Sphinx?

Never mind the countdown night before last, now we're down to the last few hours of an 11-day break from the demands of gainful employment and gainless diet, and so I pour my last bourbon for a while and contemplate cinema 2010. Yes, there are as always things I've thus far been deprived of, by geography and M4-deferring poverty, that I expect would contend for the "Best of" list if anyone were paying me to see everything by year's end, but nobody is, and so this year I propose to judge only films of whatever age that I saw for the first time in 2010 about which I expect someday to say, as codgerdom eats ever more of my brain, "They don't make 'em like that anymore!"

Of course, codgerdom already has a foothold--or a canehold, if not yet a walker-leg-hold--I'm 57 now, as old as my father was when I became a father (I was the youngest, so he was already a grandfather several times over; but I collected my 2nd grandchild this year). As I've whined before, I was cinematically deprived as a small-town child, so I don't really have the treasured-films-of-childhood collection of the cinephile who grew up in a city with first-run theaters. I guess the film I saw most often as a (Catholic; duh) child was The Sound of Music, released the year I turned 12. (Coincidentally, the eldest von Trapp girl, named not Leisl but Agathe, died Tuesday, 16 going on 98.) So count backward from now to 1965, and then an equal number of years backward from then, and you see that when I was a kid, 28-year-old Mary Pickford starring as Pollyanna was equally ancient history as 30-year-old Julie Andrews starring as Maria von Trapp is now. Except, of course, that the algorithm of ancientness has become so accelerated, even more so (I hope, I pray) than my own ancientness, that you might as well say Pollyanna and S of M are now equally ancient, which means I'm eating my own ancient tail, or something.

So what's my point? Have you not been paying attention? Have you forgotten that you're dealing with a bourbon-consuming senescent? It's your job, not mine, to determine my point. It's my job to tell you what I've dug (it's a generational term; you might find it in Urban Dictionary) in the past 1/57th of my life. What can I remember without going back over the year's blogging? Inception, for sure--but was it sound and fury signifying a miscast role for Juno? True Grit, but I just saw it a few days ago, and I just saw the 1969 version a few days before that, so how much credit is due? Toy Story 3, but I'm a grandfather and a sentimentalist, so there may have to be a Boehner discount for those tears. Cairo Time, but . . . well, you know.

So, let's sift through the year . . .

January, first (of, what, 2?) Manhattan trip produced 2 amazers, Sweetgrass and Fish Tank, the former a perfect example of why people who don't live near Manhattan and who don't take my recommendations (or the recommendations of someone similarly warped) just don't get as much out of the movies as the movies have to give; the latter a sad-bastard flick for the ages.

February, the leftover White Ribbon, quite simply one of the most excruciatingly wonderful awful films I've ever suffered. I'll pretty much see anything Michael Haneke wants to show me, even knowing that I'll hate it 30-40% of the time.

March, 2008's A Woman in Berlin, about which I seem to have used the unusual adjective "miraculous." Also the brutally amazing Red Riding trilogy. And Un Prophète, which seems to have blown me away even more than the Haneke. Incidentally, I seem to have used the headline "An education" 3 times in 2010, all in tribute to the Carey Mulligan film, of course.

April started with a concert stunner whose existence I had been unaware of, The T.A.M.I. Show, from 1964, and I'm going to keep telling people from my generation about it until you've all seen it, dammit! A few days later I finally saw F. W. Murnau's 1927 Sunrise; oh, my--the best of an very good M4, maybe the last one ever (oh, that way madness lies!). And can it really be that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and both sequels all came to America in one year? Well, this is the one that remains worth seeing.

May: Terribly Happy: from my wispy review of this Danish flick: "the best Coen brothers film I've ever seen that wasn't made by the Coen brothers"; 'nuff sed. And The Secret in Their Eyes, the Argentine (Argentinian?) Best Foreign Film winner of 2009. But Nicole Holofcener's Please Give made it worthwhile to see an American movie this month, too.

