The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Tags

Daniel Craig, Drama, Movie, Rooney Mara, Suspense, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

you should get a dragon tattoo, riiiiiight there.

Always good to see David Fincher doing more intense, darker material like this.  He excels at it.  And there are definitely some dark, hard-to-watch moments here.  If you can handle those moments, and you like a good detective story, then you should enjoy this one.  For some reason, I like seeing characters piece together a puzzle.  That’s one of the reasons I liked Fincher’s Se7en, and it’s one of the reasons I liked this movie.  It’s not quite Se7en, but it’s definitely worth a watch.

I’ll hop on the Rooney-Mara-was-awesome bandwagon as well.  She is quietly menacing, yet vulnerable at the same time.

Good acting, good directing, and an interesting (if a bit over-loaded) story.  8.3/10

Enduring Love (2004)

Tags

Bill Nighy, Daniel Craig, Drama, Enduring Love, Movie, Rhys Ifans, Samantha Morton, Suspense

you're lucky I don't have my license to kill yet!

R

Daniel Craig, Samantha Morton, Rhys Ifans, Bill Nighy

Joe: You’re mad.
Jed: That’s what they said about Jesus once.
Joe: They also said it about a lot of mad people!

While having a pleasant day in the countryside, Joe (Craig) and Claire (Morton) witness a hot air balloon accident that costs a man his life.  Joe feels like he could have done more to prevent the man’s death, and his guilt starts to eat away at him.  Meanwhile, another man who was there that day has taken a bizarre interest in Joe and follows him everywhere.

Is love real?  Is it an unexplainable feeling, or is it just a chemical reaction the body uses to fool us into procreating?  This is the subject that Joe, a college professor and writer, seems to spend all his time discussing with his students.  What course he’s teaching exactly, I’m not sure, but his students never seem too thrilled about it.  Neither does Joe’s girlfriend, Claire.  She’s an artist who seems to lean more towards a less concrete idea of what love is.

Something about that balloon accident has pushed Joe far to the end of the spectrum where love is just a biological process and nothing in the world happens for a reason.  Just as his psyche is starting to unravel over the seeming randomness of life, in walks Jed (Ifans)…and gets it unraveling even faster.

Jed was there at the field when the accident occurred.  He tried to help too.  He and Joe found the dead man’s body together which, to Jed, created some sort of bond between them.  And he’s not letting it go.

There’s a bit of a Hitchcockian feel to this movie, which I’m always a fan of, with an average guy getting thrown into a confusing, life-changing situation out of the blue.  As Joe gets more and more confused by his situation, the people around him get more and more confused and frustrated with Joe.  The tension builds to an intentionally frustrating level until it reaches the point that you’re totally sympathetic with Joe when he wants to just start smashing things with a baseball bat.

This movie has its flaws, and I imagine it could be a challenge to get through for some, but I like what director Roger Michell was trying to do with it.  He ramped up frustration levels in a previous film, Changing Lanes, but I think this movie might do that movie one better in that arena.  There’s some interesting, inventive camera angles, good performances, and a nice creepy mood throughout.  It probably holds the tension a little too long, and then wraps things up with too nice a bow on top in the end, but I was still along for the ride.

I wouldn’t be surprised if people let go and drop off early though…just like Joe did.

Be careful opening and closing your curtains.  You might be inadvertently sending signals to stalkers.

10 – 1.5 for being a little TOO aggravating at times – .5 for some odd musical choices – 1 for too neat of an ending = 7.0

Quantum of Solace (2008)

Tags

Action, Daniel Craig, Drama, Judi Dench, Movie, Olga Kurylenko, Quantum of Solace

Seriously James, what's with the hair?

PG-13

Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Judi Dench

M: Ask him about Slate. 
Tanner: She wants to know about Slate. 
James Bond: Slate was a dead end. 
Tanner: He says it was a dead end. 
M: Damn! He killed him. 

Um…let’s see…there’s a bad guy, who’s working with other corrupt people…and his plan is…um…I think it’s to control the water supply…somewhere…in South America?  Bond is trying to stop him, while simultaneously exacting revenge on those who were responsible for the death of Vespa, the woman from the last movie.

I remember when this came out, it got some negative criticisms, and I can see why.  Though, it wasn’t as bad a movie as I thought it would be.  My only issues with it is that it’s a little hard to follow.  Or, maybe it just doesn’t compel you to want to follow it closely.

It’s not just the overarching plot, but also specific scenes that are hard to follow.  Especially the action sequences.  The first thing we see in the movie is a car chase that cuts from shot to shot about every 0.7 seconds.  It’s dizzying, and not in a good way.  All the cars look the same, and you’re just left to assume that it’s the bad guys going over the cliff to their demise and not Bond.  The frenetic pace seemed more suited for a Jackie Chan movie than a James Bond film.

Also, to me it’s just bad writing to have roughly 8 million rounds of ammunition fired at Bond throughout the movie – often at close range – without one bullet ever even nicking him.   Bond probably fires about 25 shots in the movie, and connects dead on with about 90% efficiency.  These villains make the storm troopers from Star Wars seem like sharp-shooters.

There are definitely some good moments along the way.  There’s a good scene at an opera, and I thought Bond and Camille (Kurylenko) were good in their scenes together.   Plus, I liked the whole revenge storyline because it gave some heart to a movie that otherwise would just be a series of indecipherable car chases, boat chases, and fight scenes.

Lastly, isn’t James Bond supposed to have better hair than what Daniel Craig is sporting in his two movies?  I mean, I’m the last person that should be criticizing somebody’s hair, but come on…grow it out a little, give it some waviness or something…anything more suave than what he’s got going on.

10 – .4 for confusing car/boat chases – 3 for a boring villain with a boring master plan – .2 for bad opening song + .5 for good bond girl – .2 for bad hair =  6.7