The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, etc

 I recently saw new David Fincher version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in theaters.  I highly recommend it.  Given the option between seeing the American verison in theaters or the Swedish one on Netflix, you should drop the money to see it in theaters.  Among other reasons, this is the kind of smart, sexy, grown up movie we want to see Hollywood make, but only stupid schlock for kids makes blockbuster money.  Send a message to Hollywood, pay some money to see this movie.

After I got home, I watched the original on Netflix.  The acting is perhaps better than the American version, and the direction is good (but its no David Fincher).  Also, bonus, there's three of them.  Generally I don't mind subtitles, but because the action moves so fast in this movie (which is a great thing), there were a couple of times I had to rewind to catch some dialog.  The movie is different enough from the American version that it wasn't a waste of time to see them both.

The first movie was better than the sequel (The Girl Who Played With Fire), but #2 was still very entertaining.  The acting and script were tight and gripping, but not as "edge of my seat, come home from the theater and watch it in Swedish" gripping as the first one.  I haven't watched the third one yet.

A+ for the Fincher verison of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in theaters.  A for the Swedish version.  A- for The Girl Who Played With Fire.

The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret

The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret is a weird little British show developed jointly with IFC starring that guy from Arrested Development with that other guy from Arrested Development.  It's about a bumbling nice guy who "accidentally" gets a job distributing a (possibly toxic and/or radioactive) Korean energy drink.  Wacky hijinks ensue.  The show starts in media res with Todd on trial for a litany of crimes, including terrorism, kiddie porn, and other horrible things.  Ove the six episodes that follow, we see just how a ridiculous series of increasingly poor decisions led to that predicament.  It's well written and acted, funny often, and stupid almost as often.  It wants to be Arrested Development, but it needs a more convincing straight man and to take itself much more seriously.  That being said, it's funny enough.  A solid B.

The Colony

So, faithful readers know that I have an embarrassing prediction for post-apocalypse fiction.  Recently, I ran across a post-apocalypse "reality" TV show called The Colony.  About 10 people are stranded in an abandoned urban-blight warehouse/industrial compound and have to forge a new life.  There's no "game show" aspect to it.

The first season is made awesome by the presence of not 1, but TWO mad scientists. The first is a gray bushy-haired computer engineer named John.  Not too much of a spoiler:  at one point he builds a bad-ass fire-thrower.  The second mad scientist is even more awesome:  his name is Vlad.  He's a Croatian mechanical engineer, who's quite the woods-man.  He escaped from Communist Croatia when he was a teenager. Bonus: a second middle aged Croatian, a grumpy green contractor named Michael.

The show isn't intended (I hope) to be a "real" post-apocalypse scenario.  It's more like Mythbusters crossed with The Real World.  It's good fun, and has lots of awesome engineering porn.  (How to make wood gas, how to build a solar array, etc)

The second season, peopled primarily by attractive young people, is not nearly as good.  I stopped watching after the fourth episode of season 2. B+ for season 1, C for the first part of season 2.

Practical Magic

Practical Magic is one of my favorite movies ever (although the book is much better, darker and stranger).  It's the story of two adult sisters, Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock, who happen to be witches.  Sandra Bullock, the older of the two, has renounced magic, and is trying to live a sedate, normal, suburban life, but the world has other plans.  This is technically a romantic comedy, but the real sparks come from the completely believable sister relationship between the two leads.  Stockard Channing and Dianne Weist are fantastic as the elderly aunts.  Aidan Quinn is a very good as the romantic lead, with a folksy, down-home, protective vibe that I don't really find appealing, but I imagine is very sexy for middle aged hausfraus.  Mostly what I love about this movie is the magical realism and the awesome sets and production design.  Also, keep an eye on everyone's hair; the more magic they do, the thicker, wilder, and more awesome the weaves get.  Bonus: a tasty fine, very young Goran Visnjic in a sexy role as a "vampire cowboy" bad-boy love interest for Nicole Kidman.  I think this was one of his very first American roles.  A- for witches, probably B for anyone else.

Strange Days

Strange Days (no longer available to stream) is a weird, awesome, compelling movie.  It stars a very wide range of people before they came to wider attention.  Ralph Fiennes (excellent as always), Vincent D'Onofrio (creepy and convincing), Juliet Lewis, Angela Basset (smokin') , etc.  It came out about the same time as Johnny Mnemonic, and it's a lot like that movie would be if it didn't suck.  Set 5 minutes in the future, on the eve of Y2K, I really love all the small background details.  Ralph Fiennes is an ex-cop who now deals black-market VR disks.  It's a little slow at the beginning, but don't give up on it until the who-dunnit kicks in around the half way mark. B+

Brother Born Again

Brother Born Again is a documentary by a late thirties lesbian Jewish woman.  Her younger brother, about 10 years ago, ran away from their family and its complicated New-York/Jewish/intellectual drama, and joined a fundamentalist Christian community in remote Alaska.  Although they've been estranged for a long time, she sets off to visit him, and try to, if not reconcile things, at least try to understand.  Because my own younger brother escaped our family to move to Europe (although we're not exactly estranged, we're not tight the way we used to be), the movie was particularly touching for me.  It's a sweet, fair look at a man who just couldn't handle the world, and fell into religion as a crutch.  B+

United States of Tara

The United States of Tara is one of the few shows I discovered on Netflix that really surprised me with how good it was.  Netflix has been recommending it to me for a while, but the premise seemed so hokey, I couldn't bring myself to watch.  A while ago, I was home sick from work, so I thought I'd give it a shot. I'm glad I did, and you will be too.  The show focuses on a woman with multiple personalities, played beautifully by Toni Collette, who I've been watching for a long time.  It was great to see her in a long-term role like this;  she really dug into it.

I know it seems like this show must be stupid, or even offensive, but it's not.  The writing (by Diablo Cody) is tight and sparkling, and all the actors are very good, especially John Corbett as the husband and some kid I don't know the name of as the son.  It's particularly nice to see teenagers represented as actual fully-developed people who, despite not quite knowing who they are yet (and who does?), have consistent personalities that make sense.

I really like the family dynamic on this show, and how sensitively (but hilariously) it treats mental illness.  I rate it A-, with some A+ and some B episodes.