June: hey, it's my bully pulpit, so sue me for giving another plug to Leading Ladies, still looking for distribution. Though even as a loving father I must confess that the best film I saw that month was 1987's Wings of Desire. And then there was the astonishing Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone--like it, loved her.

July? I'm crying already, just typing in Toy Story 3. And my brain's hurting already, just typing in Inception. Who the hell won the World Cup final anyway? It wasn't France, I know that, but they have this to boast of: Wild Grass.

The Happiness of August was Life During Wartime. And speaking of life during wartime, Steven Soderbergh's 2008 Che is worth a 4-hour look if you're an unreconstructed lefty. But I think I'm just gonna come right out and say my favorite film of the year is the quiet, understated symphony of sexual tension Cairo Time. OK?

September was Mesrine, whose star Vincent Cassel I didn't recognize as the starfucker/starmaker of Black Swan until it was pointed out to me, but it makes perfect sense.

Don't hate me 'cause I'm popular: The Social Network is one of the best films of the year, notwithstanding its accessibility. And to salvage my art house cred, let's put Howl in here too. But what's Halloween month without a creeper, even if Let Me In gets in only as a pointer to the Swedish original?

November: OK, I'd seen Metropolis before, but not this Metropolis. Stunning. As is, in a much squirmier way, 127 Hours.

December: I don't think it's any secret that I digs me some mumblecore. So: Plastic Furniture. Nor that I loves me some Coen. So: True Grit.

And so, if I never tell you what I think about any more movies, we'll always have Paris. And Cairo. OK?

His voice's master

The King's Speech

Crit

As it turns out, this is probably my last movie house movie of 2010, since nothing seems to be opening Friday either downtown or in the 'burbs. Alas.

Probably there are Masterpiece Theatre junkies out there who can do lots more of this than I can, but I got a BBC kick out of seeing the stammering royal's Archbishop of Canterbury played by the best stammering royal ever, and the one scene shared by the best Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet was also a sweet touch. On a weirder note, strange to hear what I've always thought one of the most inspirationally martial pieces of music ever written by a German during the climactic and titular address--you know, the one where George VI is rallying his subjects to rise up again to repel the marauding Hun.

So coincidences and random chitchat aside, how's the film? Topping good entertainment, and Firth is sure to join the ranks of Damaged Guy Oscar® nominees--ranks that include his costar, coincidentally.

Trailers

• Source Code--Actually saw this trailer the other day but forgot; looks like Inception lite.
• Blue Valentine--Oh yeah: my kinda sad bastard movie.

The belief that it would make him more dead

True Grit

Crit

Oh, my: for the most part the same story told in 1969, just told infinitely better in every way.

My sense about the language of the earlier version was accurate: many of the same lines are heard here, but there are also many more of what are presumably Portis's words--damn, I do have to put that on my 2011 reading list!

Maybe something else Coenish with dinner tonight?

Trailer

• Transformers: Dark of the Moon--Need I say more?

The long grift

I Love You Phillip Morris

Crit

What says Christmas like a gay prison romance? And seeing this today made me think of my Christmas movie eight years ago, Catch Me If You Can, which is largely the same story, only heterosexual. But while it would be inaccurate to suggest that the gay slant isn't important in this one, it would be equally inaccurate to suggest that it's the only or even the main thing that matters. What is notable in this good, not great, film is that the same-sexness of the central couple is incidental to their story and their difficulties. It is as sweet and honest a male-homosexual love story as I can recall being portrayed on the screen--Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor are convincing but thoroughly unclichéd as men who prefer men. Carrey's Steven Russell has issues with truth, it's true--but his roles as husband and father actually involve much more truth than do the roles that land him, repeatedly, in prison. And in the end, a movie truth that may or may not be a life truth prevails: the truth of love covers a multitude of lies.

Wings of desire

Black Swan

Crit

Prima ballerina Nina (Natalie Portman) is technically solid, but as her company master (worst. boss. ever.) helpfully points out, she is artistically repressed because sexually repressed. Fortunately, she is also absolutely cuckoo and delusional, always helpful for an an artist. This pic raises as many what-actually-happened? questions as did Inception, but if anything provides even fewer answers.

