The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2/5 Stars)

A tepid lukewarm anticlimax

Wow, talk about a disappointment. The third film in the Millennium trilogy plays less like a thriller than as a scam. There isn’t an independent movie here. Well, actually there could have been. You could plausibly take the movies, “The Girl Who Played with Fire,” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” cut out all the repetitive exposition and superfluous plot points and combine the rest into a superior movie. But instead we have a story that takes twice as long as it should to tell. Why? Perhaps it was because they knew a person like me who loved the first movie, aka a sucker, would on principle go and see every movie in the series. (It may have also mattered that the author is dead and thus can’t write an unlimited amount of sequels. They may be trying to squeeze the most profit out of a limited supply.)

If you saw the first two movies then you basically know what happens in this movie. Not much new is introduced. As in the second movie, the journalist Mikael Blomvist, played a third time by Michael Nyquvist, is writing an expose on a secret cabal called “The Section.” They are involved in communist defection, sex trafficking, really bad stuff like that. Quite a lot of time is spent on him going around and telling people what the story is about and when he plans to publish. The story is retold several times. Meanwhile our heroine Lisbeth Salandar, played again by Noomi Rapace, is in the hospital healing from several bullet wounds. The main set piece of the movie is her trial for the attempted murder of her father. All of the evidence presented at the trial is taken directly from the previous two movies. It is a pretty clear case of self-defense and there is little suspense as to the outcome of it. The prosecution has a flimsy argument (Lisbeth is crazy), which it repeats endlessly. I think you hear it about four times by the time the movie is over.  

The first two movies did a very good job of being thrillers. The plots were always very procedural but they still managed to insert realistic action sequences and fights at appropriate intervals. Would it surprise you to know that there is but one action sequence in this entire movie, that it is not very long, and it is perhaps the least exciting action sequence in the entire series? I mean what the hell is that all about. Has the director, Daniel Alfredson, forgotten the genre he is working in?

The worst thing of course is even though the plot of this movie is wafer-thin it still had room for action. Alfredson simply chose not to shoot any of it. Everything is told in the passive voice. For example, Blomvist apartment is broken into and documents are stolen. Instead of showing the break-in as it is happening (action!), we are shown Blomvist talking to a security guard about the break-in (passive voice). Then there is the character of Niederman, the huge baddie/Lisbeth’s half-brother from the second movie. Several times in this movie the plot calls for him to steal cars, break into homes, and kill people. Do we see that happen? No, we see Niederman sitting and watching TV in somebody’s home as the camera slowly zooms out to reveal a dead guy in the background. If you can believe it, one of the biggest threats in this movie is a couple of anonymous email that are sent to the journalists and say insidious things like, “Are you afraid of the dark?” Talk about lukewarm scares. Really, it kind of surprises me that this movie is rated R. Almost nothing happens.

The first movie had this very dangerous edge to it that made watching it a really visceral thrilling experience. That feeling is basically nonexistent here. There is a scene where Salandar walks down a hallway in full gothic battle regalia, piercings, and Mohawk. It looks cool but such badassness feels out of place in such a tepid movie. In fact, the whole character of Lisbeth Salandar has been reduced to what is essentially a supporting role. She spends the whole time in a hospital and then a courtroom. Her character is not the type that speaks much, so when she is also not physically doing anything, well, not very much happens. True, Noomi Rapace is one of the few actresses who can still be interesting while just sitting there, but that isn’t nearly enough to carry what is supposed to be a thriller. It should be noted that the Mr. Lazy, Daniel Alfredson, was not the director for the first film. That director was a guy named Niels Arden Oplev. I don’t know why they didn’t pick him to direct the entire trilogy but whoever made that decision really screwed up royally.  

You know who could do a much better job with this story? David Fincher, that’s who. His version starring Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig comes out next year. Just in time too, I still haven’t gotten enough of Lisbeth Salandar. Let’s remind the Swedes what a badass movie looks like. 

Fair Game (3/5 Stars)

Wait, wasn’t this supposed to be about WMD’s?

On January 2003, President George W. Bush gave his State of the Union address. That speech contained these sixteen words: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” One man, former ambassador to Niger Joe Wilson, found those words rather disconcerting. Why? Because he had been sent on a fact-finding mission to Niger and had concluded that the supposed sale of yellowcake uranium was nonexistent. He told the administration exactly that. But here it was presented as fact in the President’s biggest speech of the year. A big speech made even more important because it presented the administration’s case for the Iraq war. He called the State Department and they confirmed that when the President said Africa, he was talking about the supposed sale in Niger.

