The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - David Fincher (2011)

1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a superior best-seller to blockbuster adaptation by David Fincher.
2. Like Fight Club, this is way better than the book it's based on. Fincher and screenwriter Steven Zaillian, have stripped out most of the dross about industrial espionage and the Venger family history. Lisbeth's backstory is reduced to one intense vignette plus a menacing hint about her Dad. And there's none of the stuff to do with Venger having employed Blonquist's father in the 60s. All this makes it a leaner and tighter thriller altogether.
3. Speaking of which, Fincher cast Rooney Mara from the Social Network, instead of Scarlett Johansson, whom he rejected for being too sexy (which you have to like him for doing on behalf of all men, just once). At first the camera approaches her with caution, giving us the hard angles of her jaw and hair. But as the film progresses Mara's body is photographed pornographically. Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with her body, but it is an unconventional sight in a blockbuster. Small-breasted and lithe as an eel, she's boyish, and never more so than when she's being handcuffed and sodomised (yeah, spoiler, if that's the word).
4. Fincher seems to be intent on provoking several million hetero viewers to an experience of the 'queer' element of their own sexuality. For instance, during the rape did you walk out? Why not, were you enjoying it? And if that seems like an uncomfortable question, consider that this film is all about the terrible things that people won't admit to.
5. If Fincher made the call not to move the action to the US it's not because he likes Sweden. Blonquist asks Harald, who sits surrounded by photographs of Scandinavian supporters of the Third Reich, why he doesn't redecorate. The exchange goes something like this:
   
   H:I'm the most honest
   B:In your family?
   H:In Sweden. My relatives want everything to have a shiny surface, like an Ikea table.
   
   Needless to say, this isn't in the book. Nor is this the first of Fincher's films to feature Ikea. As in Fight Club, the veneer hides something something far more savage.
6. Martin Wenger's chamber of horrors is an upgrade from the cellar in the book, which is merely a basement, rather than a centre spread from Lairs Magazine. What else would be hidden beneath his sterile Scandi-house? Like interior design, like mind. It isn't quite fair, since Fritzl was Austrian, but the precedent does prevent you wondering too much about how he got the sofas down there without anyone noticing.
7. Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor have put together a really intelligent score. You probably noticed the white noise as Lisbeth enters (she's a hacker, one who interferes), and the use of disjointed rhythms while they piece together disparate clues. Also that their cover of Led Zeppelin's Immigrant features a scream very like the one that Lisbeth lets out in the lift after her first meeting with Bjurman.
8. Lisbeth's primal scream is important, it tells us that, fucked up as she may be, she offers the dark currents of her personality a clear channel into the world outside. The really evil people in this film are the hypocrites, the kind that live in a world of wheat-toned scatter cushions with a soundtrack by Enya. By breaking Martin Wenger's jaw she reveals his true face, as it would be if evil could be seen, and when she rides out into the forest after him they do so as the purest versions of themselves: a demon chasing a monster.
9. The intro sequence is by Tim Miller at Blur Studio - not Kyle Cooper who did Se7en. As everyone keeps saying, it is like a James Bond intro, but there's a larger repertoire of fetish objects: guns, women, men, USB cables, rubber ball-gags and carnivorous plants, can you spot them all? And did it give you an erection? Just asking.
10. You can buy Lisbeth's 'FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCK' nightshirt here. But to distress it properly you'll need to really put the hours in spooning heavily-pierced bisexuals.

Moneyball - Bennett Miller (2011)

