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“The Men Who Hate Women” is the blunt original title of the late Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s worldwide bestseller; its harsh portrait of that country’s industry and welfare state earns it. But can a story about misogyny inadvertently traffic in it? As “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo,” it’s a barn-burner of a page-turner, the first of three novels Larsson left behind (films have been made of all three; the other two will be released this summer). The adaptation by director Niels Arden Oplev (“Portland”) is an adroit compression of its angry themes and doesn’t stint on the graphic material. (Its distributor is Chicago-based Music Box Films; see related story.) Financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvis) has been convicted of libel and will be going to prison, which allows an aging industrialist from the fractious Vanger clan to hire him to investigate a forty-year-old mystery about a missing girl. Before he’s hired, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a young investigator with epic hacker skills, investigates him. Their paths cross, and soon they are in league together in an increasingly epic search for a serial killer. The two-and-a-half-hour running time never feels leisurely, although three scenes involving rape and retribution involving Salander and an advocate assigned to her by the state go well into NC-17-level cruelty. (It’s one of the key differences between page and screen, especially involving violence: you imagine only as much as you need to while reading.) While made for television, Oplev’s visual style, from design to lighting to framing, has cinematic sweep (and the men’s cardigan budget must have been daunting). While several plot strands are swept away, there are lingering glances and hints toward them which suggest the filmmakers thought most of their audience would be familiar with the novels. One bit of compression that takes the place of pages of exposition suggests “Blow-Up” mingled with the brief clip that exists of Anne Frank turning her head as seen in a window: it’s the sort of creative solution that lands its own punch. 151m. (Ray Pride)

“The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” opens Friday at Landmark Century and Landmark Renaissance in Highland Park.

Iowans react to an outbreak of a virus that not only elevates their body temperature, but makes them kill neighbors and loved ones, although not livestock. First-person shooter thrills go exponential in a spree of Iowan-on-Iowan mayhem. The infected versus the disinfectors. “Initiate Containment Protocol” reads a directive annotating a satellite image of Pierce County. Extreme hygiene ensues. Breck Eisner (son of former Paramount and Disney exec Michael) directs a screenplay by two updaters of horror films: Scott Kosar did the 2005 version of the 1979 “The Amityville Horror” and 2003’s remake of 1974’s “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”; and Ray Wright rescripted the 2001 “Kairo” into the 2006 “Pulse.” “The Crazies” revisits the 1973 original by George Romero, credited here as an executive producer. Horror shocks are added and political satire is subtracted. Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) and town doctor Judy (Radha Mitchell) are upgraded from volunteer fireman and nurse, respectively. Songwise, “Heaven Help Us” is replaced by a Johnny Cash cover of “We’ll Meet Again,” perhaps a nod to “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” (“When Johnny Comes Marching Home” is heard in all three films.) Eisner sounds savvy when calling our Midwestern wasteland “endless plateaus of nothingness” but this USC grad is silly to label his work “extremely thoughtful.” From the director of the fun, issue-free “Sahara,” that may be a stretch. This otherwise satisfying genre exercise blows off opportunities to contemporize Romero’s pointed references to Vietnam with new ones to Iraq and Afghanistan. That self-immolating priest in 1973 has no counterpart in the shoe-bomber of 2001 or the underwear-bomber of 2009? Eisner reportedly fact-checked the etiology of his crazed characters who look and act like they could have rabies, tetanus and erythema multiforme. What really ails them and their victims is a viral fear that entered our vital national fluids after 9/11. With Danielle Panabaker, Joe Anderson, Christie Lynn Smith, John Aylward, Glenn Morshower. 101m. (Bill Stamets)

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(Hausu, 1977) “House” is so much stranger than “The Room.” “The Room” may be from another planet, but Nobuhiko Obayashi’s hallucinatory House” is from another universe, or, it’s like “an episode of Scooby Doo as directed by Dario Argento” as distributor Janus Films inventively suggests. Attempting to capture the fanciful imagination of his 11-year-old daughter, Obayashi’s pop-art haunted-house freak-out featuring seven teenage girls manages to be both compulsively watchable and completely indigestible. It’s a buffet of strangeness, grape bubblegum meets sashimi meets Sid and Marty Krofft’s “Banana Splits.” The detached fingertips picking out tunes on a very hungry piano are one of the inspired nightmare images you’ll be repeating for weeks. Disembodied kung fu-kicking girl’s legs? The bursts of animation, including a demonic cat (seen on the stunningly bold poster) and tragically sweet pop are equally random. It’s glorious delirium and downright nuts. 110m. (Ray Pride)

“House” opens Friday at Siskel. The trailer is below. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island,” a consummate genre exercise, is not—and this is for the best—another “Cape Fear.” Instead, it’s a thrill of form and function, a fully crafted exercise in visual style and classical genre legerdemain.

