RECOMMENDED

The kick-ass experience: “Haywire” is kinetic neo-pulp that lands halfway between the solar plexus and the lizard part of the mind. The latest by prolific director-cinematographer-editor Steven Soderbergh, working a third time with screenwriter Lem Dobbs, after “Kafka” and “The Limey,” is self-conscious filmmaking, using genre trappings and a multi-double-triple-cross espionage plot to explore Soderbergh’s most consistent latterday theme—where government meets money and money wins—as well as the potential of a distaff Jean Claude Van Damme taking down a succession of handsome male adversaries (with notably crummy haircuts), largely through physicality alone. (The movie’s original, double-entendre title was “Knockout.”) Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

When does work become a “work”?

Almost as fascinating as the cool, perfectionist sheen of David Fincher’s version of “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” is the tattoo of tales of the making of the movie. Collaborators seem to go to special lengths to point out that the painstaking focus Fincher applies to his work is just what he does: his splendid perfectionism isn’t workaholism, it’s work, the work. He’s Lisbeth Salander in his own immodest analytical skills. As the film industry transforms in so many ways, in every way, from distribution to projection to production, the directors who’ve unapologetically forged their own way are often as fascinating behind-the-scenes as they are on screen. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“I want you to help me find a killer of women.”

Rooney Mara attains the role of Lisbeth Salander in “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” with the slightest lift of her chin on hearing those words, the coldest fire in her eyes, as she matches the gaze of Daniel Craig’s Mikael Blomkvist.

Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy of novels reads, in its present English, like the worst rush translation on Earth, but at its heights, the late author’s moments of pulse-rushing pulp instinct are vital. And its immodest beating heart is Lisbeth. As adapted by screenwriter Steven Zaillian and director David Fincher, “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” is terse, telegraphic, fluent, a watercolor composed in molten pewter pen nib. Read the rest of this entry »

Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s animated motion-capture 3D “The Adventures Of Tintin” (known on its October release in Europe as “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn”), from several of Hergé’s graphic novels, may perplex the unacquainted and confound the devout. (It did not go over as a treat in Blighty.) It made me thirstier than a Haddock. I feel winded even reaching toward my notes. While the intention may have been to explore what’s possible in live action, in a new vocabulary of unattractive animation at the kind of headlong pace that would match today what “Raiders of the Lost Ark” accomplished in 1982, the end result is more winded than winding, a dispirited ragbag of faux-naiveté and unlikeable, weird-looking, strange-moving characters. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

What a generous goof! Contemporary digital-film technology contends that anything is possible: just imagine it, draw it, pre-viz it, throw a few football fields’ worth of computing power in a corporate terabyte farm and it is so! Your millions will come streaming back to you in satisfying increments over the course of your multiyear investment. Too many movies are demonstrating that just isn’t so. Weirdly, all the things that make the motion-capture animation of “The Adventures of Tintin” an almost unwatchable rush of half-baked slapstick and headlong “action,” work in contrary fashion in “Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol,” the first feature film directed by animation good-guy Brad Bird. Bird bends the physical world to the needs of the faux-physics of the self-aware decamillion-dollar action movie, working with the weft of spectacle and the possibility of an unlikely, but sudden snuff, but also the weave of kinetic potential of composition as surely as he did in “The Incredibles.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” a labyrinthine tale about British espionage and spycraft, is an adaptation of John le Carre’s 1974 novel, from Tomas Alfredson, the director of “Let The Right One In.”

The level of patience and control is similar between the two films: in the superb, measured “Tinker Tailor,” we realize there’s horror inside all of us, the potential for terrible things. George Smiley (Gary Oldman) may not even know it consciously, but he’s just waiting to spring cruelty on someone. After a botched mission, a search for a double-agent in Britain’s MI6 begins: the complex interlocking narratives are enacted by a brilliant, precise Oldman, but also John Hurt, Mark Strong, Ciarán Hinds, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Simon McBurney, Toby Jones and Colin Firth. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

At the end of “Sherlock Holmes” (2009), a mysterious mastermind absconded with a newfangled radio-controlled trigger devised by an occult mastermind from the Temple of Four Orders. In “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows,” also set in 1891, Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris) emerges from a shadowy tiny part as that absconder. Once again, wily operative Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) is in his employ, and not long in the arms or handcuffs of detective Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.), a character created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and dubbed by Downey “an intellectual superhero.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

After the kapow kick-netics of Raymond Wong’s two Donnie Yen-starring “Ip Man”  origin films, Herman Yau’s 2010 prequel, ” The Legend Is Born: Ip Man” (Yip Man chinchyun) doesn’t hit new heights but it remains a big-screen eyeful, the kind of efficiently choreographed martial-arts action scenes that are joyful in any format. There’s talk among the characters about keeping the history of Wing Chun fighting to the “authentic styles”—anti-Japanese sentiments are bruited—but even the eldest characters concede that the lessons that will be handed down will be blended with other influences, and from those, decades in progress, voila, we have Bruce Lee, trained by a master. Read the rest of this entry »

More comic than any of the identikit wisecracks in “The Killer Elite” would have been if this period story of retired OSS men at each others’ throats—kicked, punched and snarled through by Jason Statham, Robert DeNiro and Clive Owen—had kept the title of its source material, a book by Ranulph Fiennes called “The Feather Men.” The Feather Men! Then again, this dizzying assemblage of editing overkill is so murky in motivation, outcome and cinematography, that now vastly ironic title would crumple to a whimper almost instantly. A few of director Gary McKendry’s would-be iconic images are strong, like Statham’s gentle clenching-unclenching of his palm as blood congeals under the main title, but the restless editing seldom pauses. The dialogue has more lumps than fast-food oatmeal: “yer geezer”; “ah, yah horny git”; “g’wan, yah cheeky buggers”; “Well, it’s 5 o’clock somewhere, iddn’t it?”; “He’s your worst nightmare”; “War’s never over until both sides say it’s so” and the marvel, “C’mon, shit happens when you play the deep end of the pool, Danny.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Fireworks come screaming across the sky. Near the hulking fortress of a London housing estate, five teenagers are mid-mugging. It’s Guy Fawkes Day; a larger flare falls to earth. Monsters. Alien monsters. Who can save the “block”? Five unlikely heroes and their once-victim, now reluctant co-human, are on the run, through the streets, through the vast estate’s corridors as more monsters land and hunt. There’s only one enemy now. (“Inner city vs. outer space” is one of the filmmakers’ coinages for the elemental conflict.) Running under ninety minutes, even with end credits, Joe Cornish’s debut feature is triumphantly rude and violent and headlong thrilling and even funny, honoring worlds of influence that came before. The richest gift of Cornish’s work is how it’s permeated with influence, but he listens to film history the way he listened to the kids near his home and the actors in his film to create its fast, funny lingo: transformatively. Read the rest of this entry »