1.  Moneyball is a surprisingly engaging film about using statistical analysis, or sabermetrics, to assemble a successful baseball team.
2. But it’s ok, it was written by Aaron Sorkin who also did The Social Network, the best film about a court case about a website that you are ever likely to see, and it was directed by Bennett Miller, whose last film was Capote.
3. You have to wonder whether Miller even likes baseball. His depiction of it is bleak – the players are exploited, the scouts are liver-spotted charlatans, the owners are shark-eyed capitalists. Pitt’s character, Billy Beane, is unable to even watch his team play, because he’s terrified he’ll jinx their game, so the game itself features hardly at all. Ok, there are a few graphs and some montages, but that’s more or less it. In fact, Miller seems to have ended up making a sort of anti-sports movie, which is probably good thing, given that the baseball is up there with cricket and kabbadi in the wilful tedium stakes.
4. Miller took over from Steven Soderberg, who wanted to turn it into one his of his multiple storyline films, following the car journeys of 20,000 individual Oakland As fans on their way to the stadium.
5. You suspect Brad Pitt is the man who made this film happen, since he’s been allowed to play his favourite version of Brad Pitt. In this sense the film is of a piece with The Ides of March, and The Rum Diary. A major star shooting an eccentric, otherwise virtually un-financeable script. You might see this as A-list males bankrolling their own B-movies. But even if these films aren’t as good as they’re making out, at least they’re way more interesting than studio pictures cobbled together from green paper, CGI and market research.
6. Aaron Sorkin is a huge Freudian. His stories are all about characters processing trauma. So Zuckerberg becomes the geek who can't relate who creates the ultimate system for mapping social relationships. Lt. Kaffee (Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, which, yes Sorkin also wrote when he was about 15) is the lawyer who can't stand up in court because he’s so intimidated by his memory of his father, the star court lawyer, and ends up having to face down the ultimate father figure: a bristling Jack Nicholson. And here Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), the baseball player who was overrated by scouts as a young man, brings down the temple of subjective baseball analysis with sabermetrics.
7. It's a great way of writing satisfying films, but it’s sort of misleading, because it makes it look like a situation has arisen in order that the character can process their stuff. This is an illusion, brought about by the fact that Sorkin has worked backward from the event to the trauma, when in real life the trauma happens first, and there probably isn't any kind of causal relationship anyway. 
8. Sorkin used to like to freebase cocaine. He said ‘I had found a drug I absolutely love and that gave me a real break from a certain nervous tension that I kind of carry with me moment to moment.’ In a Sorkin film Sorkin would be a writer who learns to process his dissatisfaction with real life by writing screenplays where the dialogue is always perfectly polished and everyone has a sharp comeback ready. Miller allows his actors to hesitate, talk over one another and repeat lines which gives all the smart stuff the patina of realism. It works surprisingly well, even if you can't quite believe that people who work in baseball are anything like this entertaining.
9. You’ll notice that Beane has a load of pictures of The Clash on the wall in his office. These are from the single date the Clash played at the Oakland  in 1982, supporting the Who - you can tell because Strummer has his 80s wide Mohican going – like in the Rock the Casbah video.
10. Aaron Sorkin could probably write a script about eastern mysticism, field theory and kabbadi and it might even be interesting, so long as they didn't let Steven Soderberg direct it.

Margaret - Kenneth Lonergan (2011)

1. Margaret is a flawed, overloaded, but moving film by Kenneth Lonergan.
2. Who's Kenneth Lonergan? Well, he wrote Analyze This and, yeah, ok, The Gangs of New York. But wait, Margaret is really good, and at no point do gangs of men march on set, armed with a range of cutlery, and introduce themselves. If you're wondering what Lonergan looks like, he plays Anna Paquin's screenwriter dad here.
3. Don’t Matt Damon and Anna Paquin look terrific? It’s not CGI, it’s just that this movie has been trapped in post-production since 2006. Lonergan shot hundreds of hours of footage but couldn’t arrive at a cut he could live with. Fox Searchlight, to their credit, wouldn’t release the film without his approval – but they did sue him, hard, for not getting his shit together. This explains why, despite having some major stars in it, there was zero publicity, and you can only see it in about two London cinemas.
4. What you’re watching is a cut by Martin Scorsese, signed off by Lonergan. Things have to get pretty bad before people start saying ‘let’s get Scorsese to do this, at least he’s not such a perfectionist.’
5. It’s a film about sympathy, and how much we can really be expected to feel for other people.
6. All modern life depends on apathy. For instance, it’s only possible to inhabit a city like New York or London because, beyond your family and closest acquaintance, you don’t really care what happens to the human beings around you. Imagine the emotional ‘load’ of a single London tube carriage: all the hopes, dreams and fears of all those people sitting in close proximity to you. Compare that with your own deafening sense of isolation when sitting on the tube. The city has turned you into a psychopath. Why, you could probably watch someone being horribly maimed in a traffic accident and have forgotten about it by lunchtime.
7. Or could you? Are there certain kinds of tragedy that would force you into deep sympathetic contact with the strangers around you. And how would that be? Isn't there something greedy-seeming and, ironically, unsympathetic, about trying to participate in someone else’s emotional life without their permission? And how do we choose who we feel for and who we don’t? These are just a few of the pleasantly un-worked-out questions that the film raises.
8. There is no one in this film called Margaret – the title comes from a poem, Spring and Fall, by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It’s about a little girl crying for the dead leaves in Autumn. Hopkins basically explains to her that she’s crying for her future self who’s bound to end up so weighed down with human misery that things like dead leaves just won’t even touch the sides. Just one good reason for never leaving your child alone with a Jesuit.
9. You probably noticed that, in the scene in which Joan and Lisa sit down in the New York Opera House, the shot is an extension of your own view of the cinema’s seating. It’s a paradox that if you want to care about people you have to go to the opera. Or the cinema. Another paradox is that the people invested with responsibility for the public expression of emotion are actors, the most narcissistic, emotionally self-involved people there are.
10. The experience which Lisa is having at the end of the film is catharsis, as described by Aristotle. The drawing out of emotion elicited by drama. The spooky thing is that what she’s watching is Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, which has nothing to do with her situation whatever. Which is, realistically speaking, true of any work of art you've ever loved.