But this movie isn’t about that. It’s about what happened after Joe Wilson decided to call out the White House by writing a NY Times Op-Ed piece titled, “What I didn’t find in Africa.” The administration responded by doing a rather curious thing. They revealed in a national newspaper that Joe’s wife, Valerie, was a covert CIA operative. This movie is about her job and how she lost it, the media circus around it, and how it almost destroyed her marriage. The movie claims that the whole Valerie Plame debate was simply a diversionary tactic that distracted everybody from the real topic: why the administration felt that there was enough evidence to state in the biggest speech of the year that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Africa. In a way the administration has succeeded even in this very friendly pro-Wilson/Plame movie. We get hints as to why the administration did what they did, but it is never clearly stated. In the second half of the movie, that part of the story is all but lost. The focus becomes the marriage. We have become distracted.

In a way I am being unfair. Since this is a story based on real events and real people, it would probably not be entirely ethical to have an actor play a character named Karl Rove and have him saying, “I did this because…” If the makers of the movie don’t know, they certainly shouldn’t put words into the mouths of real people. But then again, this is a movie and the makers are telling a story. When judging a movie based on fact, one of the best questions a reviewer should ask is this: Would this still be a good movie if it were entirely fictional? If you can’t make it work, you should probably be making a documentary. (Or at the very least you should have one character ask another, “Why are they doing this?” and then the other can say, “I don’t know.”)

Case in point, one of the best scenes in the movie is when Scooter Libby, aide to the Vice President, visits the Central Intelligence Agency and interviews one-by-one the CIA agents working on nonproliferation about some aluminum tubes. One CIA agent believes that they were being used to build nuclear fuel centrifuges. All of the other CIA agents have doubts because these tubes are the wrong size, type, and haven’t been used in any nuclear fuel reactor since 1952. But of course, they aren’t certain and they shouldn’t be. It’s not like the CIA has omniscient intelligence. Libby brings up the fact that in the First Gulf War Saddam Hussein actually was working on weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear bombs, and the CIA knew absolutely nothing about it. (For a comprehensive list of other things the CIA didn’t know or got wrong, go and read the book Legacy of Ashes.)  What Libby wants is the one agent who thinks the tubes are real evidence. As long as nobody else in the agency can tell him with 100% certainty that Hussein isn’t up to anything, he doesn’t care what he or she says. (95% isn’t good enough). Remember that line from ‘In the Loop,’ “In the land of ignorance, the man with one fact is king.”

Did that scene actually happen exactly as scripted and shot? I haven’t the slightest clue. But it is one of the best scenes because it explained the motivation of the antagonists in the story. That never happens again. We never get to know why the administration put the words in the speech or why they thought outing Valerie was a good idea. In the second half of the movie, we are shown quite a lot of talking heads on cable news bad-mouthing the Wilsons. But who are those people? Why are they saying those things? Did the administration tell them to do it? How does that work? It really isn’t enough to simply say that a smear is going on. What are the mechanics of a smear? Better yet, how do you tell if it is working? Who won this battle? What is the end result of a bunch of pundits yelling at each other on TV? The marriage survived, Libby was convicted, and a movie made. Are Joe and Valerie victors? Better yet, should we care? Because after all, isn’t the real issue WMD’s? My favorite scene in the movie takes place at a dinner party while Valerie is still a CIA operative currently working on the aluminum tubes thing. The other people at the table start up a really ignorant discussion about them, repeating all the stupid things they heard on TV. And there is Valerie sitting silently unable to discuss them in any way. Why? Because it would blow her cover to let on that she knows more than anybody at the table. Does it ever seem to you like the loudest most morally certain people around rarely know what they’re talking about?   

The movie ends with what is unfortunately becoming a movie cliché. The old “call to action.” Joe Wilson gives a speech to a classroom and implores the young people to go out there, become involved, and “do something about it.” I have passively heard this before and usually nodded my head but I will finally admit that I don’t really know what he means. Does he want me to vote Democrat or what? Should I become the annoying person at the dinner party? Should I think for myself by reading books other people recommend? Should I stop watching “Real Housewives” and get a life (i.e. do anything else)? Only one of these questions can I answer with real certainty. I prefer the way the documentary “The Cove” went about its call to action: Simply send a text message to sign a petition. Now that’s something I can do.

