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Ghost World
The Ghost Writer
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
The Girl Who Played With Fire
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
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Ghost World 2001 Jerry Zwigoff (the maker of the documentary 'Crumb' – he told Crumb that if he didn't cooperate in finishing the film, he would commit suicide) 3.5 Thora Birch chunky, semi-punk with straight black hair and heavy dark-rimmed glasses as Enid, the girl with no goals, no dreams, who doesn't know what to do now that she has graduated from high school (or has she?); Charlotte Johansson plain and big-chested as her more level-headed friend who shares her disdain for the straight world but who seems willing to give it a try – e.g., get a job; Steve Buscemi as the loser Seymour, a loner isolated in his apartment full of collectible 78 rpm records – he can’t relate to people and he hasn’t had a girlfriend in years; Illeana Douglas as priceless politically correct art teacher ("summer art class for losers") who thinks Enid's gifted drawings are not art because they don't suffer and scream enough – her favorite student art project was a found-art sculpture of a tampon in a teacup. Based on Daniel Clowes' graphic novel of the same name, the film is set in Los Angeles, and follows the fortunes of Enid, who has contempt for the whole world around her and resolutely refuses to grow up. Characters are true and picturesque, and have you constantly laughing. Several memorable scenes such as the high school graduation scene where the two girls are annoyed with the keynote speaker in a wheelchair – she thinks she is so cool since she had a little car accident and got paralyzed!; and the "party" attended by old fogie record collectors. Film follows Enid's and Buscemi's developing relationship: at first Enid just attaches him as another of her little projects that she makes fun of, but she gradually gets closer to him. Buscemi is eccentrically isolated in his fanatical collecting of old records, quirky, very bizarre looking with his bad teeth, self-aware and penetrating (he tells Enid all the things that are wrong with him); he has no confidence in himself and is insecure in all his relationships. Enid helps him get a date with a charming woman that likes him, but Buscemi is not cut out for normal people and he drifts back toward a romantic attachment with Enid. The end is quite negative: after his breakup, Buscemi sees a vapid analyst and goes back to live with his mother (no progress there); and Enid takes the mystery bus (that an older man has been waiting for most of the film) and takes off down a dark mysteriously lighted street – destination unknown. Might the bus take her somewhere where she will grow up?


The Ghost Writer 2010 Roman Polanski 3.5 Ewan MacGregor as persistent ghost writer called to Martha's Vineyard to rewrite memoirs of a former British prime minister; Pierce Brosnan l as the charming, although ill-tempered former prime minister, Adam Lang; Olivia Williams as Brosnan's anguished although highly intelligent, politically savvy wife, Ruth; Kim Cattrall eternally young as Brosnan's assistant and, as soon becomes evident, his mistress; Eli Wallach very old and grizzled as Hitchcockian colorful personality -- an old fart who gives MacGregor valuable information in the midst of a violent seashore squall; Tom Wilkinson as normal-looking, elegant Harvard professor, who turns out to be a CIA agent. Wonderfully directed, although essentially lightweight thriller about ghost writer who detects something is rotten in the house of Lang and then pursues his private personal investigation to its logical conclusion -- his own death when he is run down by a big black car in the streets of London. Film is wonderfully directed. Gray skies, high winds, and rain squalls dominate the mise-en-scene; MacGregor is often alone, isolated inside the big, beautiful East Coast beach house, sitting or standing next to big plate glass windows and looking at the sand dunes and stormy weather outside, riding a bicycle through a downpour. Editing is kept to a minimum (quite un-Hollywood), and Polanski tells his story with minimal cutting and maximizing action inside the frame. The viewer is fully identified with the everyman ghost writer who has is driven to find out what his boss is really like and what really happened to his predecessor -- he was supposed to have committed suicide, but a lot of people seem to believe he was murdered. The narrative gives us alternative possibilities -- Was it jealousy since the murdered man was having an affair with Ruth? Was it the deranged father of a soldier killed in Iraq? Or was it the Americans trying to hide their torture of prisoners in the war of terror? The film has important an political dimension: Lang is obviously modeled after Tony Blair, and it is apparent that Polanski is hostile to Blair’s and Bush’s War on Terror: hence the indictment of Lang for crimes against humanity and his association with a defense contractor recalling Halliburton. After visiting Tom Wilkinson, MacGregor believes that Lang himself murdered his former ghost writer to keep him from revealing that throughout his career he worked for the CIA! After Lang's assassination by the deranged