The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Column: The Word on Films | Date Published: Tuesday, 17 January 12 | Author: Melissa Wellham | 1 year, 4 months ago

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a brutal film – and while you might not always want to watch the screen, you won’t be able to look away. It’s completely captivating.

The English adaptation of the novel by Stieg Larsson, follows Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) a journalist whose reputation is in tatters. He is hired as a private investigator by a wealthy patriarch (Christopher Plummer), who wants his help finding out which member of his family murdered his niece 40 years earlier. Blomkvist, however, finds he needs help, and in turn hires a deeply troubled young woman, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara).

Rooney Mara is a revelation as Lisbeth Salander. Having only seen her performance in what was essentially a bit-role as Erica Albright in Fincher’s The Social Network – a film where she plays a relatively sassy young woman, but certainly not someone you can imagine withstanding violence from, nor inflicting it upon, another human being - she came as a complete surprise. She is both violent and vulnerable; closed-off from the world, but with a face like an open book.

Having read neither the hugely popular series that the films will be based on, nor seen the highly acclaimed Swedish adaptations, I was able to approach the film with few expectations. Well, except for the one massive expectation that as the film was directed by David Fincher, it must be awesome…

And, to ease your fears, it was.

	Sherlock Holmes 2: Game of Shadows: The crime – Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows doesn’t live up to the first film in the franchise. When Guy Ritchie first decided to shake up the Sherlock Holmes tradition, he did so with a steampunk style and panache. The first film in the franchise was criticised for diverting too much from the original text, but this reviewer found that instalment to be a refreshing and fun take on a classic. Although Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows follows the same formula – so much so that outlining the plot feels redundant – it falls short. In what way do the two films diverge? The difference is elementary, my dear readers. The bromance between Sherlock (Downey Jnr) and Watson (Law) is still just as believable (indeed, I kept hoping Ritchie would up the ante, and take it from bromance to romance. The two male leads have a helluva lot more chemistry with each other, than they do with their female companions, in any case) but for the most part, A Game of Shadows doesn’t hold a flickering, mysterious candle to the original. And it’s because Sherlock doesn’t use his head. Where the first film Holmes’ main weapon is his mind, backed-up by some ass-kicking action, in the sequel there is very little sleuthing, and more cruisin’ for a bruisin’. The smarts are gone, and replaced by brute strength. It’s absolutely criminal. Case closed.
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	The Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister was hardly uneventful – but I will say that The Iron Lady left me a bit drowsy in parts. The film zips between Thatcher (Meryl Streep, brilliant as usual) as an old lady (coming to terms with what her personal decisions have cost her), and her earlier years. We dash back and forth between old Thatcher and a young, determined Thatcher just breaking into politics, and of course Thatcher at her height of power, as Prime Minister. Basically, there wasn’t enough on the politics of the Thatcher era, which was what I went for, and far too much of Streep in old-person makeup. Plus, how are you not going to feel for her, just a little, when she’s wandering around all feeble and confused? That element irked me, biopic or not. Though it’s not exactly wildly skewed in Thatcher’s favour, it still doesn’t sit right. Plus, the focus on her personal life meant a lot of the real gritty stuff was omitted, apart from the occasional (top notch) montage. The film itself is not at all sure what it’s doing, what story it wants to tell, who it thinks Margaret Thatcher is. The Iron Lady is one of those films where the more I thought about it, the more I realised I disliked it. Overall it left me a bit cold - funny that.
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