Not at all the new Girl with the Dragon Tattoo like the press is desperately trying to pass it off as, Headhunters is completely different, both in plot, character, and feel—and it’s excellent fun. Thundering along at great speed and with a main character who will lose your affections at the start and then win you back, this is how crime movies should be made.
Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie, incidentally the first person convicted for doing graffiti in Norway), as he explains in a brief voiceover at the start, is 1.68m tall and compensates for his lack of stature with an oversized house and his improbably beautiful and tall wife Diana (Synnøve Macody Lund), who, like a surprisingly number of people in crime books (this is adapted from Jo Nesbø’s book of the same name) but not in reality, runs an art gallery. He’s a headhunter, a recruitment agent who knows the value of reputation. He’s good at his job and makes a pack of money, but not enough to fund the lifestyle that he and Diana lead. To compensate, and with the help of his security company cohort Ove (Eivind Sander), he also moonlights an art thief more than happy to steal from the clients he’s hiring, and whose personal information it is ridiculously easy to discover when you’re the one doing the interviewing. Despite this, Roger’s finances are precarious and his emotionless affair with brunette Lotte (Julie Ølgaard) is coming to an end when he encounters the man who could change his life: Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, almost ridiculously handsome), the perfect candidate for the job Roger is hiring for, and someone who’s just inherited an original Rubens. Clas, alas, is not your everyday job hunter.
Roger is a total prong, and when everything in his life falls to shit you’re almost pleased—at first. Slowly, Roger regains your compassion and becomes a character you can get behind instead of one you want to push over, and kudos to Aksel Hennie (who has a bit of a Steve Buscemi look to him) for portraying a character arc you’re initially unwilling to follow. Part of this is the ridiculous situations it doesn’t take long for him to be in—you’ll probably want to cover your eyes for a particular hiding place he chooses, and for a fight he has with a dog—and part of it is his reactions, which don’t have you shouting at the screen “Augh! Why are you doing this?” but rather thinking: yes, that is the right thing to do. He’s a smart guy, just confused about his huge ego fighting with his lack of self-esteem. The characters that surround him are excellent too: Diana is lovely and misinterpreted, Clas ominous in his smoky expression, Ove hilarious in his introduction as he runs around his house naked shooting pop guns at a giggling Russian prostitute. Even the peripheral characters, including overweight identical twin police officers, and real-life police chiefs at a press conference, are wonderful touches that make this movie a cut above other action-type flicks.
The movie doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test—and the few women in it aren’t at all simpering, but are still being used by men in some way. Having said that, the men are all jerks. It’s also a bit gory in parts, which isn’t necessarily a criticism but something to point out if you’ve got a weak stomach for such things. (A brief pan over someone’s crushed face is followed by a solid close-up you weren’t expecting; also, the aforementioned hiding and dog scenes.) There’s a discrepancy at the end that I haven’t quite figured out, but as I went to see it alone, I don’t have anyone to set me straight.
Those are all very, very minor gripes in a movie I genuinely adored. Go see it; it’s a thrilling, entertaining crime adventure that deserves a wider release than it will probably get, and equal, if not more hype, to the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (which, as possibly an in-joke, Diana is actually watching the Swedish version of at one point.) I give it eighteen out of twenty machine gun bullets scattered on the ground.
The ten-minute introduction to the movie Hugo, before the title card even reminds you what you’re at the cinema to see, is an absolute popcorn-gobbling delight of special effects. As we follow the titular hero through the labyrinthine pathways that make up the landscape of his home—living behind the walls at a Parisian train station—we pass through cogs and pendulums and down slides and up rickety stairs, all merging seamlessly together to create an entirely new and beautiful world. Seeing this in 3D is even more incredible, and is an immediate way to engage your audience so that they’re staring slack-jawed with glee within moments.
The world of young boy Hugo (Asa Butterfield) himself is not so lovely. It’s 1931, and, orphaned after the death of his clockmaker father (Jude Law) in a museum fire and sent to live with his alcoholic uncle, his life goes from quiet contentment to ruination. Unable to go to school, running the station’s clocks is his only job, but one he must do perfectly in case anyone notices that as the movie begins, he is now alone, his uncle having abandoned him. Apart from the clocks, Hugo spends his time tending to a broken automaton his father found in a museum, trying to find parts for it—or to steal them from the station’s toymaker, Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley) out of view of the orphan-catching Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen). After an altercation with Georges that sees him lose his father’s notebook, a precious memento that also holds the clues to fixing the writing-robot that is his father’s only legacy, he thinks all is doomed. But wait! Because it’s an adventure story (and a self-referential one at that), an effervescent girl named Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz, adorable) is waiting in the wings to befriend him, even though her guardian is Georges himself. And between them, they may just hold the not entirely metaphorical key to everyone’s angst—Hugo’s emotional and mechanical problems, and the secret her godfather has been keeping for years.
Hugo is a love letter to cinema itself: not only in its visuals, but in the subject matter and in the characters themselves. Hugo’s father adored cinema and took his son to films, whereas Georges has never let Isabelle see a movie in her life. There is a glorious line to make all movie-lovers sigh, as Hugo tells Isabelle about the first time his father had seen a movie: “He said it was like seeing his dreams in the middle of the day.” The history of film is touched on as well, as the first one shown—a train pulling into a station—causes the entire audience to shriek and run as the train barrels towards the camera. Connected to it all is cinematic genius Georges Melies, whom you might remember from a particularly referenced and adored film scene where the moon cops a rocket to the eye. Any movie about movies is one that floats my boat, and this is lovingly rendered in every way, where the recreations of hundred-year-old special effects still have the power to amaze, and the loss of film can cause the loss of much more personally.
Quirky French touches abound, as the station’s other occupants—flower-seller Lisette (Emily Mortimer), the object of the Station Inspector’s awkward affections; cafe owner Madame Emile (Frances de la Tour, one of three Harry Potter actors in the film—she played the French giantess); and newspaperman Monsieur Frick (Richard Griffiths, second Potter-person, Uncle Vernon) dance around each other and create a lightness and sweetness that the movie’s occasionally sad moments need. Moretz is a delight as an enthusiastic counterpart to Butterfield’s quiet grimness, and Cohen does a wonderful job making the initially dastardly Inspector a sympathetic character (it does take a while to warm to the man, though. What kind of jerk throws orphans in a cage?)
However I couldn’t really bond with Hugo himself, a character with a genuinely sorrowful backstory but who in Butterfield was unable to sell me on any of his emotions or the reasoning behind some of his actions. Sadly, this made him one of the least interesting characters in the movie for me. Papa Georges’ backstory, while interesting and visually entrancing, is not quite enough payoff for the build-up surrounding it—so I enjoyed the movie but still left the theatre feeling slightly unfulfilled. I do recall feeling the same way when I read the book as well: that I was hoping for a dramatic reveal and was underwhelmed. Characters frequently did the frustrating trope where they don’t explain their actions, choosing silence over logical discussion and making the movie stretch out into devastation when it could have been remedied by a nice chat over a cup of tea.
