriously wounded, and have Cassie once again assume Lexie's identity. It seems to work, and once again operating undercover, Cassie immerses herself in Lexie's life - that of a post-graduate student living in a crumbling, ancient mansion with four other students who can only be described as very insular and very weird indeed. Is one of them the killer? Or does it have something to do with the inhabitants of the nearby village, who for some reason are less than hospitable towards the five students?

At nearly 700 pages, The Likeness is a long haul and one that will, I suspect, frustrate a lot of readers by virtue of the fact that it is not the sort of story it initially appears to be and doesn't answer all of the questions it seems to pose. It's impossible, when summarising the basic plot, to make the novel sound like anything other than a crime thriller in the "whodunit" tradition, but in reality apprehending Lexie's killer takes a back seat for a considerable portion of the narrative. It's really more of a character study, not just of Cassie but also Lexie and her four housemates, who to the outside world present an insular, unified front but who, we quickly learn, are slowly beginning to crack and fragment. Who the girl calling herself Lexie was ultimately turns out to be less important than you might think, and her similarity to Cassie - so striking that she is able to fit into the dead girl's life without her friends noticing a difference - is ultimately never explained. At one point Cassie, who narrates the novel in the first person, mentions the old wives' tale that everyone has a mirror image somewhere on Earth, and I get the impression that the author considers this sufficient.

It ultimately doesn't harm the narrative, and indeed on some level adds to the eeriness that permeates throughout. The Likeness is very much a mood piece, playing up the secluded location in which the bulk of the novel takes place, eschewing set-pieces and shocking revelations in favour of a gradual build-up of atmosphere. The old house and its inhabitants come alive on the page, and the dead Lexie, who in a sense never actually existed - at least not in the sense that her housemates believed she did - becomes a continual presence, lingering in the shadows as a constant reminder of the undercurrent of violence that poisons the students' idyllic lifestyle. The book poses some interesting questions about identity: Cassie starts out thinking of Lexie as "hers" and there is an undercurrent of annoyance to the notion that someone "stole" the identity she created, but as the narrative progresses the similarities between herself and this mysterious woman gradually emerge. The concept of reality is also called into question on numerous occasions: we start off thinking of Lexie as some sort of impostor, but we come to see that the life and the identity she built for herself at the house was every bit as "real" as any she might have had in the past (and it becomes clear that, throughout her life, she was a great number of different people), and that the friendship between her and her housemates was nothing if not genuine. (By that same token, the bond Cassie forms with them is every bit as real.)

It's all rather philosophical and I suspect readers looking for something exciting and fast-paced will give up fairly quickly. Myself, I found the first hundred or so pages a bit of a slog but, as I persevered, I found myself being gradually sucked into the compelling and believable world French had created. The Likeness may not be for everyone, but it's a nicely realised mood piece and one that does well to avoid the usual generic trappings of the murder mystery format.

BD review: Braveheart

3:57 PM / Reviews / 8 Comments

It's difficult to argue against Braveheart being one of the finest packages assembled on Blu-ray this year. With a transfer that is extremely close to perfection, a rollicking good audio mix and a nice (if slightly incomplete) array of bonus features, this is a fine example of how good a catalogue release can be if those involved go the extra mile instead of taking cheap shortcuts. While, in my review of the phenomenally disappointing Blu-ray release of Gladiator (released by the same studio on the same day, no less), I encouraged those who already owned the DVD to hang on to their copies and forego the BD, my advice for Braveheart is the exact opposite: chuck your DVDs in the bin immediately and pick up this excellent BD release. Highly recommended.

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BD review: Gladiator

4:24 PM / Reviews / No Comments

The Blu-ray format, to me, is supposed to be about experiencing films in a state that is as close to perfection as is realistically possible. Perfection is, of course, an unattainable ideal, but the fact remains that, with regard to its picture quality, Gladiator doesn't even come close. We know it can look better: the extended scenes confirm this, so it's not as if the unattainable is being demanded. Yes, if I detach myself and break the set down to its individual elements, I can find much to praise in the audio mix and the quality of the bonus features, but when I watch a film I want to get sucked into it, enjoying it as a whole and forgetting that I'm watching a digital reproduction on an optical disc rather than the film itself. With Paramount's release of Gladiator, that simply is not possible. This disc is a colossal mistake on the studio's part and one that damages the reputations of both their own supposedly prestigious Sapphire Series label and the format as a whole.