dad, a final last-minute twist has MacGregor realize that the wife Ruth is behind the naïve pm, but before he can follow it up, he is run down by the black car: end of film. Marvelous Hitchcock-like moments: in the beginning of the film, one car remains immobile in the ferry as cars drive around it to exit, and the driver then turns up dead on the beach; MacGregor's informative conversation with the grizzled geezer Wallach, who still has a twinkle in his eye; MacGregor rifles through secret files of his predecessor, and the notes, phone numbers, and photos he discovers give him valuable clues about what is happening; at one point MacGregor gets into the same BMW SUV that we saw on the ferry in the beginning of the film, and the navigation system destination that the murdered man had last used takes him to Wilkinson's house instead of the quaint old inn where MacGregor had been staying; MacGregor's note with key information gleaned from the memoirs is passed from hand-to-hand (close-up photographed) to a hypocritically mourning Ruth in a memorial service for Lang. Virtually the only fault of the film is the seams in the complicated, twisty plot: Was Lang really that passive and thick-headed so that he did not know that the CIA was commanding him through his wife? Who was supposed to read the secret message embedded in the text of the memoirs? Was the film clear enough in letting us know enough about the political intelligence and ruthless ambition of Ruth? And why did this calculating woman seduce MacGregor? Nevertheless, we should heed Hitchcock and not be so small-minded as to demand absolute credibility in the plot. A fine achievement; stands head and shoulders over the average thriller!


Giant 1956 George Stevens 3.0 Elizabeth Taylor as strong-willed, independent, sharp-tongued, socially conscious bride from genteel background who marries the Texas rancher and who teaches us in the end that you can only raise your children, you can’t make them do what you want; Rock Hudson strong and steady as the rancher with 100,000s of acres – he has difficulty adapting to new conditions, especially with his children whom he wants to be typical bigshot Texas ranchers; Mercedes McCambridge as crusty sister of Hudson – she is jealous of Taylor when she arrives; James Dean rather annoying looking at the ground, mumbling, unhappy, depressed, slumped in a chair, sucking on a cigarette, drinking too much (his drunk scene toward the end is pretty embarrassing) – first as a non-conformist ranch hand and then rich guy with a mustache; Chill Wills as avuncular older relative always preaching reason and sensibleness; Dennis Hopper in good performance as the retiring, naïve son of Hudson (cast against type!) who wants to be a doctor, but who gets fiery when racial prejudice affects his wife; Carole Baker as preppy, the apple of Daddy’s eye, showing a little breast and putting the moves on rich guys; Sal Mineo in cameo as Mexican American kid proud of his Marine uniform and then killed in the war; Earl Holliman as rather thick-headed, unambitious husband of a relative of the family. Well-made 50s epic ultimately about family: the enduring affection between Hudson and Taylor, their troubles with typical 50s children who have their own ideas about their lives, Hudson coming to accept his Mexican daughter-in-law and his dark-skinned grandson, and Taylor saying at the end that the family is finally a success! Two generation film with Hudson and Taylor looking pretty good in the second part but with silvered hair. Epic scope of the film evokes social and political environment: huge, arid Texas cattle ranch; all the guys wearing cowboy hats, shouting rebel yells, the band playing “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas”; discovery of oil, the tax exemptions and depletion allowances; the beginning of World War II and the departure of the young men for service; successive women’s fashions from 30s through 50s; kids going off and marrying mates below their station without telling their parents; the nouveau riche Dean who makes obscene amounts of money through oil and then seeks respectability by marrying a member of the established family. Lovely epic style photography of the big sky and open spaces especially in the first half of the film. Nice depiction of the death of McCambridge – the viewer sees only the lone horse returning to the house. Wide angle long shot takes in all the empty tables in the hotel when Dean is sitting drunk with his head lying on the head table. A good 50s liberal film: Taylor shakes up the strictly segregated society with her concern for the sanitary and living conditions of Hudson’s Mexican servants, all of whom are of course noble, patient and long-suffering. Some race mixing, when Hopper marries a Mexican girl and they have a dark-skinned child. The family stands up for the Mexican daughter-in-law when they are confronted with discrimination in restaurants and beauty parlors; Hudson even has a big fistfight with Sarge, the racist owner of a restaurant – so long as you have the money, you should be served anywhere and treated politely. Good film with great star power; it does not probe very deeply, ending up with an affirmation of the family and love of children and a denunciation of racism, while implying Texans are really good at heart.