Darren Aronofsky has never been shy about stirring genre schlock into his intelligent films, and here he gives us an art-house creepy, slashy, supernatchy. Judged by the standards of those genres--i.e., how much I squirmed--it's wildly successful, but I can't really say I liked it much.

Trailers

• Water for Elephants--Fairly screams "from the literary novel of the same title."

Such are promises

The Fighter

Crit

Funny that the guy who tries to make his living beating other guys senseless is just about the least-violent, quietest soul in the story. And not coincidentally, Mark Wahlberg, who plays the gentle boxer, is one of the few members of the cast who doesn't throw a dramatic rabbit punch at some point.

 

But Oscar® loves big, and Christian Bale is a lock for a nomination (though whether lead or supporting is a fair question), and Melissa Leo has a shot as well. Not that they haven't earned it, but the best stuff happening on the screen is the least showy, and Wahlberg has become a life master at that.

Trailers

• Thor--That's the Mighty Thor to you. In 3D.
• No Strings Attached--Wait, didn't we just see the woman-who-wants-uncommitted-sex bit last weekend?

Stand by me

Love and Other Drugs

Crit

"Who Wants to See Anne Hathaway’s Breasts?" asks the headline of the Newsweek review. "Must be a trick question," thinks I. No, just a snarky way into another unenthusiastic assessment for a film currently showing a 44% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes.com, 33% from the sites designated Top Critics. So, the upcoming Oscar cohost's extrathespian attributes notwithstanding, I was set to give this a pass--until the New Yorker's David Denby, whose reviews aren't nearly as much fun as Anthony Lane's but tend to hew more closely to my tastes, gave the film as enthusiastic a notice as I've seen for it, concluding with a downright astonishing declaration:

Love and Other Drugs has many weak spots, but what it delivers at its core is as indelible as (and a lot more explicit than) the work of such legendary teams as Clark Gable and Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.

Whoa! I mean, whoa! That's a hell of a core then, no? So after that I pretty much had to see AH's breasts and whatever else the film had to show me, right? Well, here's the thing: no, it's not really much of a movie. In fact, if you're not predisposed to love Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal, then her character is just another clichéd movie sick girl too selfless to fall in love, and when forced to move to plan B, too selfless to let the one she loves sacrifice himself for her; and he's just another clichéd movie cocksman too selfish to fall in love but who finds himself completed by the first truly remarkable woman he's ever met and gets to win her over with a late speech where he has her at "hello."

But they really are pretty terrific; only one of them is a salesman in the movie, but they both sell a shitload of cinematic snakeoil. The you-should-pardon-the-expression rise of Viagra is really a blue herring, which enables a little preaching about how fucked up the drug companies and the insurance companies are, forcing senior citizens to make bus trips to Canada for affordable generics. It's really just boy-and-girl-meet-cute; well, actually they meet creepy, but they're cute enough to compensate. And any film with both the Kinks and Regina Spektor on the soundtrack earns extra points.

Trailer

• Red Riding Hood--Amanda Seyfried as a sexy young Red menaced by bigger threats than wolf teeth.

Plastics!

Tiny Furniture

Crit

Some time back I was given to understand that the term mumblecore had fallen into scorned desuetude, but it seems to be popping up again for this, and if the spiked heel doesn't fit very well and you wobble around self-consciously on it, . . .

Whatever else you call this, it is a tour de courage by 24-year-old Lena Dunham, who wrote, directed, and stars in this smart, funny, and loosely autobiographical tale of the most hopelessly unfocused recent college graduate since Benjamin Braddock, which, given the general demographic of mumblecore, is tall cotton. Aura, whose milieu, to the extent she has one, is the YouTube video, moves back in with her mother and younger sister, both of whom are vastly and unashamedly more accomplished artistically. Having put herself in such an emotionally unhealthy environment, what else is there for her to do but start and quit an awful job and crush on two worse boys, culminating in one of the ickiest episodes of consensual sex on film? And to top it off, Dunham films her own perfectly ordinary physique as mercilessly as any documentarian could have. Is it art, or just masochism? I don't care, because even the ugliness of this is beautiful.