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BD review: Hannibal

11:56 PM / Reviews / 4 Comments

This UK edition of Hannibal is being released by Universal next week. (Universal supplied me with a review copy, which I've had to return.) Alas, those who already own the earlier German release by UFA will have no reason to replace their copies with the UK edition, which fails to improve on its disappointing image quality. (The same master has been used and the results are virtually identical.) My only hope now (and a slim hope, at that) is that MGM's US release, due out in September, will deliver the goods.

Anyway, at least I was motivated to pen a new review for this unjustly maligned masterpiece...

Whenever I tell people I prefer Hannibal to The Silence of the Lambs, they tend to assume I'm either mad or joking. Either way, they never look at me quite the same way again. Mad though I may be, I'm certainly not joking, and I suspect my preference for this Grand Guignol 2001 follow-up lies in my own individual tastes. Jonathan Demme's offering, fine film though it is, always struck me as being slightly ashamed of its identity as a horror film: whether consciously or otherwise, it seemed to go to great pains to disavow the horror trappings of the material and present itself as something more refined, something less distasteful... a psychological thriller, as it were. With Hannibal, on the other hand, Ridley Scott goes the whole hog, to use a rather fitting phrase, embracing what is ultimately a deliciously twisted fairytale, a Beauty and the Beast for the modern era.

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BD review: Labyrinth

3:30 PM / Reviews / No Comments

There's something impressively gung-ho about Labyrinth. It clearly knows it's nonsense, but doesn't seem to care and simply runs with it, resulting in a movie whose irresistible charm makes up for the fact that the story is held together with sticking plaster and the whole thing is really just an excuse to wow the audience with its impressive creature effects and a hefty dose of 80s camp. This was never a childhood favourite for me (I saw it once, when I was around eleven years old, and had more or less forgotten about it until I watched it again recently), so it doesn't hold quite the same degree of nostalgia for me that it will for many other people. Regardless of that, however, it's unquestionably lamentable that films of this sort simply don't get made any more. Perhaps we've become too hung up on things making sense, or perhaps we're so anxious not to frighten children that we forget that all the best fairytales had elements that were truly terrifying. Regardless, for all its daftness and artifice, Labyrinth seems a good deal more genuine than just about any other film aimed at children that I can recall seeing in recent years.

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Book review: Still Midnight

1:03 PM / Reviews / No Comments

In September 2006, Glasgow businessman Javed Mukhtar was abducted from his house in the middle of the night by armed men, who demanded a ransom of £2.5 million in return for his release. The kidnappers were ultimately apprehended shortly after retrieving a suitcase of £400,000 from an arranged pick-up point. In the process, Mukhtar was returned alive to his family, and his six kidnappers given various jail sentences ranging from three years to twelve.

I mention this because Still Midnight, the new novel by Denise Mina, widely considered to be Glasgow's finest crime writer, is not so much a loose re-imagining of the Mukhtar case as a carbon copy of it. No acknowledgement is made of the real case anywhere within the book's covers, and I don't doubt that enough was changed in order to avoid litigation (Javed Mukhtar has become Aamir Anwar, and so on), but the similarities are beyond striking, down to the time of year when the kidnap occurred, the ransom demanded, the amount ultimately handed over, and even the alleged involvement of one of the abducted man's sons, right down to his first name. This presents a problem, because those familiar with the real-life case (and it's not unreasonable to assume that a considerable portion of the book's target audience will be, given that it's arguably the most bizarre and widely-publicised kidnapping in Scottish history) will know only too well how the tale progresses and what its outcome is, making it all rather predictable.

Mina tells the tale from alternating perspectives, focusing primarily on the gang of kidnappers (six in real life, three in the novel) and a character wholly of her own creation, DS Alex Morrow. According to the back cover, Morrow "knows the difference between good and bad, [but is] not sure which she prefers any more." As far as I can gather, this is intended to be the first of several books focusing on the Morrow character, so it's with a heavy heart that I must confess to finding it extremely difficult to warm to her. She's distant, rude to everyone and so self-assured in her own moral superiority to those around her that she openly chastises her boss, on extremely slim evidence, for being racist. (He appoints a male colleague to head up the investigation; she assumes that this is because he thinks the kidnap victim's Muslim family won't cooperate with a woman.) A fairly obvious twist is introduced two-thirds of the way through the novel, attempting to explain the character's obnoxiousness, but it ultimately feels like a cheap ploy. Showing a character to be a thoroughly nasty individual and then retroactively introducing an excuse for his/her actions is something I've always considered to be lazy storytelling. Mina's first protagonist, Maureen O'Donnell of the Garnethill trilogy (still in my opinion her best work), had endured a horrible past, arguably considerably worse than the ordeal Alex Morrow is revealed to have gone through, but I never got the impression that Maureen's past was being used to excuse bad behaviour. On the contrary, one of the most enduring aspects of the Garnethill novels was Maureen's determination to overcome what had happened to her and emergence as both a fighter and a fundamentally moral individual. Maureen invoked both sympathy and admiration without ever asking for them. I found myself unable to feel either for Alex.