In some of Scorsese’s pictures of the past couple of decades, “Casino” being the example that comes quickest to mind, the effect of so much antic erudition turns claustrophobic, even out in the desert, an overlay of shimmering design and compacted footnoting of the film history that makes up the grey matter in Scorsese’s colorful brain. But even beyond its salute to myriad movies most of us would never have heard of, let alone seen, “Shutter Island”’s asylum-set story is ideal for this treatment: claustrophobia, physical and mental, is made evident in every turn, fully, gloriously, inhabiting the haunted house of the mind.

An obvious and key inspiration that Scorsese cites is Robert Wiene’s 1924 “Caligari,” so it’s useful to consider “Shutter Island” as “The Cabinet of Teddy Daniels.” It’s 1954, and Teddy is a U. S. Marshal dispatched to Ashecliffe Hospital, an asylum on a rocky island offshore from Boston, to find the identity of a missing patient among the criminally insane. Teddy’s new partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), leads Teddy through an investigation that moves through the wards and across the rough island, but also its raft of ominous characters, including a trimly goateed Ben Kingsley as the hospital’s director and Max von Sydow as a German-accented doctor. The timeframe of Dennis Lehane’s novel (adapted by Laeta Kalogridis, who worked as a story editor on “Avatar” for James Cameron) means wounds from World War II are still raw, including Teddy’s memories of being one of the soldiers who liberated the Nazi’s Dachau concentration camp. It’s the era of the House Un-American Activities Committee, as well, and their witchhunts are invoked, and there’s more mental pain as well, with the migraine-prone Teddy also stricken with bad dreams about the death of his wife (Michelle Williams). (The resonance with the modern day is in how much of Teddy’s stress rests in what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder.)

“How do you believe a crazy person?” is a key line in the dialogue, suggesting as well, how do you believe a constructed narrative, or a seemingly unstable and thus unreliable narrator, or how does a marshal get viable testimony from a world that is only comprised of the mad and their controllers. Scorsese’s always been stronger on mood and character than plot-driven storytelling, but one of the great pleasures moment-by-moment in “Shutter Island” is how the mechanics of the story work: even when you think you’ve figured out one aspect of how subjective or objective a certain scene is, there’s another little bit that’s superbly crafted that fits right into the evolving mystery.

On the ferry to the island, the visual style is already off-kilter and disorienting, with a nauseated Teddy surrounded by chains and clamps and damp-mottled walls that provide nightmarish atmosphere, already the trappings of the charnel house. The first flashes we see of memories of his wife are typical, the first of two shots showing her barelegged in a summer dress, surrounded by sunlight, an apparition, golden, chiding, reaching to kiss Teddy, arch of foot and red-enameled toes, a gentle angelic smile; the second shot cuts abruptly, a half-second or more sooner than we expect: even memory is unreliable.

Cinematographer Robert Richardson’s palette is classical, heightened, burnished, with especial attention paid to eyes, capturing the flickers of thought expressed by DiCaprio, Ruffalo, Kingsley and the rest. It’s something missing from a lot of latter-day movies, especially those originating on high-definition video: concentration paid to the sculpting of light to express space, and to allow an audience to see the performers’ eyes. (These are not stained windows to the soul.) The other actors, not listed in the opening credits, walk a tightrope in what they reveal as well, but John Carroll Lynch, as one of the wardens of the asylum who’s on hand to lead Teddy and Chuck around the island, remains perhaps the most distinctive of little-recognized American character actors, who can indicate an entire character with a nod of chin, the slightest of basso intonation.

Operatic in many senses of the word, the score is assembled from existing music by Robbie Robertson, and leans very little on pop, instead drawing on needle-drops of exquisite gloom and bedlam from modern composers like Brian Eno, John Cage, Nam June Paik, Morton Feldman and especially a haunting end-title mix of Dinah Washington’s vocal for “This Bitter Earth” mixed with Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight,” from the movie “Pi” (another horror-of-the-mind movie). John Adams’ orchestral “Christian Zeal and Activity,” from the 1970s, dovetails nicely, too.