But it’s still a fun film, and kudos to director Martin Scorsese for doing to 3D what the mechanically brilliant young Hugo does to a mechanical mouse—injecting it with something new and wonderful. I give it eight out of twelve o’clock.
In Australia, Hugo is released January 12.
David Fincher: he’s great, isn’t he? The Social Network was one of my favourite movies of recent years and he also made this little-known flick called Fight Club that you can’t mention in a sentence without everyone in the vicinity falling over themselves to sputter out their adoration of. He’s a talented director who knows how to craft addictive movies with an original edge.
So why, oh lord why, did he choose to remake Niels Arden Oplev’s Swedish film that was perfectly capable of telling the story already? Why did he waste months and years of his precious filmmaker time to give everyone a third outing of the Millennium Trilogy? 30 million people worldwide have read the books; the first film made over a hundred million smackers. This is not some obscure gem that needed a fresh facelift: it’s all tremendously modern and already available in literary and film formats. So the question is: what did Fincher hope to achieve with his version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and did he succeed? He claims that it is a completely different film from the Swedish version, but it’s not, of course. When they both work off the same source material, a dense brick of a novel with elaborate backgrounds for each character and incident, they are going to hit the same beats. Yes, it is different, because someone different directed it and the actors are different. Yes, it’s different because everyone speaks in English with Swedish accents (though they read Swedish-language newspapers.) But honestly, apart from a small change in the ending, it is the same film told the same way, and you’ll feel exactly the same by the end as you would at the end of the Swedish version. (That is: paranoid about government agencies, horrified by all men and never able to have sex again.)
It’s hard to see past that to judge the film on its own merits. Of course, it’s wonderfully cast: Rooney Mara captured the damaged (and thin) look wonderfully to be computer hacker/ward of the state Lisbeth Salander; Daniel Craig is the perfect age to be disgraced but excellent investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist; and Christopher Plummer is expansively patriarchal as Henrik Vanger, the wealthy industrialist who inadvertently brings the two together to solve a forty-year-old crime: the loss of his beloved niece. It’s not all Agatha Christie innocence, however: you will be disturbed, by the outcome and also by many scenes disturbing in both sexual and non-sexual gore (Lisbeth’s relationship with her new guardian Bjurman—Yorick van Wageningen—is especially something you’ll want to cover your eyes for.) The growing friendship between youthful Salander and craggy Blomkvist is convincing and enjoyable to witness; the peripheral characters are portrayed just about as you’d imagine them. On a visual level, Fincher perhaps overtakes Oplev purely because where Oplev sees the place he lives and conveys it in a natural way, Fincher sees it from our non-Swedish perspective, revealing the white, icy beauty and Ikea-white angles of homes and buildings. His intro, also, is quite mind-blowing, as a soft, tender tinkly piano barrels into a tar and sweat-soaked Karen O intro as Mara and Craig sex things up in an edgy, oiled-up way along with an eagle, a snake, and some raunchy flowers. Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor score the whole flick with requisite rage and gentleness.
Lisbeth’s use of Google and Wikipedia to track someone down seems to undermine her enormous talent in the hacking field; the Swedish accents sometimes slip; I felt that despite the epic running time—nearly three hours—Lisbeth’s storyline was not given enough time; during a Eureka moment for Blomkvist he makes such a ridiculous show of taking off his glasses in mute shock it seemed like a cliché in what is otherwise a very cliché-free movie; and in frustratingly Hollywood way of thinking, female Rooney is given countless crotch shots and appears fully naked frequently while male Blomkvist (who is polyamorous and hardly a prude) reveals his chest and the barest hint of butt-crack.
Still, these facts don’t at all ruin the film. Fincher’s use of actors in their natural, often makeup-free state is commendable (and something I enjoyed about the first movie trilogy); the long running time doesn’t mean the movie drags—it’s enthralling from start to finish; Mara’s Salander, like Noomi Rapace in the Swedish version, is an absolute treat of a character, scarred from a lifetime of people screwing her over but with a raspy charm all her own: wearing a t-shirt saying “Fuck you you fucking fuck”, explaining Blomkvist’s background to the man who has hired her: “Sometimes he performs cunnilingus. Not often enough in my opinion”—she really is amazing and is the new style of heroine everyone says she is. It passes the Bechdel Test (barely) and, in Sweden, is called Men who Hate Women, so the women are smart and not underwritten.
By all means, go see it if you’re unable to see the Swedish version—it’s a well-crafted film telling a wholly interesting and grotesque family crime story. But without it showing me anything new about the story (which admittedly, I have possibly overdosed on), it is still a vaguely pointless exercise. Because of this, and my clear ragey bias about it, I’m not going to give this movie a rating. See it for yourselves and let me know what you think.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is out January 12.
Unknown was pretty average and thus, after a few false starts, gets only a short amount of my mental energy expended on it.
Liam Neeson is on a plane with his hot wife and her improbable hair. Upon landing in Berlin, where he’s about to give a speech on bio-who-cares, he gets in a taxi which swerves to avoid a fridge and then lands in the river. When he gets out of hospital and barrels towards his hotel, no one knows who he is—his wife doesn’t recognise him, and someone else is standing in his place, with his name tag on. Was he never who he thought he was? If he is, what is happening? And why didn’t he get a haircut before the movie started so it wouldn’t flop everywhere and distract the viewer?
This movie had a lot of potential—Neeson is a solid actor, the idea is pretty interesting, and the actual outcome not at all flat. But it’s stuck with some overly ridiculous car chase scenes—not one but two separate incidents with cars driving down pedestrian paths (once backwards!) with no honking, and all you can do is think: is this one person’s life/sanity worth the potential death of everyone who decided daringly to walk on the footpath today? And while on the carnage discussion, why does pretty much everyone involved, or barely involved, have to die? I just stopped being concerned about people because I assumed they would be eventually shot in the head, and never was invested enough in the characters in the first place to care.
In Summary: Below Expectations. There’s probably a worse movie out there at the moment (I’m making brash assumptions here about Disney’s Handy Manny Motorcycle Adventure, which is unfair of me) but it couldn’t be more middle of the road if it were that machine what paints stripes in the middle of roads.
So I had a completely smug moment when I went up to pay for our tickets and said, “Two adults for The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, thanks,” and the cinema person said, “You know, you’re the only person who’s managed to say the title correctly.” Little did she know I’d sold five billion of the book, read it in a frenzy the day it came out, and attacked all customers who bought it afterwards with “I finished this yesterday/last week/a year ago! It is SO GOOD.” Anyway, while the title makes sense, especially within the context of the whole Millennium trilogy (deep breath): number one, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, followed by The Girl who Played with Fire, then ending on The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, it’s still true. Long titles are difficult to remember, like the book The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (aka “The Potato...Jersey...book” to customers) and A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian (“Uh, The Story of Tanks in Brazil?”). So while they’re quirky, publishers shouldn’t do it. And while we’re on the topic of things that are ridiculously long, the film The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, at more than two and a half hours, is ridiculously long. It’s mostly worth it, but you’ll be too distracted by the need to pee to pay attention to the last half hour.