On some level, this may be intentional. We spend as much time with the kidnappers as with Alex, and one of them actually ends up being far more sympathetic than the supposed protagonist. (Alex Morrow may be unable to decide whether she prefers good or bad, but after finishing the book I was personally in little doubt.) Pat is a reluctant participant in the kidnapping, and from the moment he enters the Mukhtar household brandishing a gun, he regrets ever agreeing to go along with the plan. In the process he manages to accidentally shoot Aamir's sixteen-year-old daughter, Aleesha (an atheist and the black sheep of a deeply religious family), severely disfiguring her hand, and spends the remainder of the novel alternating between feeling deep remorse over what he did to fantasising about what it would be like to be involved with a girl like her. This, incidentally, leads to an utterly bizarre second encounter between the two characters and an ending that left me absolutely slack-jawed as to its implausibility.

Mina has always excelled at depicting the seedy criminal underbelly of Glasgow, and this one is no exception, vividly depicting both the gangsters and their surroundings with a minimum of words. Her prose is always efficient, which I wish could be said of more authors, and there can be little doubt that she is writing with authority (and if she isn't, she does a terrific job of covering it up). That said, in many ways it feels hastily assembled, which may an accurate representation of how it came to being. Originally, Mina's next book was slated to be the fourth instalment in her "Paddy Meehan" saga, but this failed to materialise in time for its scheduled 2008 release. This is pure speculation, but I wonder whether Still Midnight was perhaps thrown together by the author to honour her contract with the publisher. This would certainly explain the story having been literally "plucked from the headlines" with little in the way of re-imagining, and also why, despite the vividness of the prose, the story unfolds in a manner that feels oddly indifferent. With an unappealing protagonist and a lingering sense of predictability, Still Midnight is comfortably the weakest of the seven Denise Mina novels I've read as of writing.*

PS. This book could have benefited from some serious proof-reading. In addition to a multitude of punctuation errors (e.g. " ’ " used to open quotations and " ‘ " to close them), there are a handful of grammatical mistakes, including at least one sentence whose meaning is rendered utterly indecipherable, and the misspelling, on at least two occasions, of the Glasgow area of Pollokshields.

* I've yet to read the stand-alone Sanctum.

BD capsule review: Bound

4:33 PM / Reviews / No Comments

The first and by far the best film by Andy and Larry Wachowski, Bound offers up the potent combination of a steamy Sapphic romance and a sharp deconstruction of gangster movie conventions. When it was originally released in 1996, it was all but ignored, probably because it was perceived primarily as sleazy girl-on-girl exploitation (which is rather strange, as I would have assumed this would have been a lucrative endorsement for many). It's a shame, because the audiences that later flocked to The Matrix ultimately missed out on the Wachowskis' masterpiece and one of the best gangster movies of the 90s - a supremely entertaining and in many ways novel take on a well-worn genre. Luckily, the DVD and now Blu-ray markets have provided viewers with an opportunity to (re-)discover this underrated, under-seen gem.

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BD capsule review: The International

9:40 PM / Reviews / No Comments

If The International was Tom Tykwer's attempt to break into the American mainstream, then he succeeded admirably. The film is as slick and soulless as anything else being put out by the major studios at the moment, and absolutely none of the qualities that have marked out his previous films are to be found. A by-the-numbers conspiracy thriller, it pits Clive Owen's maverick Interpol investigator and Naomi Watts' workaholic assistant DA against a crowd of global arms smugglers cum assassins who receive their funding from a major international bank, enjoy meeting in coldly lit Mittel-European locales and speak in the sort of clipped, hushed tones that filmmakers seem to believe lend gravitas to any situation, however derivative.

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"Gotcha, ya yellow fuck!"

12:30 PM / Reviews / 10 Comments

Note: the following is a review of Dario Argento's latest film, Giallo, from its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. This review is also posted at DVD Times.