Gilda 1946 Charles Vidor 3.0 Rita Hayworth in her quintessential role as ruthless temptress, who likes guys and knows how to use them to get what she wants; Glenn Ford as tough guy who falls for Rita despite her marriage to his boss – she had married Macready on the rebound from a breakup with Ford; George Macready smooth and slippery as the owner of a casino who is really carrying on a business with a couple of Germans (a bit evil since the war was just over) to corner the world tungsten market; Joseph Calleia as policeman on the trail of the criminals. Excellent shot-in-the-studio film noir vehicle with one of the most percussive femmes fatales of all time: many shots of the long-bodied languor of Hayworth, throwing back her long hair in her boudoir to make suggestive remarks to the unflappable Ford; she seems always to be stepping in and out of expensive cars with men she has picked up (although in bow to the Hayes Code it is revealed at the end of the film that she wasn’t having sex with them – it was all play to rekindle the romance with Ford). Takes place exclusively on believable studio sets representing a wealthy Buenos Aires, where everybody dances the tango in fancy night clubs into the early hours and pursues international finance in expensive homes. The problem is in the relationship of Ford and Hayworth: they always express the most extreme loathing for one another, and yet we are supposed to believe them in love. The attempt to depict a masochistic-sadistic love relationship comes across more as a botched script and confusion about what to do with the main characters. The film ends with impossible reconciliation: the two lovers forgive one another, the evil Macready is killed when he tries to use his walking stick spear to kill Ford, and the two embrace and agree to try it together one more time. Meanwhile Calleia agrees to turn a blind eye to their exit from Argentina. Strong elements of noir in the shadowed cinematography and the domination of the femme fatale; the viewer is disappointed in his expectation that that the male lover will be doomed. Fun mainly to watch the famous Hayworth: fabulous gowns, sultry sexiness, long, wavy hair, quick on the repartee, not much on the singing (her voice is dubbed) and the awkward dancing (when she spins in the famous final number her arms flap like wings).


Girl Shy 1924 Newmeyer, Taylor 3.5 Harold Lloyd, Jobyna Ralston as Mary, his sweet love interest with the slightly protruding teeth. This time a romantic comedy about a very girl shy apprentice tailor who has written a book about how to succeed with women; he falls in love with a rich girl who is more or less affianced to an obnoxious rich guy; we have to have a finale big chase (22 minutes) for Lloyd to thwart the wedding with the rich man and to get his girl. Film plays almost as a romantic comedy. Lloyd, dressed in his usual middle class clothes, stutters and flutters around women (silent film disadvantage of depicting a stutter without sound!), but as soon as he becomes attached to his woman, he becomes a tiger; nothing will stop him! Some classic scenes and sequences. Meeting Mary on the train, he has adventures with her dog who is not allowed on the train and with the suspicious conductor; meeting Mary next to a creek, he first sees her reflection in the water and thinks that he is just imagining her there (kind of a satire on silent film double exposure to show dreaming), and then he is successively embarrassed when he comes across a mother dog suckling her pups and some naked boys swimming in their swimming hole; the bust gag when he imagines a bust of himself (with trademark glasses) next to a famous author in the publishing house; he is mocked by the employers in the publishing house for his silly book on how to be successful with women, but then the publisher decides to publish his supposedly serious book as a humorous one. The pièce de résistance however is the last 22 minutes of the film, when Harold must race across town to stop the marriage of Mary with the rich man: he misses a train, fails to hitchhike, tries to hitch a ride with an incompetent woman driver, transitions acrobatically from car to tree to horse, tries to catch a fire engine but can’t stay on since he is holding a hose that is playing out, finds himself driving a streetcar and when he has to get on the roof to put the trolley pole back on the wire the streetcar careens driverless down the street as startled passers-by jump to the side to avoid being crushed, steals a cop’s motorcycle, drives through a trench with workers bailing out right and left, jumps on to a wagon drawn by two horses, ends up riding the horses without the wagon into the formal Italian garden of the mansion where Mary is being reluctantly wed; and he arrives in the nick of time, literally kidnaps Mary and takes her outside; when he can’t get out his marriage proposal because of his stutter, she borrows a whistle from a milkman and startles him into blurting it out! Final chase a kind of parent of ‘It Happened One Night’ and ‘The Graduate.’ The romantic part of movie sometimes drags a bit and Harold seems to be trying to be too sweet and innocent; but it is heart-warming, and the final chase is one of Lloyd’s best, even if it isn’t as hair-raising and palm-sweating as the skyscraper climbing sequence in ‘Safety Last.’