In the third and probably final title in the Millennium Trilogy—there are rumours kicking around of a fourth that is mostly written, and that late author Stieg Larsson was intending to write ten—we pick up from where The Girl who Played with Fire ended. Feisty heroine Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace, now ridiculously and deservedly famous) is in the emergency room in hospital after being shot in the head and hip and shoulder, her completely vile father Zalachenko (Georgi Staykov) is down the hall in a room with a Salander-inflicted axe wound to the head, and Lisbeth’s half-brother Ronald Niedermann (Micke Spreitz)—the “blonde giant”, and someone who can’t feel pain—is on the run. Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), journalist at Millennium magazine and champion of Salander’s cause, is doing the very best he can to save Lisbeth from the media storm worked up by the frenzied attacks at Zalachenko’s house, and the residual hype around her from the murders she was accused of in the second movie. Now she is accused of the attempted murder of her father, as well, an accusation aided by her attempted murder of him years earlier as a twelve-year-old defending her abused mother, and supported by master bastard doctor Peter Teleborian (Anders Ahlbom). Yes, it’s all very dramatic. And when it involves politicians from the very highest parts of Swedish society, it’s about as dramatic as you can get. And it makes the ending all the more delicious.
Most of Salander’s screentime is spent with her locked up—first in a hospital room, aided by her hot and all-round fantastic doctor Anders Jonasson (Aksel Morisse); then, in a jail cell; and finally, in a courtroom, assisted by Blomkvist’s pregnant lawyer sister Annika (Annika Giannini). We also follow Blomkvist, and the rest of the Millennium team, as they try to find links between Zalachenko and parliament, despite numerous death threats and Blomkvist’s single-minded approach. Along with the police, aided by Blomkvist, and the bad guys themselves, who basically sit around shitting their pants, we also have the displeasure of watching Niedermann’s grotesque escape route, as he kidnaps and harms everyone in his path.
I have a lot of goodwill for the books, and the brilliantly cast movies. And I enjoyed The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, and it was fabulous to see virtually everything wrapped up. You can’t help but get completely involved with Lisbeth Salander and want desperately to see her free from the horrific life she’s had to live through since she was a child. The movie has a very satisfying black-and-white way of looking at the world, where all the good people are wonderful (though Blomkvist makes some bad decisions, it is ultimately for a greater good) and all the bad people are snivelling monsters who deserve all they get.
Still, this movie was not without its flaws. The police force came across as completely incompetent—too slow-moving to defend against the lumbering Niedermann, unable to figure anything out without the help of a journo, and in one eye-bleedingly cheesy scene, driving along a pavement and almost hitting a woman wheeling a pram (a pram! Wasn’t that trope done and dusted after the bit in Speed where Sandra Bullock hits a pram and it’s full of cans?) Despite the time lapse between the start of the movie and the end—Lisbeth has brain surgery, grows her hair out, becomes stronger—Annika remains just as heavily pregnant throughout the entire film with no actual mention made of the fact that such an integral part of the team may burst into labour on the courtroom floor. If you haven’t seen the two previous movie, it’s really not worth seeing this one, as you’d spend most of it trying to remember what the hell is going on, what happened in the past, and who that middle-aged guy on screen is. Hell, I’ve read all the books and seen the movie and I still had trouble cottoning on sometimes. The courtroom aspect ends neatly but leaves you thinking, “Wait, what was the crime being discussed, and why, despite what just happened, was this the outcome?” It felt that often one little sentence was all that was needed to make a confusing aspect make sense. But they didn’t happen, and so I sometimes sat there with a perplexed look on my face dribbling my Pepsi out the side of my mouth. And seriously, I cannot state this enough: it’s too long.
I’ve mentioned this with the previous movies but it bears repeating: one of my favourite parts of these films is the casting, not just because they’re talented actors (they are), but because all the people are just so damn normal. Blomkvist is handsome—and I adore him—and has a mid-life belly and a rough-skinned face. Erika, his blonde and beautiful editor, wears the same clothes over all the movies and has wrinkles and fuzzy hair. Salander punks up for her courtroom scene in more silver jewellery than a Kmart full of teenagers, and doesn’t really make it sexy deliberately, even though she’s gorgeous. Everyone is just wonderful in their everyday way and it makes movies so much more believable when they are. Of course, they’re all speaking Swedish which just reminds you that American/Australian/British movies have a long way to come in this regard.
In Summary: Meets Expectations. A fine thriller with a dash of politics, a sprinkle of action, one and a half teaspoons of schadenfreude, and sixteen cups of length. It missed out on some parts of the books I was hoping for—the relationship between police officer Monica Figuerola and polyamorist Blomkvist, for one—but did a fairly good job of containing the important parts. May have made a better television series—ten episodes per book or something—and apparently were actually filmed as telemovies in Sweden anyway.
GIVEAWAY! Want to see this, but not sure enough to fork out full price on it? Well I have a handful of two-for-one passes for The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest valid Australia-wide, so if you’re keen, comment here about what you think the fourth book should be called, and if you’re lucky (chances are supremely high) I’ll send you one out!
I don’t know when it happened—or if it has always been so—but kids movies always have to have a singing and dancing scene. Inevitably, the fuddy-duddy-est of the characters will do the silliest dance and all the under-fives will fall over themselves laughing. I for one am waiting for the one kids movie that doesn’t require a song or a dance to get its point across. After all, life doesn’t work that way, and apparently I am a miserly old cynic who wants to strip all young children of fun in their flicks so that I don’t have to cross my arms and sigh pointedly when everyone bursts into song. So it’s probably not a surprise to you that there’s singing and dancing in Gnomeo & Juliet. Worse still, it’s Elton John—and while he’s a multi-kazillionaire and well-loved, I don’t actually enjoy his music at all. It’s fun enough for a kids movie, and the glitziness that goes alongside his work helps too (you will see glitter sunglasses, fear not), but he is executive producer and thus it seems like a blatant bit of self-promotion. If I liked Sir Elton perhaps I wouldn’t be so ranty right now—and one of my co-watchers loves him and had a dirty great smile on her face whenever his songs came on—but I don’t.