One more complaint: Doug Liman’s directing. He uses a hand-held camera for almost all of the shots. Bad decision. A hand-held camera tends to be shaky, unclear, and consistently out of focus in long shots. This can be annoying and distracting. There are times when a hand-held camera is called for. A documentary type film like, “JFK,” is a masterful example of that. The shaky camera in that movie works because the story itself is mysterious and unclear. A shaky camera works best as an admission from the director that the audience shouldn’t know exactly what is happening. The shakier the cam: the more uncertain the events. (This is also the reason why the History Channel uses blurred shaky cameras as well. They don’t know exactly what went on.) In this movie, Liman seems to be making the mistake that a shaky cam actually makes the movie feel more realistic and thus convincing. It doesn’t. It does the opposite. When a director wants to persuade the audience of his version of the facts, he should keep the damn camera still. Quite frankly, it also happens to be the professional thing to do. One of the first things they teach you in Broadcasting 101 is how to use a tri-pod. Come on people, this isn’t rocket science.

127 Hours (5/5 Stars)

A fatal mistake and plenty of time to think about it.

Life moves fast for most of us and it can sometimes be hard to find a decent amount of time for self-reflection. A chance to slow down, take stock of your life, and learn from your mistakes might just be a blessing in disguise. Some people find that a stint in prison is just what they needed. Aron Ralston has just found himself in such a situation as well. He is in the midst of a life-changing experience, if only he can survive it.

I suppose most people walking into the theater will already know the true story of Aron Ralston, an engineer who was hiking in the Arizona desert when a falling boulder pinned his arm against a canyon wall. Unable to lift the boulder and not having told anybody where he was, he was trapped and helpless for 127 hours. And then he decided to cut off his arm and hike back without it. So he did. This is that story.

“127 Hours,” was directed by Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, Trainspotting) and stars James Franco in what is basically a one-man show. The story itself is very limited (Franco unable to move for a long time) but the way it is told is fresh and energetic. Danny Boyle does his usual incredibly innovative editing and camera techniques. My favorite sequence is when Boyle starts at Franco and takes the camera on a fast forward pace through the canyon back to his car and zooms in on the full bottle of Gatorade resting very peacefully in the back. It would be a good idea to bring some water to this movie. You will feel thirsty. James Franco does an incredible job as well. You should go to this movie just to see the look on his face the first couple of seconds after the boulder pins his shoulder. It’s all right there. His life is flashing before his eyes. He will probably get nominated for this role. I never saw “Buried” with Ryan Reynolds, but I would think that these two movies ought to be seen together. Then you can debate who gives the better performance. (By the way, James Franco is one of my heroes. The guy already had a successful career but went back to graduate school at Columbia to get a Masters of Fine Arts. Why? For fun. He’s now working on a P.H.D. in English at Yale. What a cool guy.)

At its most basic level, “127 Hours” is a procedural movie. It treats the dilemma of being stuck between a rock and a hard place not as melodrama but as a problem to be solved. It helps that the real Aron Ralston was an engineer because it allowed his character to be very ingenious about his predicament. He constructs a pulley system, he tries his best to get warm at night, he rations his water, and after awhile he starts to wonder what is the best way to go about cutting off his arm. It also helps that he has brought along his video camera because that way he can explain to us exactly what his plans are. At one point he logically states why he knows that he will be dead before anyone finds him and what, from an engineering standpoint, he will need to get the boulder off his arm. At one point I was reminded of that great scene in “Apollo 13,” when the rocket scientists are asked to figure out how to get a square box in a circular cylinder only using socks and other things in the capsule. This movie is exceedingly interesting from an intellectual point of view. If you are an engineer, you probably will love it.

Then there are those scenes where Franco dwells on all the mistakes he’s made. He forgot his Swiss Army Knife, he didn’t return his mom’s phone call, he didn’t tell the guy at his work where he was going. Then he has even more time to think. He regrets a break up with a girl who said she loved him on a magical night. He apologizes to everyone about everything on the video recorder. He hallucinates and sees his family and friends sitting on a couch and staring at him so very far close and yet so very far away. There’s nothing quite like having a near-death experience to really clear the mind.

It’s true that there is a grisly scene where Franco cuts through his arm, and yes it is graphic and painful to watch. But there is a huge difference between watching this and watching something like “Saw,” or other gruesome horror movies. When you watch “Saw” you really don’t want to see limbs getting hacked off and that’s why it should scare you when it happens (or you do and then I suppose you’d like this movie just for that scene). But in this movie, by the time Franco gets around to cutting off his arm, you want him to do it. I know by that point I was like, “Fuck the arm. Get the hell out of there.” I really doubt Ralston misses it as well. He’s probably just happy to be alive. We all should be.