Octopus's garden

Monsters

Crit

It Happened One Night, with enormous menacing semiaquatic cephalopods. And with significantly less attractive and vastly less appealing romantic leads, such that you don't really get the mutual attraction. And without the good writing or Capraesque set pieces or quirky minor characters. And with a fiancé instead of a husband, and with the father in favor of him. But otherwise, pretty much the same movie.

Also a bit of a primer on minuscule-budget sci-fi flicks:

1. show terrified anticipation of your aliens lots more than the aliens themselves;
2. when you do show your aliens, mostly show them in the dark;
3. when you do show them in the light, show only probing tentacle tips or decomposing parts of dead bodies;
4. if you can manage an alien sex scene without its looking ridiculous, go for it;
5. leave yourself plenty of room for a bigger-budget sequel in case this one is an unlikely hit.

Evils have left the building

Unstoppable

Post

Hey, if your freight train or your action movie is out of control, who better to save the day than Denzel? This is junk food, but it's tasty junk food, though I must say it's more than a tad annoying that the Bad Thing that happens happens because of union men dicking off. Things aren't bad enough for the unions?

Megamind

Post

A hilarious goof for about the first half-hour, this parody of superherodom and more or less serious treatise on yin and yang stays solidly entertaining throughout, but given that the intended audience isn't exactly the Hustler magazine contingent, you wonder why heroine Roxanne, voiced by the defiantly un-Barbie dollish Tina Fey and as smart as any father and grandfather of a daughter and granddaughter could wish any role model to be, needs to be quite so . . . well, three-dimensional.

Tangled

Post

Sometimes brilliant, sometimes sappy, always Disney--the studio's 50th solo animated feature.

Trailers

• The Eagle--Another ancient Rome movie that looks awful.
• Battle: Los Angeles--Another alien-invasion movie that looks awful.
• Sanctum--Spelunking Aussies in 3D.
• Gulliver's Travels--Didn't laugh once, and as much as I love Jack Black, do we really need to see him in 3D? Incidentally, to answer a question raised by a friend, only Lilliput, apparently.
• Yogi Bear--Also didn't laugh. Oh, god.
• Kung Fu Panda 2--Did laugh, once, at KFP's extended ninja staredown with the audience.
• Never Say Never--Justin Bieber in 3D; the adolescent pheromones were flying!
• The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader--Does this count as Jesus' first 3D film appearance?
• Mars Needs Moms--Or, in Australia, Mars Needs Mums; thanks IMDb.
• Cars 2--No Australian alternate title.

Why I always carry my Swiss Army knife

127 Hours

Crit

What better way to work up a Thanksgiving appetite than to see James Franco cut off his arm with a dull knife?

OK, I'm here to do my part to combat the tendency of referring to this as "the movie where James Franco cuts off his arm with a dull knife." (Incidentally, I'm pretty sure James Franco didn't actually cut off his arm with a dull knife; I think a stunt double cut off his arm with a dull knife. But I digress.) There's a lot that goes on here besides James Franco cutting off his arm with a dull knife. For one thing, because the knife is far too dull to challenge bone, before James Franco (or, let's just say Aron Ralston, the real-life cutter-off-of-his-arm-with-a-dull-knife whom Franco plays) can cut off his arm with a dull knife, he has to break that arm. So there's that.

But director Danny Boyle, no stranger to the unwatchably intense, has sense enough sometimes to get us away from the scene of the impending crime against our sensibilities. This he does via flashbacks--to a failed love affair, to a regrettably unreturned phone message from his mother, to a first boyhood glimpse at the magnificent Canyonlands vistas that have driven (and now threaten to take) his life--and increasingly hallucinatory fantasies about how this might turn out, or what he might be doing right now were he not stuck, per the title of (spoiler alert!) Ralston's book, between a rock and a hard place. And when I say "increasingly hallucinatory," think Scooby Doo. We also get to see the real-life one-armed Ralston, with his wife and baby and with a supercool superheroish prosthetic climbing tool attachment; he still does crazy things in the wilderness, we are told, but now he always leaves someone a note telling where he's going.