In happier news, I did quite like Gnomeo & Juliet. Aimed squarely at the kidlet market, though still pretty endearing for the old folks (read: twelve-plus), it’s a story we’ve all heard before, but perhaps not in this style. Gnomeo (James McAvoy) is a rough-n-tumble ceramic garden gnome from the blue Montague house, a bit of a larrikin with a podgy gnome belly. Juliet (Emily Blunt) is held literally on a pedestal by her father over the fence in the red Capulet house. Along with the crotchety home owners, the red and the blue gnomes have been enemies for as long as anyone can remember, but when Gnomeo and Juliet bump into each other in another property across the alley, they spark a forbidden romance that causes much drama as their relationship accidentally brings neighbourhood tensions to the fore. Will it follow the same storyline, with a double suicide at the end? I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say “no”, not when it’s a kids movie, though the smirking statue of Shakespeare (voiced by Patrick Stewart) at the gnomes’ local park insisted with a smirk it would end as he originally wrote it.
Frankly, gnomes just take a while to get used to. We know via the Toy Story trilogy that we can fall totally in love with otherwise inanimate objects, but watching gnomes clunk around the place, tending to their garden, repeatedly fishing for one bored fish, and so on—it’s tricky to connect with them, but you really do. The sound design is wonderful in this film, with the ceramic clacking of gnomes against themselves, each other and the environment completely spot-on and natural. They are less fragile than you’d expect but still can’t fall from great heights, and they will freeze as soon as a human is nearby into all manner of hilarious positions. I’m not sure how sold I was until Gnomeo and Juliet meet at a disused glasshouse where Juliet is hunting for the perfect flower, and the introduction of the two characters is one of the sweetest and most entertaining I have seen as the two—both in disguise—swing around the greenhouse in a nifty little action sequence. Once they fall into a pond and discover—to their mutual horror—that they are from opposing houses, their attraction doesn’t wane but things get a bit trickier when it comes to meeting up.
As in all good kids flicks, the main characters’ pals count for a lot. Gnomeo’s main man is actually a clay mushroom that, despite having no face (seriously, it’s just a mushroom) sniffs around the place like a dog and somehow makes barking noises. (What, THIS is what I can’t suspend disbelief for?) Juliet has an Irish pond frog as her helper, one who spurts jets of water out of the hose in her mouth and is happy to leap about singing, “Doooooomed!” after she discovers the dangerous romance. The most emotionally devastating character is, bizarrely, a plastic pink flamingo named Featherstone that Gnomeo and Juliet accidentally let out of a shed, who attacks everyone with love, knows no boundaries, has a strange Latin accent and, after recounting what led to him being trapped in a shed for twenty years, will make you want to bawl your eyes out and ruin your 3D glasses. (Not to mention, he’s voiced by Jim Cummings, who had a similarly devastating storyline in the substandard The Princess and the Frog. I hope his human life is much happier.) Add to that a bad guy in arrogant red gnome Tybalt—voiced, awesomely, by Jason Statham—and the ultra-competitive lawnmower fights the two groups of gnomes get into, and you’ve got yourself total entertainment.
It’s a bit cheesy, the ending is wrapped up far too quickly and with a bit of a vague hand-wave to some loose ends. There is a big stupid dance finale, if you’re bothered by such things. The 3D is absolutely fine—but underused. While it’s a good-looking movie, it’s restricted to two backyards, one neighbouring lot, and a brief foray into a park. It’s nothing that couldn’t have been done with live action, or puppets—there’s no sweeping panoramic shots, and limited action scenes, mostly lawnmower-related. I understand that the gnomes live a sheltered life, and that I’m overthinking this movie, but I’m not sure why they bothered sticking in a third dimension while keeping it so limited.
However, it’s super cute, pretty funny, and there’s lots of bright colours to keep the kids entertained. It’s not too childish for adults, and grown-ups get to play find-the-Shakespeare-in-joke—the houses are on Verona Drive, and when Juliet tries to stop a huge, drooling dog from entering her yard, she pushes a door against him yelling, “Out! Out! Damned Spot.” The computer having a banana as its logo was also a funny (though done before) touch.
In Summary: Meets Expectations. It’s all you could want from a kid’s movie—laughter, tears, and genuine desire for the couple to get together and live happily ever after with purple babies. (NB: This does not happen in the movie, but if I’d written it I would have made it happen. Maybe when I pitch my sequel to Elton at our next coffee meeting.) Gnomeo & Juliet is just plain good standard animation fare.
One thing that is always the kicker when it comes to seeing a movie based on a true story is that often I know how it ends. No one went into Titanic expecting to see the plucky engineers turning the boat in time, missing the iceberg and changing the movie into The Love Boat; no one thought Gallipoli was going to be a gentle travel narrative. So going into 127 Hours, I knew exactly what happened to Aron Ralston during his climbing accident in Utah. If you’ve been paying attention to the movie’s publicity, you’ll know that the film’s based on Ralston’s autobiography, so you know he survives. Because I work in a bookstore, and I can’t ever refrain from flicking through pictures in autobiographies (it’s my protip on the shortest way to understand the entire plot if I get asked questions by customers), I know how it happened. So did Danny Boyle sustain my interest in an entire movie set around one guy stuck between a rock and a hard place (I’m not being corny, that’s the name of the book) and with an ending I knew clearly? We all know I love to answer my own questions, so here: Oh My, Yes.
127 Hours is amazing. I can’t recommend it enough. I also can’t stress enough how much you shouldn’t bring your small children to see this, like the family I saw with a stack of kids so little they needed booster seats—not only is the fourth word of the opening song “fuck”, but there are some scenes so visceral that there are warning signs all over the movie theatre alerting viewers to the danger of seizures. Okay, so maybe I’m a prude, but it’s rated MA15+, so The Man agrees with me.
Aron Ralston is a happy-go-lucky outdoorsman, in his element when thrashing around America’s expansive countryside. One Friday night he drives to Utah’s rocky desert, sleeps in his car, then wakes up fresh and peppy to make his way to Blue John Canyon. On his way he encounters two lost and conveniently pretty girls, and he sets them back on their path, but not before taking them on a nifty little side tour, revealing his ultimate desire to be an outback guide. They part ways, the girls inviting him to a party of theirs locatable by the giant inflatable Scooby Doo, and Aron continues bouncing around the place. Then, while making his way down a crevasse, a solid-looking rock falls and Aron tumbles along with it. When Aron and the rock come to rest, his arm is lodged firmly between the canyon wall and the rock itself.
Movies about people trapped in small spaces have to work hard to keep you from getting bored, and of all directors, the ever-inventive Danny Boyle is absolutely the one to nail the genre. While all moments spent in the enclosed space with the camera lodged in Aron’s face are still compelling, he does give the viewer the relief of flashbacks and elaborate hallucinations, but they are not so extended they remove you from the ultimate claustrophobia of being stuck to a stone. The beauty of his surroundings are lost on neither us nor Aron himself, angling his foot out to catch the fifteen minutes of sunshine he gets a day, or setting his clock by the raven that flies ahead in the morning. He’s in his element, but has made a fatal error: no one knows where he was going, or when he was intending to return. So if the movie has a moral, it’s that. Leave a note, kids. Or take up a low-impact sport like Extreme Toastmaking.