A sadistic killer is terrorising Turin. Posing as a taxi driver, he abducts, tortures and murders young women - tourists, loners, those who are unlikely to be missed. Fearing that her sister Celine (Elsa Pataky) has been kidnapped by the maniac, flight attendant Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner) enlists the aid of Enzo Avolfi (Adrien Brody), a quirky, haunted cop who has been working on the case alone. Avolfi, by his own admission, is the ideal person to crack the case, because he understands how the killer's mind works. Nick-named "Yellow" as a result of a rare skin condition, the killer has already proven that he means business; but will Linda and Avolfi succeed in tracking him down before he can do to Celine what he has already done to several other women?

If there is a single trait which characterises Dario Argento's 21st century output, it is its self-referentiality. Always a cineliterate filmmaker, in recent years his material has verged almost on self-parody, with 2001's Sleepless serving as a greatest-hits package of his career, Do You Like Hitchcock? paying homage to his Hitchcockian and German expressionist influences, and most recently the long overdue Mother of Tears concluding his "Three Mothers" trilogy in a manner that might charitably be described as a tongue in cheek romp through the iconography of the Italian horror movement.

Amid all this self-copying, a generation of filmmakers have grown up with Argento's films and been influenced by them, some more profoundly than others. Some, like Tim Burton, have assimilated the maestro's visual style into their own, to impressive effect. Others have been more flippant in their appropriation of Argentoisms, with Quentin Tarantino lifting the music from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (as well as the image of a villainous psychopath surreptitiously photographing young women) for use in Death Proof, and screenwriter Diablo Cody including a conversation debating the merits of Argento relative to H.G. Lewis in 2007's breakaway hit Juno. In effect, "Argento" has become something of a buzzword for a certain type of movie brat: a slightly edgy (but not too edgy) name they can mention to show that they're a little off the beaten track (but not too far off). "Wow, this is even better than Suspiria!" breathes an awe-struck Ellen Page while watching a scene from Lewis' shlock-fest The Wizard of Gore with Jason Bateman. Well, maybe, if your idea of "better" is a greater quantity of oozing ketchup and fake-looking intestines.

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BD review: The Unborn

7:30 PM / Reviews / No Comments

Despite half-heartedly attempting to be something more than just another generic possession movie by substituting the usual Catholic mumbo-jumbo with mumbo-jumbo of a different denomination, The Unborn is as unimaginative and forgettable as they come. The AV presentation is top-notch, but unfortunately a nice transfer and a pleasing sound mix do not a good film make. Unless you've made it your mission to collect every last movie about demonic possession in high definition, you'd be as well to simply pick up the likes of The Omen, Poltergeist or The Orphanage, all of which are available in very serviceable Blu-ray editions.

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BD review: Vicky Cristina Barcelona

12:30 AM / Reviews / No Comments

"Pleasant" is a fitting adjective to describe Vicky Cristina Barcelona. "Insubstantial" is another. When the lights came up at the end of Woody Allen's latest romantic drama - or should that be dramatic romance? - I was very much left with the impression that not a lot had actually transpired in the space of its 96-minute duration. Then again, perhaps this shouldn't come as a surprise: the director's work of late has been patchy at best, with each new offering being tenuously heralded by one camp as a return to form and decried by another as conclusive proof that he is a has-been...

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BD capsule review: A Bug's Life

12:05 PM / Reviews / No Comments

Operating under the assumption that not everyone wants to read a DVD or BD review of several thousand words, and indeed that not every film or disc requires such an essay, DVD Times recently started a series of "capsule reviews" - shorter write-ups of a few hundred words which give readers the gist of what they can expect without bogging them down with the nitty-gritty details. While I wouldn't like to see longer reviews disappear completely, I for one think this is an excellent way of getting more content covered without undermining the site's reputation for high quality coverage of a wide variety of films.

For my first capsule review, I've taken a look at Disney's recent Region ABC (US) release of A Bug's Life:

In retrospect, it seems bizarre that, during development, A Bug's Life was intended to be the studio's "A" picture, with its stablemate Toy Story 2 initially intended to be a cheap direct-to-video project. Indeed, Pixar's sophomore effort, a loose re-working of Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai, remains their least impressive offering to date. This should not be inferred in any way to be a dismissal: the Emeryville CGI house's worst is still considerably better than most studios' best. A Bug's Life, however, had the misfortune of being beaten to the post by a matter of months by rival DreamWorks' Antz, a suspiciously similar-looking tale about a colony of ants under threat that was actually devised after Pixar's film but rushed out the door ahead of it. A Bug's Life, with its bright hues, colourful array of child-friendly characters and patented Pixar humour, is by far the more aesthetically pleasing of the two...

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