Terrible things happen within dream sequences that are boldly colored and inventively eruptive as the universe of Paul Schrader’s “Mishima,” and Scorsese’s evocation of movies from the era and from the noir-and-snakepit genres, as well as the superb Robert Mitchum mystery “Out of the Past” to the atmospheric work of producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur, never detracts or becomes top-heavy: going for baroque, Scorsese winds up with a rococo entertainment of glistening delirium. The claustrophobia is form and function: in the end, “Shutter Island” is about the life sentence everyone’s issued, until memory goes: sentenced to life in the mind.

“Shutter Island” opens Friday.

Vampires will come and go, but zombies have staying power. As part of the Facets Night School, Facets Cinematheque will show George Romero’s classic “Day of the Dead” at midnight this Saturday, February 20. Facets’ Patrick Ogle, who will lead a pre-screening lecture, says, “George Romero created the ‘movie zombie’ as we know it in ‘Night of the Living Dead.’ Before that—and there are some exceptions to what I am about to say—zombies were ‘voodoo zombies’ or an adaptation of ‘voodoo zombies.’” “Day of the Dead” is the third installment in Romero’s “Dead” trilogy, and as Ogle puts it, “Is the poor stepchild amongst the first three Romero zombie films. It is the grimiest of the movies.” Tickets for the night’s event are five dollars, and include an educational packet with notes, essays and a bibliography for further reading. There will also be raffles for movies, posters and books. And if the movie and discussion isn’t enough for your undead palate, Ogle jokes, “I usually kill an audience member and eat their brains.” (Peter Cavanaugh)

Like the sepia-jaundiced monochrome of the dusty “The Book of Eli,” the gloomy blue-gray palette of the dank “The Wolfman” surrounds us in an unmistakable and inescapable place. Mise-en-scène, of course, is more than color, decor, costume, howls and yak-hair extensions. There is how characters make sense of this sunless land of leafless branches and ominous full moons. Writers Andrew Kevin Walker (“Se7en”) and David Self (“The Haunting”) “update” Curt Siodmak’s 1941 screenplay for “The Wolf Man” by wreathing this werewolf classic with a welter of threads and tangents. Benicio Del Toro plays Lawrence Talbot, a Shakespearean thespian raised in America after a stint in an asylum.  His brother’s fiancée Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt) beckons him to his birthplace of Blackmoor. His missing brother Ben is found in a local country ditch ripped to shreds. Their father is Sir John Talbot (Anthony Hopkins). The unkempt estate of this nobleman bespeaks inner diseases of soul, tooth and claw. Hunting trophies abound. Nearby is a sepulcher to his late wife, slain years ago in the same manner as her son Ben. Director Joe Johnston (“The Rocketeer,” “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids”) handles the gothic saga with refreshing seriousness, with a trace of “X-Files” circa 1891. The syllabus of “The Wolfman” includes: class friction, gypsy lynching, animal rights and British colonial blowback via blood-borne curses. Sir John is partial to a prodigal-son reading of his long-gone Lawrence’s fateful homecoming. More to the point is the funny Freudian episode in a London medical amphitheater in a disastrous test of a diagnosis of a repressed primal scene. Gwen weighs the ontology of monsters, as if siding with the existential Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s 1879 novel: “If such things exist, if they are possible, then everything is: magic, God…” In another apt borrowing, composer Danny Elfman channels a key motif from Wojciech Kilar’s 1992 score for “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” With Hugo Weaving, Art Malik, Geraldine Chaplin. 103m. (Bill Stamets)

By Ray Pride

There’s small, there’s large, there’s big, and then there’s overblown and overbearing.

There’s the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, there’s “King Kong,” and now there’s Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Alice Sebold’s unlikely bestseller, “The Lovely Bones,” written with his usual collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. “The Lovely Bones” is narrated from beyond the grave by a young girl, Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), as she watches over her parents (Rachel Weisz, Marc Wahlberg) and her rapist-murderer (Stanley Tucci), trying to make sense of what’s happened to her so she can move beyond the strange limbo she’s in. This is where the overbearing part comes in: in concept, her surroundings are limited to the experience and emotions of a girl her age, but the riot of stylized color and bold backdrops is less evocative of pictorial masters of subjective delirium like Powell and Pressburger (“Black Narcissus,” “The Red Shoes”) than of IMAX-sized screensavers. Fields and skies that resemble ads for over-the-counter antihistamines do the tale no favor, either.