The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest 2009 Daniel Alfredson (Sweden) 2.5 Noomi Rapace continuing as the emotionally damaged, punk, electronically savvy Lisbeth Salander; Michael Nykvist as the head of the leftwing muckraking magazine ‘Millennium’ and Lisbeth’s devoted defender. A wrap-up film to the three part Swedish film. Lisbeth is in jail after almost hacking her father to death with a large axe; the plot is essentially whether the heavies, who seem to have control of a large number of the top offices in Sweden, will succeed in railroading her back into a mental institution, whether the (mostly elderly or dying) bad guys will succeed in intimidating Nykvist from pressing ahead with a publication that will help her get off, and whether the police, who seem to be honest, will get the bad guys in custody in time; and what will happen to that mutant half brother residing in an abandoned factory that belongs to dad?. A problem with the film is that Lisbeth spends most of her times in the hospital or in custody, so that the little action we enjoy is conducted by less entertaining hands. The film is filled with television-like long conversations, about half of them should have been eliminated to cut down the interminable 2:30 hours of the film; also quite a few action sequences with speeding cars recalling Hollywood action movies (but the crashes were much less spectacular). One jarring surprise has an elderly member of the Secret Service gang who is dying from cancer shoot Lisbeth’s father in the head while he is recuperating in the hospital; the trial sequence is satisfying and entertaining as the defense adduces fresh evidence Perry-Mason-style to shoot down the corrupt prosecution and undermine the testimony of the psychiatrist who is trying to get Lisbeth committed again to psychiatric care. After lengthy meandering, the film does provide closure – Lisbeth is sprung from Jail, she returns to her (fancy, though empty) apartment to smoke a cigarette after long abstinence, she arranges for her half-brother to be murdered by a motorcycle gang that hates him (in her showdown with him she staples his feet to the floor with as high-powered staple gun!). As for her future mental health, one wonders – she does manage to proffer a wan thank you to Nykvist before she shuts the door of her apartment….the credits roll. The three novels seem to have two stories: the first one that was handled well in ’Dragon Tatoo’; the five hours or so written into the second and third episode should probably have coalesced around Lisbeth’s problems with her father into one two-hour film. Entertaining, but one hopes that the American remake will be stronger and more focused.