The Rum Diary - Bruce Robinson (2011)

1. The Rum Diary is a confused film about boozing in Puerto Rico, based on a novel by Hunter S. Thomson with a screenplay and direction from Bruce Robinson.
2. Robinson is famous for Withnail and I, but he also made How to Get Ahead in Advertising, a poorly researched but entertaining morality tale about an ad executive (Do you mean executive or do you mean copywriter? Well how about you make up your fucking mind?) who grows a talking boil. He also wrote an autobiographical novel The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman, which the 10-Point Review can't really recommend.
3. About half-way through this film Johnny Depp's character, Kemp, visits a ghetto where he takes a picturesque photo of a young black girl through the window of an abandoned car. This scene is meant to demonstrate that Kemp is more than a tourist, he's a serious reporter with an axe to grind. Yes, fine, but the majority of the film is about getting drunk and chasing girls on a tropical island, which is more or less the modern definition of tourism. And all the other black people in it are hostile, frightening or sexually threatening. You cannot both have your cake, and also eat your cake.
4. In fact, if you're scared of gays and black people you'll love this. As in Withnail and I male homosexuals are menacing, but in Puerto Rico it's not just Uncle Monty who wants to bugger you, there are a load of sailors who are just dying to get right into your ass. There's also the scene in which a sweating Chenault (Amber Heard) dances with a young black man whose abs look like they've been carved from an illegally logged Amazonian hardwood while her husband (Aaron Ekchart) is forcibly restrained, powerless to intervene. You probably recognised these scenes as the expressions of sexual neurosis they patently are. If you're this worried about being forced to suck cock, no wonder you have to drink so much.
5. Speaking of which, there's a lot of cock fighting in this film, a blood sport that's illegal on the US mainland, but not in Puerto Rico. Its inclusion, in unflinching slow-motion, along with the racism and homophobia mentioned above, as well as the boozing, drug-taking, fast cars and the edible female lead, demonstrates the film's unrepentantly retro aesthetic. This is subtly different from the reconstructed retro of, say, Mad Men, which encourages the viewer to see the 60s in a slightly patronising light ('Nice suits, but if only they'd had therapy'). It's a sort of paean to a time when life was less complicated and/because these things were allowed to pass unexamined.
6. Bruce Robinson is a recovering alcoholic who relapsed to write this screenplay. Maybe that's what gives the movie its holiday feel: an escape from reality and its concomitant moral responsibilities. (Is it ok to have sex with prostitutes if you only do it in Puerto Rico? Just asking.)
7. You might consider this film as a sort of prequel to Terry Gilliam's, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Depp who at 35, played the 34-year-old Thompson in Fear and Loathing, now at 48 plays the 22-year-old Thompson in The Rum Diary. Basically he's twelve years older where he should be twelve years younger. It's confusing, and all you can take from it is that Jonny Depp looks fantastic for his age.
8. Aaron Eckhart is forging a career as what William Burroughs called 'The Ugly American'. Which is not to say that he's ugly, but that's there's something about his too-good-to-be-true jawline that means he's inevitably cast as a representative of everything that's cruel in the American dream. A few decades ago he would just have been a leading man, a la Donald Sutherland, but now he appears in order to demonstrate the vulnerability of old America, brought about by its lack sensitivity. His girlfriend is bound to cheat on him.
9. Hopeless sentimentality is as much a feature of alcoholism as drinking alcohol. And this film has a sentimental streak about a mile wide.
10. 'Empower the fowl', 'Your tongue is an accusatory giblet! Keep it out!', 'Can you smell that? That's the smell of bastards' - these phrases are characteristic of Hunter S. Thomson's idiosyncratic voice. Yes, well, none of them are in the book - they come from Robinson, who, let us not forget, could write a line for Uncle Monty like ' Come on lads, let's get home, the sky's beginning to bruise, night must fall and we shall be forced to camp.'