But after its Oscar-qualifying run, Paramount and DreamWorks made a bold marketing choice, pulling the film’s Christmas release and rescheduling for mid-January. Jackson has so superlatively realized the emotional surges of an immature, inexperienced girl that it’s now being positioned as a film for an audience that sees and re-sees the “Twilight” movies. It’ll be fascinating to see how that plays out, even if some older viewers wonder where the bold yet delicate director of “Heavenly Creatures” went. Read the rest of this entry »

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“Daybreakers,” written and directed by twin brothers Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig (makers of 2003’s outback zombie tale “Undead”), is set in 2019, when most of the world has “turned” after a plague, becoming vampires (or “vamps,” as the script has it) dependent on an ever-decreasing population of humans for blood to put in their morning coffee. Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) is a hematologist vamp researching a blood substitute for his boss Charles Bromley (Sam Neill), head of the Bromley Marks Corporation, “World Leader in Blood Pharmacy.” The yellow contacts Hawke wears are almost unnecessary, set against his impressively high, gaunt 40-year-old cheekbones. He carries a kind of survivor’s guilt, wishing he could be disinfected, to become human, mortal, again. The opposition is represented by a cross-bow wielding human with a secret named Elvis (Willem Dafoe): vampiric even when playing ordinary humanity, Dafoe’s cracker Van Helsing drawls the bulk of the movies’ punchlines (“Bein’ human in a world full of vampires is as safe as barebacking a five-dollar whore.”) Read the rest of this entry »

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(Mammut) Lukas Moodysson worries for the world but not the chance of his own embarrassment: while “Mammoth” is at its weakest points of inspiration only so much Babel, the Swedish writer-director does strain with intermittent success toward the lyrical. Leo (Gael García Bernal) is a childish videogame designer about to seal a deal in Asia, leaving wife Ellen (Michelle Williams) in their New York City loft (crafted and shot in Sweden rather than above Soho streets) with their 8-year-old daughter and Gloria (Marife Necesito), their Filipino nanny. Moodysson intercuts New York life with Leo’s lollygagging in Bangkok and Gloria’s small boys back home, who long for their mother. Child endangerment, prostitution and the threat of child rape ensue. Actions have consequences. Screenplays have structure. Undercooked moralism thuds. Moodysson’s concern for the life of the child shines in movies like “Show Me Love” and even the grim “Lilja 4-Ever.” His themes are more forced here, and the surroundings of the characters, the production design of the rich couple’s pampered environs versus shanty life everywhere else speak more profoundly of a world of unequal opportuity. Bourgeois, beware! Moodysson’s English-language dialogue is overwrought, but Williams, especially, inhabits it. A doctor of children oblivious to the children of the world until they bleed out in her E/R! Still, that heavy-handedness lands with a soft thump alongside her capable features. The music score draws on songs by Ladytron and an oddly placed Cat Power tune. And, in a year of chilling, apt endings, the last line of “Mammoth” is in a class of its own: it’s perfectly demonstrated that someone has learned nothing. Then Chan Marshall plays. 125m. (Ray Pride)

“Mammoth” opens Friday at Facets.

By Ray Pride

One of my favorite new words I learned recently was Icelandic: “Kreppa.”

Depression, collapse crisis, whatever: the crunchy onomatopoeia of “kreppa” struck Reykjavik last year. Roll the eyes, raise the brow: “Eh, it’s the kreppa.” Nearly the same’s the case with Greece. There were riots Sunday over the anniversary of a police shooting in Athens last December; a meltdown of the economic system essentially began this Tuesday morning, with the European Union hoping to “fence off” the strain on its overextended economy. Icelandic mortgages have triggers that may kick in within a few days that demolish the last of home equity among its landholders. These are just countries the politics of which I follow. But food’s still on the table, right? Closer to home, this Monday, a subsidiary of food giant Cargill was again accused of trafficking contaminated meat, weeks after a New York Times exposé of previous incidences of fouled meat.

In the modern world, information wants to be freely deconstructed and recontextualized. You could make a case from disparate strands like these that either leaders are hapless or the future is hopeless, as does Michael Ruppert, the single solitary figure in “Collapse,” a documentary by Chris Smith. Smith is best known for “American Movie,” which, with its post-”X-Files,” post-Errol Morris, post-9/11, mid-paranoiac fashion, could also be the name of this enterprise. Read the rest of this entry »