It is, in short, a remarkable film, one that may join Trainspotting and 28 Days Later as Boyle films I need to own, and so I would say to you, if you are a James Franco fan, if you have described him as "one of the few boys [you'd] do" (you know who you are), but were planning to avoid this film because he cuts his arm off with a dull knife, I would say to you . . . do not see this; dude, he cuts his arm off with a dull knife! Are you nuts?

The unthin man

Inspector Bellamy

Crit

Claude Chabrol's final film is a spiral of mysteries, criminal, romantic, and familial, but we're less interested in the answers than in the questioning. (Well, one exception: is Françoise (Marie Bunel), the almost-Nora Charles-perfect wife of the titular inspector (Gérard Depardieu), really carrying on an affair with his brother Jacques (Clovis Cornillac), as Chabrol goes to great pains to imply? And if so, does that undercut all he believes in? And if not, what of his suspicion?

Depardieu, the size of a small province, with a nose the shape and texture of a fine smelly cheese, has somehow never been more beautiful--and Bunel's not bad, either. An eminently French film, and I mean that in a good way.

You really blew the lid off of nookie

Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer

Crit

Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex. In the finale of Those Bastards! weekend, the reasonably plausible premise that the governor's downfall was engineered by powerful enemies he had made as a crusader is less interesting than:

1. the fresh perspective provided on the eternal question, Why do powerful men risk everything by thinking with their dicks? and
2. the extraordinary range of access the filmmakers had to principals: Spitzer himself, several of those powerful enemies, and the barely-legal, giggle-handicapped madam of the Emperor's Club, as I believe the institution was called.

And apart from some unfortunate cheesiness (especially the use of an actress to portray "Angelina," the governor's regular call girl [notwithstanding the self-aggrandizement campaign of Ashley Dupré], whose extensive testimony is key to the story, but who declined to appear on camera), this is a remarkable and thought-provoking film.

Spitzer, who is not blind to the elements of Greek tragedy in his story, is astonishingly frank in his self-assessment. (He's one of the sympathetic talking heads in yesterday's documentary, too, though there he makes just one oblique allusion to his fatal flaw.) And while not cutting him any slack regarding his hubristic overreaching and his grotesque bankruptcy in the diplomatic skills required of a politician in a democracy, director Alex Gibney convincingly portrays him as a larger-than-life hero who stupidly stubbed his toe, who let all of us down in letting his family and his principles and himself down. On the issue of whether he thinks Joe Bruno and Ken Langone and others with good reason to hate the former state's attorney who seemingly was the one man in law enforcement asking hard questions about life on Wall Street years before the meltdown were behind the unusual federal investigation into prostitution, Spitzer acknowledges, to his credit, that it doesn't matter: that the man most responsible was Eliot Spitzer.

And ultimately, he can't answer the Big Question.

Same as the old bosses

Inside Job

Crit

Those Bastards! weekend, chapter 2; or perhaps I should say chapter 3, since this film was misplattered at my downtown movie theater such that the subheadings came in the sequence I, IV, II, III, V. I was apparently the first viewer to point this out to the management, but then there were only 2 other people in the audience when I saw it, so who knows how many have had a chance to complain.

So how confusing was it, out of order? Aside from a few splice glitches, not very. Mainly what happens is that you get the outrageous information that all these people who dozed through the financial meltdown have been put back in charge of the institutions designed to avert such meltdowns before you get the play-by-play of the meltdown itself.

This is pretty complicated stuff, of course, and I wouldn't recommend viewing the film out of sequence, but it's not like that time the same theater showed me the serpentine plot of The Good Shepherd out of sequence--you think Matt Damon is somehow involved?

