I review a movie

I think that this year I'll try harder to write about the things I read and hear and see. That's probably useful for you and me dear one. Cause I gotta get the old fingers warmed up and I can warn you all the same about the terrible things that you can see and I can explain to you too why the things you like are actually terrible.

So... Okay I Saw Tintin but that was last year and I read Tintin, a lot of it, but also in prior years so commencing with 2012 here's the thing - The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo = Just alright. 

The premise is okay but the plot was pretty gross/shaky I will always spoil - so you know.  The plot's all to do with the consequences of rich Swedish Nazis having their own personal rape island.  So these swedes have their rape island and things go wrong and eventually they get around to caring about things enough that they hire daniel craig to have solutions.  Now - to me I know it's not that good of a movie if I can't remember the character and just think it's Daniel Craig.  Daniel Craig isn't James Bond or Lord Asriel - he's a guy who represents them - but I haven't the faintest idea what the character Dan Craig played in the GWDT.  Suffice it to say he and his daughter and girlfriend are the only pleasant and possibly decent people in the movie.  Everyone else is fucking awful. 

Daniel Craig is helped out by a gross creep girl who has to put up with a lot of gratuitous rape at the hands of her social worker.  Now  - You always see those top-10 lists about the best countries to live in with the best social services etc... and I'm pretty sure all the Scandanavian countries always top those lists.  Maybe Sweden is the Mississippi of Scandinavia though?  Couldn't say, but I can say that I felt that I was lied to about the quality of their social services.  Still - it looked a little better than what you can get in the states-  welfare wise, at one point this creeper girl, who is crazy - is able to replace her destroyed computer that she uses for crimes in exchange for a blowjob.  A nice apple piece - big product placement for apple and Volvo in this picture - both looking suitably bland and elite.  Anyway this girl's social worker goes on to do some unbelievable rape acts that are basically comical for being unbelievable and weird - but the idea of the movie is that people have unbelievable and weird sexual appetites which I always find to be distasteful and unbelievable. 

So this girl is able to use computer-magic to accompish amazing acts of espionage and to help Daniel Craig to realize that someone he met who was the only other pleasant person in the movie was no good at all.  Nazi Rape Torturer - you guessed it.  The girl does computer magic throughout and is kinda-pretty and altogether uncharismatic and is pretty obviously supposed to shine as the main point of the movie-  what with it being named after her (spoiler alert - creepy nerd girl has a couple of dragon tattoos).  Anyhow-  it's not too much with the Nerd Minstrelsy - she's pretty authentic as far as creepy nerds go.  No social ability, clever at machines, easy and confused when being easy doesn't = romantic attachment.  I liked her.  A pretty good character. 

Now - overall the movie's got some problems.  First-  it's too long and there's too gratuitous of rapes in it, Fincher could have cut them.  Not a good movie by Fincher's standards either - by the way - the title sequence was probably the best, most evocative part.  But getting rid of the rape and counter-rape sequences would've been fine and not cost the picture anything.  And really focusing down on what kind of movie you want to make.  On the one hand there's the social services abuse story - Precious  then you have the serial murderer suspense investigation buddy cop story - every movie with three words in the title.  Then there's a coda that's a fun caper movie.  Just out of nowhere the whole picture turns lighthearted and fun - The Sting.  So I didn't like that - mainly because I love Caper Movies and don't really care for suspense movies. 

Man, now I'm thinking about Precious again and how cool it would be if Precious pulled off some bank robbing internet-hijinx there at the end of her movie. 

Anyway - someday you'll probably see TGWDT on Netflix and if you've already seen Trollhunter a few times you could do worse than to watch it yourself. 

(no subject)

More media criticism! Or at least here's a new viewing diary.

It's appropriate that tonight while the Republicans choose what lamb to sacrifice in the general election that I mention how I have been watching Old Ken Burns' civil war - what with that war being waged by the first republican president.

Okay - so I'll talk about my experience as an historian. Here's the first thing you should know - I'm not that good at it. I've known a few folks, professional historians - they're not that good at it either. You see, you have to specialize - that's the thing, nobody's all that bright about the broad arc of history - and when you do read books about that? They tend to be really, really awful. Now - as a boy I was uninterested in American History and the crux of American History is the Civil War - so I kind of skipped it. Worse than that - you know most curricula are based on semesters - and you have a semester for America before the civil war and a semester for America after - and unless your professor is an enthusiast - you'll probably skip the whole thing. In this respect Old Ken Burns is pretty much my best instructor on the subject - probably the best instructor of quite a few people.

So want to get into it but I have to speak to what it is to be interested in history. Sure, sure you're interested in the past, we all are, it's interesting. Not as interesting as the future, of course not - permanent optimism. But if something catches your eye and you gain a specific interest in the past - you start noticing the minutia, devoting time and effort and the interminable energies of your life-essence to that one narrower and narrower subject. Real historians spend 20 years writing a hundred page monograph on a subject you didn't know you could do scholarship about. That's how it is. So Ken Burns has offered the documents for the lay-person. And my position is, if you're not a specialist on the topic of the war between the states - you're a lay person. Just goes that way.

Now - I like these movies! I like the narration, I like the actors that they chose. Mostly. I like Shelby Foote, and I like the photographs. I like the pacing and I like the truthfulness of it.

See right now the Republicans are of a different stripe than Lincoln. You hear loose talk from that camp about secession because the cruel onus of civil rights and the welfare state is punitive to their useful idiots. I'm from Ohio and I like thinking about how in the past, when there was animosity against union because union required a shred of human decency, a bunch of Ohioans were called up to burn down the south. I don't think much of the red-states/confederacy and it's heartening to remember a time when hard men from Ohio burned those fuckers down. Especially on a night like tonight when the confederate apologists are meeting to choose their leader.