The Girl Who Played With Fire 2009 Daniel Alfredson (Sweden) 2.5 Noomi Rapace again as Lisbeth Salander, counter-culture computer hacker girl with a dark psychological background and a penchant for violence; Michael Nyqvist again as the serious, intense, pock-marked Michael, the journalist working for the muckraking magazine ‘Millennium’. The second installment in the Salander trilogy, this one with a lot less narrative unity and plot interest than the first one; it seems more like a television program, continuing the saga of Lisbeth after her return from exile abroad and then ending in the middle of the action with her arrest by the Swedish police; we are openly urged to tune into the third installment which will hopefully bring the story to a satisfactory conclusion. The narrative focuses first on a scandal dealing with the import of East European sex slave prostitutes into Sweden, and some of the higher ups in the public establishment might be involved; when three murders occur, the focus switches to Lisbeth’s pursuit of a defected Russian spy, who after much mayhem turns out to be Lisbeth’s father! After a lengthy epic confrontation between Lisbeth and her dad (assisted by his scary, goony natural son) which includes Lisbeth being buried alive and then driving an axe into various parts of her father’s body, the dad and Lisbeth are severely wounded and carted off to the hospital …. tune in to episode three to see if they recover and if Lisbeth and her friend Michael uncover the scandal behind the sex slave story. The most entertaining aspect of the film is the personality and behavior of the 88-pound Lisbeth – small, slight, punky with a big tattoo on her back, a lesbian with a contempt for men, admirable computer expertise, a dark secret in her past (finally revealed to setting her father on fire in retaliation for his maltreatment of her mother), and consequently a major penchant for violence (e.g., the axe in her father’s head, her spirited, maiming, kick-in-the-groin self-defense against the two goons in front of the rural house outside of Stockholm); not your typical movie heroine. It is also fun to take the tour through the streets of Stockholm and through the countryside around Stockholm and Göteborg. Often entertaining, but it fails to add much to the first installment.


The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo 2009 Niels Arden Oplev (Sweden) 4.0 Michael Nyqvist as Mikael Blomqvist, a low-key, but persistent newspaper reporter hired to investigate a murder; Sven-Bertil Taube as noble-seeming older man who hires Mikael to find his beloved niece Harriet, who disappeared back in the 60s; Noomi Rapace – the star of the show as Lisbeth Salander – as dark clothed, punk expert computer hacker with lots of piercings; she has a dark past eventually teaming up with Mikael to help find the girl. A dark psychological thriller set among the farms and small towns of Sweden. The viewer follows Blomqvist in his search for the disappeared Harriet; the girl hunt picks up when Lisbeth, who has been hired to profile Mikael, likes him, contacts him, and then brings her advanced computer skills to help Mikael find out what happened to the woman. The thriller aspect of the film is laid out ably if sometimes deliberately: we follow the investigation into the Nazi past of members of the Vanger family only to find that one of the Vanger brothers was a serial killer (who picked on Jewish woman) who taught his son the skill. In a double postscript, Mikael and Lisbeth discover that Harriet is still alive and living in Australia (long flight!) and arrange for a touching reunion between her and her uncle; and then Lisbeth gives Mikael the information he needs to nail down his journalistic case against the cheating tycoon that he had pursued in the beginning of the film; and then the tycoon dies a mysterious suicide (did Lisbeth do him in?) and a mysterious woman gets her hands on much of the tycoon’s wealth (and we see Lisbeth walking down something like the Promenade des Anglais dressed now in high Eurostyle). The originality of the film lies in the character of the dark and ruthless Lisbeth: the viewer discovers in the course of the film that she had been abused as a child and that she had burned her tormenter to death in his car; hence her being on probation in the beginning of the film and her single-minded drive to discover the author of the rapes and murders she and Mikael are investigating. Much explicit sexual violence that does not come across as lurid: Lisbeth’s unmerciful revenge against her probation office tormenter with a large dildo (anal rape) and a freely wielded tattoo gun; very explicit photographs of the murdered girls with severed heads and mutilated bodies; a horrifying, sexually motivated attempted hanging of Mikael when captured by the sicko Martin (Mikael is rescued at the last minute by the arrival of the implacable Lisbeth with a golf club). The relationship between Mikael and Lisbeth is friendly and trusting, but the retiring Mikael never thinks to push it further; when Lisbeth finally initiates sex, it is somewhat impersonal, but they have an attraction for one another, and the editing makes a bigger deal of their holding hands than of the actual sex; the end of the film is open-ended inviting for a sequel that followed shortly; it is obvious that the two are on the same side, but the viewer will have to stay tuned to see what happens. An unusually good thriller because of the careful plotting, the interesting character of Lisbeth, the absorbing social and geographical background, the twists and turns and little shocks in the editing.