Trailer

• Jane Eyre--Confession: I've never read the novel. 2011 is shaping up as another big year for Mia Wasikowska, who's also in Gus Van Sant's Restless. This year was Alice in Wonderland and The Kids Are Alright. Not a bad career so far for a 21yo.

The point at which you break

Fair Game

Crit

Greetings, and welcome to Those Bastards! weekend. But first, the obligatory shoutout to Tom McCarthy: OK, dude, you've pocketed a paycheck for one of those brief, unmemorable character roles that anyone could do; now get your ass back behind the camera, where you're damn near brilliant.

OK, today's bastards are Karl Rove and Scooter Libby (a deliciously nasty--no doubt unfairly so, but who cares?--performance by David Andrews) and their bosses in a film that wants very much to be this generation's All the President's Men. It falls a long way short of that--the filmmaking is rote this-happened-then-this-happened--but Naomi Watts and especially Sean Penn give it their best, as the surprisingly (without a doubt intentionally) unappealing Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson. What's good about the film is that, as little as we may like the power couple, as much as we see that Joe is working mostly from ego and never-wrong syndrome and Valerie is calling "no fair" in a game that she has been playing unfairly for 13 years, we still want them to beat the bastards. Badly.

Then again, how hard is it to stir up sentiment against that crew? And the tested couple's reconciliation scene fairly swells with schmaltz--sorta like the "traffic was a bitch" scene in the movie-within-the-movie of The Player--you kinda wonder whether the real folks can watch with a straight face.

Trailer

• The Tourist--Yes, your recollection is correct: I have mentioned this before. That's sort of my point. I've seen this, I don't know, 6, 8, 10 times now (though I never tire of "You look ravenous!" "Do you mean 'ravishing'?" "I do"), and not until this time did I realize: it's North by Northwest in Venice! Depp is even trying to do Grant (though Jolie is much harder-edged than Saint). It's really obvious, but it took me that long.

'Til the cows come home

Tamara Drewe

Crit

I've read neither the graphic novel whence this derives nor the Thomas Hardy novel whence that derives, but this is a hoot on its own merits.

Its hootishness is built on Stephen Frears's direction of standard-issue English countryside sex farce so that the issue becomes unstandard when you least expect it, and it rests in great measure on the wronged-wife moral-center performance of Tamsin Greig, but the clincher is Jessica Barden as the hormone-besotted 15-year-old not just enamored with a rock star but possessed of the devious intelligence and good luck to bring him within reach.

Oh! Noticed in the credits, though not in the film: Patricia Quinn as "Posh Hippie." Another oh: gratifying moment in film: when Tamara is listening to Lily Allen's "The Fear."

Trailers

• Rabbit Hole--Coincidentally, my daughter just declared this a must-see, based on her enthusiasm for the play on which it's based. I'm in on that basis + dir. John Cameron Mitchell.
• Made in Dagenham--Damn, I resent a trailer that gets me misty already. Q: when Sally Hawkins wins the Oscar for her portrayal of a labor-rousing factory worker, will she in her acceptance speech proclaim, "You like me! You really like me!"?

I don't wanna know much about much

An unsuper supernatural double feature.

Paranormal Activity 2

Crit

Gosh, did I really like the first one? Not really, now that I check. OK, when Paranormal Activity 3 is coming, will someone please remind me that I've found both of the first two to be about 3 minutes total scare buried in 90 minutes of quotidian tedium? Thanks.

Hereafter

Crit

Yes, as advertised, Clint gives us one hell of a tsunami to start, and then . . . well, he gives us some pretty people to look at (none prettier than Little Opie Cunningham's daughter, Bryce Dallas Howard), and three Hall of Fame cities (San Francisco, Paris, and London), but not only does nothing much happen, but Eastwood painstakingly moves the three main characters around the chessboard in order to make that nothing happen. I'm sure there are people whose lives have been changed by this film; mine, however, merely became a couple of hours shorter.