The movie opens with loud intense music, and a three-way splitscreen that takes you between sports, cheering crowds, and the energetic Aron planning his trip to the canyon. The splitscreen continues as Aron bikes his way through the rocky terrain—even spectacularly crashing, the kind of fall that would send me into a whimpering mess and unable to walk for weeks but just makes Aron laugh heartily at his clumsiness and get right back on—and adds to the kind of on-edge hyper-realistic tone of the film. The scenes of Aron taking his new lady friends to a gorgeous blue pool you can get to only by a dangerous and concealed plunge into nothing is breathtaking, and the atmosphere until Aron is trapped absolutely makes the viewer understand the allure of his lifestyle, even for someone like me whose outdoor activities mostly comprise of running only late at night when no one can point and laugh.
Watching Aron use all of his knowledge to survive and try to escape is enlightening—from making an outfit out of rope during the cold nights, conserving his pee to drink later (and you really believe it, too, and feel a bit ill watching it), and attempting to set up a pulley system to get the rock off. As his physical and mental functions start to fail, we see him exhausted, and hallucinating the inflatable Scooby Doo in the recesses of the cavern. (And you will be legitimately spooked, too.) More heartbreaking is Aron’s realisation that he put himself in this position, alienating those that love him—family (including his sister, played by Lizzy Caplan), friends, and lovers (including Harry Potter’s Clemence Poesy as the beautiful wispy partner he pushed away)—causing no one to know he would be gone. His determination to start again eventually drives him to commit the act he is known for—and if you’ve never seen Aron Ralston and know nothing of the story, skip this next paragraph, okay?
So you’re all wondering about the arm scene, aren’t you? Of course you are, you creepazoids. You’ll know the seizure moment when it arrives—more in the form of noise that compounds the tension—and while it doesn’t take the full amount of time it took Ralston himself, it still doesn’t feel like it holds back. Ralston filmed the process at the time, and let Boyle and Franco watch it (apparently his mother did too, and undoubtedly wished she hadn’t), and it does feel real, look gruesome, and make everyone in the cinema cover their eyes and squirm and squeal. Don’t be ashamed. Everyone else is doing it too.
But all of that means that the Sigur Ros-fuelled final moments of the film had me literally clutching my heart and weeping. I’ve never clutched my heart in a movie before, so that was a new thing for me, and a bit embarrassing and histrionic. But I did it, and you might do it too.
In summary: Exceeds Expectations, almost to the point of the ridiculous. It is an incredible film. The only thing that was underplayed was how much pain Franco was in—sure, he looked anguished at the start as he stares at his trapped arm, the wall above flecked with chunks of skin and blood, but then he seems to take a deep breath and never look in pain again. Even if he’d just said at one point, “Well, this hurts a bit, but what can you do?” I would have felt better. But that’s what happens when Danny Boyle doesn’t get me to read over the script.
In a world as familiar as the suburbs and as alien as a sci-fi movie, seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly is put in a terrible position. As the caretaker of her younger siblings now that her mother has lapsed into a speechless depression, she finds out that if her absent father does not turn up for his court date in a week, she will lose the family’s house and land—which he put up for bond. Trouble is, she doesn’t know where her crack-dealing pappy is, and the frightening inhabitants of her rural Missouri town take any requests for information as a personal threat. But with the wellbeing of her beloved family at stake, Ree is prepared to face whoever and whatever she needs to help them. While Ree’s younger brother and sister adore her and are good kids, they’re too young to look after themselves, and Ree has very few people to turn to. Teardrop—her missing father’s brother—is a scary, violent man, haggard and brutal, and aware of the code of honour within the society they live in. Her friend Gail is stuck at home with a baby and her unwilling, angry-looking spouse, unable to offer Ree the help she needs in her search. As a determined Ree asks questions of everyone within her realm of knowledge, the bleak landscape and the community do their best to stop her.
Chris pondered aloud if the camera could have caught a flash of green grass or clear skies if only it had moved a bit either way; as it was, Winter’s Bone’s cinematography catches a place that is universally grim. Everything is cold, and worn, and old, and the world I am familiar with—happiness, smiles, friendliness—seems so impossible to get to that it is hard to believe cushy American movies are filmed on the same continent (and that my dear friend Lilli was in the same state recently having a total blast.) The gardens and houses show a world where perhaps in the past life was brighter: toys may have been new, machinery free of rust, houses freshly built. Drugs have choked the town, with its inhabitants mostly made up of crystal meth dealers and users, leaving everyone drawn and with the alarming look of someone high, or waiting for the next high. So chilling are the cast that Teardrop, constantly snorting from his little baggie, terrified me until I IMDb’d him in the car on the way home and realised he was actually John Hawkes, recently the cause of my adoration as the will-they-won’t-they father in Miranda July’s excellent Me and You and Everyone We Know. It was such a brilliant turn and I was so completely fooled that it reminded me just how plain talented actors can be. Jennifer Lawrence, as the savvy Ree, is also amazing, stopping at nothing—no matter what the threat—to save her family.
The movie manages to put a few interesting twists into the characters, turning two cinematically-hated tropes, including an army recruiter, into basically the kindest people in the film. As Ree hopes to join the army, asking when the promised $40,000 would arrive, the recruitment officer tells her gently that it wouldn’t be for a few months, and that she really needs to rethink joining the army if money is her sole motivation, and that caring for her family is a much more important job. Their heartfelt discussion is, frankly, shattering, as it was the only time I had thought: join the army! Get some money! This really is your only choice! Instead of: run away! Army bad!
Winter’s Bone is probably going to take over the Oscars, and it should. It really is a marvellous film: knock-you-down devastating, depressing and pearl-clutching, with a lake scene so viscerally horrible near the end that will have you wanting to hug Jennifer Lawrence should you ever see her in the street shopping for groceries. There is, in Ree and her siblings and the home of her father’s lover, little sparks of hope that make the movie beautiful through its cheerless exterior. In this, it shares similarities with John Hillcoat’s The Road, though Winter’s Bone conveyed a world that Hillcoat (well, Cormac McCarthy) needed an apocalypse to create. Why so dramatic, when there is such horror in the world we already have?
In summary: Above Expectations. This is a tremendous film, never tedious, and with characters you feel are desperately real and whose determination you cheer (or whose downfall you secretly wish for.) The only fault, for me, was the addition of a tree-felling dream sequence. I don’t believe a good dream sequence has even been filmed (or written.) Feel free to shoot me if you wish. (And hush, Alice in Wonderland is not counted.)
Hype! I hate it. It’s all up in your media, telling you something’s going to be the next big thing or a godawful disaster, and then causing nothing to ever be as awesome/terrible as you expect. But then sometimes hype is actually right. I guess it’s just statistically inaccurate to assume they would always be wrong.
