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.

Give it plenty of hoke

Singin' in the Rain

(1952)

A first: I watched this with my 4-year-old granddaughter Veronica, and while we did have to interrupt the screening, it was only because she had to go to preschool; otherwise, I think she would have watched it straight through, rapt.

She had seen the musical numbers before, and I think those are still her favorite parts (duh!), especially "Make 'Em Laugh" (double duh!), but like the rest of us, she also appreciates the quality of the direction and acting and color that hold the thinly constructed plot together. And did I mention that she loves the musical numbers?

The only living boy in London

28 Days Later

(2002)

OK, I'll acknowledge that plausibility is an atypical criterion in rating horror flicks, but one reason why this is my all-time favorite zombie movie is that the premise--that misguided science could isolate and distill a virus responsible for rage--seems a heck of a lot likelier than meteorites animating recently dead people, for example.

Another reason is that the deserted-London sequence early in the film is one of the spookiest bits I've seen in any film, regardless of genre. Yet another is that it's the first zombie film I'm aware of in which the zombies have sprinter speed, which just makes them lots more of a threat than the lumbering dead of George Romero's franchise.

It's also an improbably sweet film--a film about family values. And it's a film that, while touching all the mandatory generic tropes, never really lets you guess where it's going. Ultimately, it's my all-time favorite zombie film because it's an excellent film, full stop.

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.

Uneeq

Freakonomics

Crit

Entertaining in a lo-cal sort of way, but interesting mainly for showing a new way to approach turning a pop nonfiction book into a quasi-documentary. Segments treat topics presumably in Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's book--the socioeconomics of "black" names, cheating in sumo, academic achievement vis-à-vis bribery, abortion vis-à-vis crime--without really teaching me much but making me think it'd be a pretty cool book to read. So, a pretty good commercial, I guess.

Detention

The School of Rock

(2003)

Suggested by a brief clip shown in "Superman," and I thought it would be an antidote, but I guess I'm incapable of fun tonight.

An education

Waiting for "Superman"

Crit

Maybe three-fourths of the way through the film, the narrator intones, "Now that we've established that it's possible to give every child a great education, . . . " Sorry, I don't know what the ensuing independent clause was, 'cause I was so taken aback by the dependent: did I miss the part where "we" established that? This is a smug film that doesn't earn its smugness--a smug and very depressing one.

Director Davis Guggenheim, who banked a lot of goodwill capital with An Inconvenient Truth, adopts the structure of the competition documentaries Spellbound and Wordplay, but the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat in those thrilling films is at least partly meritocratic; here we're simply hoping the children we've focused on will profit from a purely arbitrary system--at the expense, of course, of children we haven't gotten to know.

I would love to know what Guggenheim thinks he has shown here. He jumps on the demonize-the-unions bandwagon, but he admits early on that charter schools per se are not the solution, and that good schools come from, duh, good teachers. But he doesn't begin to tell us how we get good teachers. He pays occasional and incoherent attention to the efforts of Michelle Rhee to reform D.C. schools, but I have no idea what conclusions he expects us to draw from her experiences.

It's just sad, and I despair.

Trailer

• Rango--Depp as lizard. No, it's not a sequel to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; it's animated.