Trailers

• The Fighter--Wow! Let's hope they cleared out the cliché barn on the trailer!
• True Grit--Remade by the Coens, with Jeff Bridges in the Duke role? Skeptical, but hey. Maybe I should rent the original.
• The Rite--I'm seeing nothing here to suggest that this will be a sensible alternative to taking another look at The Exorcist.
• Restless--This, on the other hand, looks very promising, Gus Van Sant directing what looks like a sort of unigenerational Harold and Maude.
• Unknown--And this Kafkaesque story of identity theft could be terrific, unless it's dreadful.

Ennui fou

Partir (Leaving)

Crit

In declaring her interest in seeing this, the person who joined me declared herself a sucker for the French infidelity genre. Afterward, she declared it too determinedly (and deterministically) French, but my thoughts (unoccupied by anything on screen) as I watched it were that except for the language and the look of the villages, this seemed drearily, drably American, like a poor imitation of Douglas Sirk, steeped--nay, stewed, fairly Crock Potted--in predictable melodrama.

Kristin Scott Thomas is peerless, and Yvan Attal as her necessarily horrible rich husband and Sergi López as her necessarily charming working-class lover both do what they can with the material, but what's to be done? The sex scenes are sexy, I'll give it that, but I'm sorry, sex is not enough. Surprise me just once--give me something to react to, something to think about. Who knew the French could be so dull?

Little back, big tattoo

Luftslottet Som Sprängdes (The girl who kicked the hornet's nest)

Crit

I wonder how many girls and women (and, hell, why not boys and men?) are, even now, roaming the streets of America (and, with what, a 6-hour time difference, Sweden) in Lisbeth Salander Halloween drag? I like to think that if I dressed up for Halloween and weighed 90 pounds less, I'd be comfortable enough with my sexuality to embrace my inner Lisbeth.

In the almost action-free extended episode of Perry Mason that stands as the last of the Swedish film version of the trilogy (unless of course it becomes a tetrology after the uncovered 4th book is published), Lisbeth herself assumes Halloweenish Lisbeth drag, for the courtroom, inexplicably: a spiked fauxhawk that adds at least 10% to her low altitude, and lots of leather and rivets. This is apparently done with full knowledge and consent of her lawyer in what seems to be both a hearing to determine her mental competence and a trial for the attempted murder of her creepy father, and you assume that what's going to happen is that the next day she's going to appear as a scrubbed debutante, the point being that she has complete control over her image and thus the mind that crafts that image. But no, next day she's spraying up the spike again, and therein lies the main problem with the 2nd and 3rd installments of the trilogy, after the astonishing adrenaline of the first film ran out (and, I gather, of the print version as well): we're smarter than it is.

I'm not so sure we're smarter than David Fincher, though, so I'm becoming ever more eager to see his take. Dragon Tattoo, currently filming, with Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig heading a solid B-list cast (I mean that as a good thing), is due next year.

Half of what I say is meaningless

Nowhere Boy

Crit

The only thing more simplistic than the Oedipal psychology here is the musicology: John's uncle gets him a harmonica just before keeling over dead; his mother teaches him the banjo (cue increasing-proficiency montage); he decides to start a band and his aunt buys him his first guitar; after his skittle band plays a gig, a friend introduces young John to a younger (and left-handed--about which John makes a joke, lest we fail to notice) and more talented guitarist, who in turn introduces a younger yet and more talented yet guitarist, and before you know it, they're off to Hamburg.

It would be a complete waste of time but for the performances of Anne-Marie Duff as the free spirit Julia, barely older in practical terms than the son she abandoned, and Kristin Scott Thomas as Aunt Mimi, the stiff-upper-lip no-nonsense and thus unappreciated in loco parentis, both of whom do the best they can with the clichéd material (and how good to see KST in an English-language film for a change, after all the work she has been doing in France).

Trailers

• The King's Speech--Colin Firth as stammering George VI, Geoffrey Rush as the speech therapist who, I gather, helps save England from Hitler.
• The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest--My relative disappointment with the second in the series notwithstanding, yes.