In the case of the new David Fincher movie, The Social Network, the hype is right. This movie is killer. It’s great. It rocks. It’s everything you could want in a movie. It is beautiful and entertaining and it is interesting and it should win all of the awards for available, even Best Musical because there was music playing in the background sometimes. I loved it. I have lost my brain a bit about it—even when I think about its failings I am like one of those people who defends their friend who is a jerk. “It’s just how they are,” they say, and you hate them. I am like that about The Social Network. Blinded by how cool it is. Just like Sean Parker does to Mark Zuckerberg—yes, maybe this is an indication I should get to the plot.
Based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, The Social Network is the fictionalised but vaguely true account of Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), founder of obscure website facebook and the world’s youngest billionaire (billionaire! I’m excited to be a thousandaire half the time.) The film opens with Harvard computer student Mark and girlfriend Erica in a bar, getting into a fight as Mark is revealed to be an arrogant and basically unbearable person to be around. Erica leaves him, and he takes out his anger by creating a website called FaceMash, where pictures of women from the university are shown side by side with the ability to vote on who is “hotter”. This crashes the Harvard server, lands Zuckerberg in trouble with the school, and brings him to the attention of three people: all-American identical twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (Armie Hammer, as both) and their business pal Divya Narendra (Max Minghella). These fine folks are looking to create a social networking site for the university, and they recruit Zuckerberg to write their code. Instead, he takes their idea and creates facebook, landing him popularity, fame, and ridiculous amounts of money—and leaving the “Winklevii” and Narendra with their idea plundered. As Zuckerberg chases his dream of getting facebook to the masses, he starts to lose his own friends, namely best pal Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), whose eventual lawsuit—along with the Winklevoss/Narendra case—plays out in the background to the rise and rise of facebook itself.
The acting is top notch. Jesse Eisenberg was awkward and loveable in Zombieland, and is awkward and a pain in the ass in this, making Mark the kind of arrogant know-it-all with jealousy issues that you can hate but understand on a human level. There is an amazing turn by Armie Hammer as both Winklevoss twins: blonde, sculpted, rowing champions, entitled and utterly enjoyable to watch, especially as they are shot down by the university dean for bringing their problems to his attention. Eduardo is the one good guy in a big pile of jackasses, and he was represented endearingly by Andrew Garfield, who is soon to don the Spider-man suit and release us all from the curse that was the other Spider-man movies. (Insert theatrical gagging here.) Another character of note is Sean Parker, the brains behind Napster, who gloms onto Zuckerberg, offers advice and becomes a business partner, coming across as a man of much blustery charm, little in the way of morals and basically as the villain of the piece. He is played with tight blonde curls by my nemesis Justin Timberlake (rant to follow).
The music, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, is incredible, from tender and moving to go get ’em inspirational-moment beats to brain-knocking party tunes. The cinematography is amazing, with every shot tight and perfect, and some—like the twins’ regatta in England—shot in such a way that the scenery and the race looked like miniatures, perhaps (and we all know I rarely go in for symbolism here) to illustrate how small they have become in the scheme of the plan, or how small-minded they are as they make fun of Prince Albert—who they have just met, as you do. David Fincher continues to be the kind of director that gets people flapping their arms about when they hear that he’s bringing a new film out. Well, me, anyway.
Women are not fabulously portrayed in this film, apart from the five or so minutes we spend with the strong and admirable Erica (Rooney Mara, who will be Lisbeth Salander in the American remakes of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo etc, and who I am reserving judgement on until I see that trilogy.) Women are shipped in by bus to a frat party where they dance on tables and kiss each other madly; they get high in the lounge of the house Eduardo helps pay for as tech boys frantically write code in other rooms; they snort cocaine off each other’s bellies; they fuck the famous; they are batshit crazy girlfriends who set things on fire; they are beautiful but never part of a living, breathing plotline. I assume this is more a pointed look at the college boy view of women, but it still feels a little gross. Women: only here to party, or break Mark’s heart. We get the instructions for those two tasks when we are born.
Also well-portrayed but hard to swallow is the whole Ivy League classism and fraternity/finals club wankery, where which club you belong to can change your entire life due to knowing the right people, but which can often only be achieved by knowing the right people (or having enough money) in the first place. Australia isn’t immune to classism, but with the universities not having frat houses or as many boys wandering around with sweaters tied around their shoulders, it’s always something that’s come across as almost comical and ridiculous. People actually act like that? What dicks. But that’s why America is such enjoyable fodder in films like these, where they milk it for all its worth, as Eduardo is picked for a finals club and Zuckerberg spitefully says it’s only because they’re filling their minority quota. Not only that, but everyone in the film appears to be from money, apart from Zuckerberg, who appears to be from outer space as his family is never mentioned and he is really weird.
Despite the bad attitude towards women and the nauseating sense of entitlement suffered by everyone involved, I would give this five stars or ten out of ten but for one thing. Justin Timberlake. I don’t even know what he’s like as an actor, though I do know he plays the person who is basically the villain of the piece. I just hate him so, so much. It’s not his awful music, or his flat head, or his celebrity relationships. It’s the fact that he not only thought that he brought sexy back, but that it ever went away to begin with, and that emulating Michael Jackson was the way to reintroduce sexy to society. JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE. YOU ARE WRONG. I cannot see past my emotions here. Therefore:
In summary: Exceeds Expectations, in the way that rockets exceed the local school zone speed limit. But only 9.5/10 until you strap Justin Timberlake to one of those rockets.
I am having trouble writing this title without changing the word “played” to “plaid”, even though I know full well that it’s a completely different word. So this is me apologising in advance for any typos.
For those not aware of the Steig Larsson juggernaut, this movie is the film adaptation of the second installment of the Millennium Trilogy, a series of books set in Sweden and concerning Lisbeth Salander (computer hacker, tough, persecuted, and all like tattooed n stuff) and Mikael Blomkvist (investigative journalist, determined, roughly handsome, defender of Lisbeth) who team up together off and on to solve crimes. Except they are much more than that, too. Lisbeth has many personal issues to sort out, and is an expert researcher with a lot of resources at her hands; Blomkvist is in a polyamorous relationship with his co-worker Erika (in the book, anyway, as this isn’t touched on in the films) and cares deeply for Salander. The crimes they solve are multi-layered, often far-reaching into Swedish politics, and involve men who hate women—the latter phrase being the original Swedish title of the first book, The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo.
The Girl who Played with Fire begins about a year after the last movie ended, with Lisbeth returning to Sweden after months of overseas travel. She is checking up on Nils Bjurmann, the guardian who abused her in the first film, but her interaction with him causes her to be accused of the murder of two aspiring journalists—who were working for Blomkvist’s magazine. Lisbeth goes into hiding and investigates why she has been set up, and Blomkvist, who doesn’t believe the allegations against her, does the same. He is unable to contact her, but she is watching him and he knows it. Separately and together, they discover that this crime goes much deeper than they expected, and will affect their closest friends and family.