Wuthering Heights - Andrea Arnold (2011)

1. Wuthering Heights is a dour Andrea Arnold adaptation of Emily Brontë's classic English A'-level text.
2. Arnold has made two excellent films: Red Road and Fish Tank. This is, if not quite a fully-fledged turkey, certainly nowhere near as good as either of them.
3. During the 80s Arnold appeared as the foxy roller-skater, Dawn, on the children's Saturday morning show Number 73. If you've ever wondered why when anyone says 'Maidstone' you mentally append the word 'Kent' you know who to blame. If you were born around 1980 and a have a spare half hour for a disorientating dose of nostalgia click here
4. Arnold's characters inhabit alienating spaces, they stalk across patches of wasteland or industrial estates, argue in car parks or dance in abandoned council flats. If you ever run out of petrol and find yourself trudging down the hard shoulder of a motorway, entertain yourself by imagining you're in an exciting Andrea Arnold adaptation of Rebecca.
5. For the first hour or so of this overlong film the young Heathcliff (Solomon Glave) and Catherine (Shannon Beer) chase one another over the Pennines. No council estates here, just birds, beetles, rocks, mud, grass, rain and sky. And did I mention birds and rain and mud? And rain? After a while you may start wishing someone would introduce an episode of Rentaghost, just to leaven the mix.
6. Unlike most adaptations this one concentrates on the childhood sections of the book, apparently to make Heathcliff's grief more poignant and believable. For Arnold cinema is the closest thing to sharing someone else's experience. Stuff like the uniquely isolating feeling of deafening wind in your ears, which no other medium could reproduce effectively. So during the extra-long first half she's trying generate sensuous memories that will tie us to Heathcliff and Cathy in the second half...
7. ...only it doesn't quite work, and she has to keep introducing flashbacks to remind us of how the first half felt. Plus Kaya Scodelario and James Howson who play the older Heathcliff and Cathy don't either look, or seem, like the same people as their younger counterparts.
8. In forensic science circles necrophilia is known as 'cold-cocking'.
9. No-one in this film seems to care about getting soaked in the rain - despite the fact that keeping warm and dry must have been a life and death-type priority in 19th Century Yorkshire. Perhaps we're being invited to consider true love's elemental qualities. But you will probably spend most of the film thinking 'will someone please just shut that fucking door'.
10. To be fair Wuthering Heights isn't an easy book to adapt, not least because the emotions it describes aren't realistic. In the novel they're smothered under layers of 19th Century story paraphernalia, framing narratives, eavesdropping, discovered texts and so on. Arnold has removed all this, she's also removed the dream sequence, and the gothic qualities of the house itself. She has removed the bathwater, but also the baby. In fact, Kate Bush's interpretation of the novel is far more faithful not just to its melodrama, but also its irony and intelligence. This film closes, not with Kate Bush, but Mumford and Sons, and so reveals its true sensibility. Like them, it proves you can strip back to the essentials and still end up sounding pretentious.

The Ides of March - George Clooney (2011)