This film has had mixed reviews; I even read one that gave it that nasty little dog symbol. (Especially strange, because dogs are cool, aren’t they?) I can’t understand that at all—I really enjoyed it. Because I’m a fan of the books, for me, it’s like when you want to reread a favourite book but don’t quite have the time, so you kind of skim through to the most important scenes and just read those. Watching these movies is like that. The film miss some seemingly important aspects of the book, but I do think they do a good job of condensing long books into two hours of film.
As with the first film, the strength lies in the casting and the honesty of the actors. Unlike in Hollywood, the actors don’t feel quite as plastic. Lisbeth Salander is supposed to be boyish and skinny, and Noomi Rapace is exactly that; she is hardly unattractive, but she is whippet-thin, bereft of curves, and leaves her underarms unshaven. Mikael Blomkvist is played with rugged allure by Michael Nyqvist; he is soft around the belly and his skin bears marks of acne, but he is one of the most appealing men in cinema because of it. Lena Endre is Blomkvist’s love interest, Erika Berger, and she also is as beautiful as the book says she is, while still rocking wrinkles and a curving belly. I wish more films were shot like this, with gorgeous actors that aren’t built by surgery and Botox but through talent.
Night scenes are hauntingly beautiful, shot as if in black and white with a hint of colour. While The Girl who Played with Fire misses the lovely snowbound feel of the first film, the city of Stockholm does sparkle in this one. Because I had the knowledge of the books behind me, I understood the movie well and enjoyed it very much, despite the subject matter—violence against women, political manipulation of the system to the detriment of Lisbeth—being tremendously unpleasant. It was well paced, interesting, exciting, and doesn’t hold back on the ugliness of violence and people. There is a wonderfully shot love scene between Lisbeth and her girlfriend Miriam Wu, as they make love in the dark and the elderly gentleman in the row behind me cleared his throat repeatedly. It didn’t feel gratuitous and I felt again embarrassed about American and Australian movies lagging behind in the world of film.
I do feel—and heard from Chris—that if you hadn’t read the books, it could be difficult to follow, to understand all the connections, and to get involved with some of the peripheral characters that are heavily introduced in the book but skipped over in the film. There are also some oddities in the movie: Blomkvist is unable to open an envelope by himself and demands a knife from a waitress at the cafe he is in; Millennium doesn’t seem to have any other articles on the go during the film, making the employees seem a bit lazy; there are some deaths that have very sappy signposting; people don’t call the police when they witness violence, instead taking retribution into their own hands.
Altogether it remained, for me, a touching film, filled with brutality. It shows how Blomkvist and Salander can remain friends after being lovers, and does well at recreating the main characters and their world. It’s unable to do the impossible task of getting everything right, but tries very hard and it shows.
In summary: Meets Expectations (which were high.)
So I’ve read and loved all the Scott Pilgrim comics, and I’ve seen and loved Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, which means that when I heard this excellent, hilarious comic series was being made into a film by SotD’s excellent, hilarious director Edgar Wright, I just about tore apart my copy of Empire magazine with squeaking excitement. And since I heard about it, I’ve been waiting anxiously for August 12 to just goddamn hurry up already so I could watch it. (Though it turns out the film was showing at MIFF, knowledge of which eluded me despite my degree in Googlology.)
Scott Pilgrim is twenty-three years old, and a lazy, fairly useless but also amusing member of society who plays bass in a band called Sex Bob-omb. He is also dating a high-school girl named Knives Chau, and everyone is scandalised. (As drummer Kim Pine says, “If your life had a face, I’d punch you in it.”) Everything is going wonderfully for our Mr Pilgrim until one day he is sleeping and a girl with purple hair rollerskates through his dreams. And to Scott’s surprise, she’s real, and at a party he’s also attending—she’s Ramona Flowers, amazon.ca delivery girl and the woman he is now in love with. Problem is, to win the right to date Ramona, he has to battle her seven evil exes. Which is pretty dramatic. Chris only had four I had to defeat.
Wright held remarkably true to the feel of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s comics; he kept its video-game roots, bubbly bursts into song and pop-culture asides. As is often true with comic adaptations, some panels were used as storyboards on many occasions, with scenes portrayed exactly to the pose. Everyone’s hair and clothes were the same as they were supposed to be, the sets matching, the jokes the same—kudos, seriously, to Wright, who obviously loved the source material and wanted to share it with the world. The fights are full of action, with people flying into the sky and through walls in delightfully over-the-top smackdowns.
The problem for me (because I’m whiny, and there’s always a problem) lies in the fact that I’ve read the comics. With Wright cracking the same jokes I’d read again just a few weeks before, nothing really surprised me. Whenever someone made a non-comic joke, I laughed and spilled my popcorn, but when they made one I’d heard, well, I thought, “It was funnier in the tone I heard in my head.” And it is funny. Seriously, I can’t tell you how much Scott Pilgrim hits all my favourite chortle buttons. Scott himself is hilarious, in that he is a bit of an asshole yet strangely appealing, mostly because he’s funny and a bit dense (he asks roommate Wallace Wells at one point, “What’s the website for amazon.ca?”). All the characters have cracking one-liners, or fantastically awkward comebacks like normal people do. It’s lit-up and doesn’t take itself seriously and stars my secret boyfriend, Chris Evans.
But it tries to fit six comic paperbacks’ worth of material into less than two hours, and it shows. While Wright did a good job of making it clear what was happening, and shifted some things around to get all the fights in and all the relationship dramas, the fact was you were never given enough time to particularly care about anyone. I’d read and enjoyed the comics but still didn’t care about Scott or Ramona in their Michael Cera/Mary Elizabeth Winstead personas. Cera’s the new awkward It-boy, but it doesn’t make him instantly perfect for every role that involves stumbling your lines. I just don’t think he was right as Scott Pilgrim. Winstead was serviceable as Ramona, but is undoubtedly beautiful in a role destined for someone who looks more—I don’t know—quirky? Funny People’s Aubrey Plaza, who plays the monstrously vitriolic Julie in this film, looked the part and was very close to being fine, but delivered her lines in such a dreary tone of voice that I hated her, not in the pleasurably spite-filled way I had in the comic but in the standard annoyed sense. Actually, apart from a couple of people—Alison Pill is great as Kim Pine, Mae Whitman is as confusing and nutso as evil ex Roxy Richter should be, and Chris Evans does Attractive Asshole just as enjoyably as he did in Not Another Teen Movie—most of the casting felt off, but I’m not sure if Wright’s direction was at fault for getting good actors to, well, be less good. Even the superb Jason Schwartzmann was kind of dulled down as ultimate ex, the evil Gideon Graves.
Everyone spoke so fast, trying to get all the best lines into the film, that it felt like Wright had just done what he could to cram as much into the movie as possible, while still keeping to a respectable running time. Fights dragged out longer than necessary in some cases or just plain sucked—Scott fighting the Katayanagi twins was a standout of pained effects—and ate into time better spent working on everyone’s relationships, like Scott’s and Kim’s.
I brought up with Chris whether it was kid-friendly, as it’s bloodless, fairly swear-free and the one rude scene starts in underpants and cumulates in not having sex, but as he says, it’s also a movie without repercussions. Being an ass like Scott just means you get to date gorgeous girls like Knives and Ramona, even if you cheat on them with each other. Killing someone ends with them exploding into a pile of coins. Stealing your friend’s boyfriend—I’m looking at you, Wallace Wells—ends in nothing but a sigh. Sure, it’s a hyped-up, gaming-related reality where if you’re an evil enough ex you can conjure up a team of flying hipster demon girls to help you, but still. I was let down and thus will bang my fists on the keyboard and proclaim, “If I’d been the one to direct this, well, it would have been a masterpiece of modern theatre.”
Still, Edgar Wright did a good job of filming Scott Pilgrim. If you haven’t read the comics, you’ll probably adore it. If you have, maybe you still will. To an extent, I didn’t, though I fell far short of actively disliking it. Stick enough pixels and cartoonish boxes in anything and I’ll have affection for it, but that’s because my home kind of looks like that. But I won’t be buying this on DVD—though I’ll happily reread the comics again, and you should too. Because I am just as awkwardly heroic as Scott Pilgrim is to you, right?
Sometimes you decide to go to the movies and you head up the stairs to the cinema and it occurs to you: this is not my finest idea. When I went to see Team America: World Police on a Saturday night in the suburbs and the crowd was about 75% drunk sixteen-year-olds, I should have gone home, made a pot of tea and quietly read a book. Instead, I spent the film witnessing fights and ducking as people threw beer bottles at the screen, interspersed with occasional giggles (no lie, that vomiting scene almost made me pee my pants.) And the same feeling of apprehension washed over me when I went to see How to Train Your Dragon at 10:20am on the first Tuesday of the school holidays and the queue was made up of seven parents and ten million eight-year-olds.
Alas, not much will stop me from going to the movies when my heart is set on a Jumbo Combo (one large Coke, one large frozen Coke, one box of popcorn probably aimed for whole families but which ends up entirely in my belly) and something to write a scathing review about later. So me, Chris and our friend Emma took our seats four rows from the front and I prepared to have popcorn pegged at my head and kids screaming MUUUUM HE’S TOUCHING MY ARMREST and NO THAT IS MY CHOCTOP YOURS IS BANANA WAIT I WANT THE BANANA ONE for the entire film. Turns out, I should not be so cynical about the youth of today. All the kidlets were impeccably behaved and the only time they were noticeable was when they were totally adorable: during the generic skit at the start which tells you to put on your 3D glasses and shows a robot puppy chasing a ball, the little girl in our row reached out to hug the puppy. (Aww, right?) And once the movie had finished and we were sitting in our chairs waiting for Fiona to watch the credits for some exciting thing at the ending (there is none), about fifty kids barrelled down to the floor in front of the cinema, spread their arms out and proceeded to run happily around being dragons with each other. (AWWW, right?)
Anyway, now that my cinematic experience has been shared fully, you’d probably like to know about the movie itself. It has to be said that I was surprised to find that the best action movie I’ve seen so far this year is this by a mile. The dragon fight scenes, especially at the end, had my heart beating faster and I was clinging to Chris’s hand with all the nervous tension I was not really expecting. I don’t think it was necessarily the 3D—though it was good—as much as just great direction. It’s heartstopping stuff.
The film, based on Cressida Cowell’s novel, tells the story of young Viking Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), a spindly thing who doesn’t fit in with the oversized other members of the island he lives on. Hiccup wants desperately to be a dragon killer like his father, played with as much of Scotland as Gerard Butler could muster. Alas, he is a bit weedy—comparatively speaking—which means he is unable to lift anything to fling or stab at a dragon, and is thus made to hang out with the blacksmith and make the weapons for the big boys and girls to use. But he’s a smart one, and he comes up with his own contraption to fight the dragons...which both fails when it brings further ruin to Hiccup’s village, but succeeds when he does, in fact, net one of the creatures.
Enter Toothless: a big adorable and now broken dragon, looking like a cat who fell out of an icanhascheezburger.com image and hit its head on a Lilo and Stitch DVD on the way down. He purrs, he flaps his lizardy frill around like kitty radar ears, and you just want to hug him and squeeze him. Hiccup sees in Toothless not an enemy, but someone else who’s just trying to survive. How can he convince his bloodthirsty tribe that the way to defeat the dragons is not with weapons but with some good old-fashioned Disney Dreamworks love?
Not helping is his crush on ponytail-flipping fighter Astrid, and Hiccup’s demoralising relationship with his father. (The line “I have no son!” is uttered, so you can tick that box in your Movie Bingo sheet.) Familial pain aside, the movie veers from serious to slapstick when called for. Hiccup’s fellow youths, a bunch of sexily-named sidekicks (examples: Snotlout, Fishlegs, Tuffnut and Ruffnut) who, along with Astrid, are completing dragon training along with him but don’t really like him, are there to mess things up and cause general hijinks.
Some of the Viking warriors don’t come home from the expeditions to find the dragons’ nest, but actual death is kept mostly off-screen. The finale, which inevitably has a moment where you think anxiously, “Will my heroes die?” as if you’re watching The Departed instead of a kid’s movie, actually does surprise with a slight twist on the happy ending that makes it seem more, er, realistic. It seemed potentially scary to me, especially in a genuinely creepy scene where the dragons’ nest is discovered by Hiccup, but the kids in the cinema with me weren’t crying, so perhaps I’m just a bigger ’fraidy-cat than your average six-year-old.
It’s a gorgeous film visually, has enough gags for everyone and the dragons will totally steal your heart. (The first thing I said when the credits rolled was “we are going to the toy store RIGHT NOW.” Though they’d already sold out of all the Toothless figurines, which means I’m also a slower runner than your average six-year-old.) I did think the movie dragged a little while Hiccup and Toothless established their relationship, but it picked up when the dragon training started and, well, never let off from there. The voice acting from the likes of America Ferrera, Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse and my secret boyfriend David Tennant is all fine, despite the fact that as in the awesomely terrible 300, everyone just used their normal accents, meaning Vikings were apparently just Scottish or American. (They had boats, maybe it’s true.) But despite that, the movie’s a whole lot of fun, the 3D never overdone and occasionally beautiful, and if you don’t also want to go out and buy a Toothless figurine at the end of it, then we clearly aren’t on the same page.