1. The Ides of March is an ok political thriller directed by the actor George Clooney.
2. It's a film about ambiguity: no one in it is quite what they seem.
3. For instance, you might consider Clooney to be a likeable, bankable, but ultimately lightweight Hollywood star. But no, no, no, it turns out he's a director of worthy political thrillers starring fidgety actors' actors like Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
4. George Clooney's face can sell anything, from Steven Soderbergh's Ocean franchise films, to proprietary brand coffee machines. This is a pretty weird state of affairs, and there's probably no-one who finds it weirder than George Clooney.
5. Clooney enjoys a reputation for both intelligence and niceness. You can almost imagine him being embarrassed by the power of his face as an instrument of economic gain and this embarrassment registering as a certain wilful perversity in its deployment. It's like he's levying a kind of boredom tax on the use of his face. This, perhaps, explains why he often appears in complex, slow-moving films like Syriana, The American and Good Night, and Good Luck.
6. You see, there was time, just after he left ER, when he might have been an action star: running around in a polo neck, shooting things, etc. Only then he started making films with Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers. Maybe it was then that he realised clever films tend to privilege dialogue and cinematography over action, and perhaps this is why all his films feel like they've had the action systematically sucked out of them. The word that comes up a lot is restrained. The discovery of the body, the final argument between Gosling and Clooney are all studiously under done in this movie. Like a not-very-intelligent person who maintains a reputation for intelligence by not saying much.
7. Ryan Gosling is great in this film. Sadly he doesn't stamp through anyone's face, but he does do some high quality flirting. The flirting is based largely on double bluff, which is one of the film's motifs. It's neat, like the way that when you break off a piece of broccoli it looks like another tinier piece of broccoli. Actually the scenes between Gosling and Wood are the best here, but then they're also the most reminiscent of Julia Roberts' scenes with George Clooney in Ocean's Eleven.
8. Don't worry, Evan Rachel Wood was born in 1987, so she's not actually a teenager. But she is, technically speaking, 'the devil's candy'. The idea of a sexually confident 20 year old woman, raised on a diet of MTV and hardcore porn, is the modern replacement for the sexually submissive female lead of the past hundred years. But she's not a threat, because it turns out that the price of that sexual confidence is emotional instability, an abortion and then death (oops, spoiler, sorry). BTW, are we really expected to believe that she poons Gosling because she needs $7000? And that there is no-one else at all that she could ask? Come on.
9. The screenplay is based on a play by Beau Willimon called Farragut North. The Ides of March is, as you well know, a quotation from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a play that is synonymous with political duplicity and betrayal. But it also refers to a date, March 15th which is not slightly relevant to this film. It's almost as though they've chosen the most famous line in Julius Caesar, because quoting Shakespeare makes you look clever. Restrained? Or just strained?
10. Ryan Gosling appeared in the Mickey Mouse Club for two years alongside Justin Timberlake. All the face-stamping and intern-fucking in the world is not going to turn you into Jack Nicholson after that. But at least he's trying.

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn - Steven Spielberg (2011)

1. The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is the gayest movie to appear on general release since Gus Van Sant's Milk.
2. Whether Tintin is gay is a facetious question, like whether or not Lady Macbeth has children. Outside certain obscure hentai Tintin is absolutely sexless. But the informing principle of this film, and of all Tintin stories, is gay.
3. Tintin is a young man with a taste for 'adventure'. These 'adventures' always involve the pursuit of some species of MacGuffin, in this case, model ships. In fact the MacGuffins are functionally interchangeable, masks for a libidinal urge that leads Tintin, with clockwork regularity, to the docks. 
4. Whenever he visits the docks Tintin is inevitably cornered by two or three heavily-built men and either chloroformed or assaulted with a phallic object like a rubber blackjack or cosh. Very often he awakes to find himself bound, and gagged. You'd think, under the circumstances, he might just avoid docks and shipyards. But oh no.
5. When the John Williams score kicks in over the seaplane taking off from the crest of a wave you may well be aware of the sensation of your buttons being firmly pushed. This won't stopped them being pushed.
6. What about that scene where Tintin is thrown violently around a cabin filled with sailors while Captain Haddock watches from the doorway? In fact, by that point you've probably started to think of the film as a really intense gay porno for children. But don't worry, all the sex has been substituted for 'adventure'.
7. Georges Prosper Remi, or Hergé, gets a good deal of stick for being a sinister fascist, not just because he was a keen scout, but because during the occupation of Belgium the Tintin strip appeared in the Nazi-controlled paper, Le Soir. And it's not like the stereotyping of black people, Arabs, South Americans, Russians and Jews was limited to that period of his career either. Spielberg has had the rights to Tintin since the 80s - but he probably had to make Schindler's List first didn't he?
8. Tintin's best friends are his toy terrier, a hairy alcoholic and two moustachioed, co-habiting bachelors. There's nothing to see here.*
9. In modern gay argot the word for a beefy, hirsute gay man is a 'bear', the word for a correspondingly lithe, ectomorphic and hairless gay man is a 'twink' or 'chicken'.
10. The only woman in Tintin is the opera singer Bianca Castafiore. She is a comic character, distinguished by her high-pitched voice, a female secondary sexual characteristic which all the other characters find intolerable.

*Hergé died from an HIV-related infection in 1983, but he caught it from a blood-transfusion. He remains a national hero in Belgium.