"Different Places" (Critics Awards & Dragon Tattoos)

Please read the title in your best exasperated Nomi Malone voice. Plz and thx. I can't read the words "different places" without hearing Showgirls in my head.

The big critics prizes (Los Angeles and New York) have come and gone but more cities are following suit declaring their bests. Now, by the magic of the expandable post, we can share them all without appearing to be as dull obsessive and monotonous about what we do here at the film experience as those investigations into unsolved cold cases are in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

I've lept from Nomi to Noomi so I pray you're still with me.

I just watched the first film in the Millenium trilogy months after the hoopla and and I'm sorry that I have to ask it: WHAT is the big deal? It's so inelegantly structured as a film and so TV like in its choices. It's also a shade too enamored of the misogyny it condemns. I'd been vaguely curious to see it because audience identification with this violent barely verbal girlwoman fascinates me; what does it say about us that it's been such a great year for aspergers anti-heroes (see also: Social Network)? 

The best moments in the film were rare tossed off funny bits, usually courtesy of Michael Nykvist (who you'll recognize from the great Swedish picture Together or the Oscar nominee As It Is In Heaven)  and a few fine details within Noomi Rapace's leading work as the very popular Lisbeth Salander. You can sometimes catch Lisbeth trying to decipher her own impenetrable emotions as if they're as myterious to her as they are to us, which was a very nice actorly touch. Noomi was recently nominated for the "Critics Choice" and though she's good in the role, I can't say it was the revelation I'd hoped for given the acclaim and the sudden explosion of job offers that followed the trilogy (I'm actually totally weirded out that anyone -- in this case the film's director -- thinks she's been mistreated or cold shouldered by Hollywood).

In other words, I'm interested to see what Rooney Mara does for David Fincher in the same role; every once in a blue moon cover versions are better than originals. We'll see.

Mostly I was disappointed in the writing and filmmaking and that it felt like a television show. Just about the only visual thrill in the long film was the scene where black and white photos are made to move as continuous negatives chase each other. That image is smartly repeated. They must have known that it really worked. The scene haunts like the girl's a living ghost, which is a neat trick given the narrative. We wonder, along with Mikael Blomkvist, what spooked this dead girl and redirected her blurry gaze away from the camera.

In short... Noomi: B/B+ Movie: C Opportunity to See David Fincher Take a Crack At This Material: B- On this last. Fincher is one of my favorite filmmakers but I'd rather he do something else since this film already exists but he's very talented and he'll surely improve on it... though I'll miss the Swedish authenticity given that they're not changing the locale and given that I'm never very excited about people remaking foreign films for America. But my main question is: Why does he want to do yet another unsolved mystery/serial killer story? It's too early in that career to start repeating himself, isn't it?


What were we talking about? 

Oh, yes, critics prizes. If you'd like to discuss Toronto, San Diego, San Francisco and who dared to plant a flag that didn't say "Social Network!" on it >GASP!<, read on.


I'll always hold a soft sport for the San Diego Film Critics for loving Michelle Pfeiffer in White Oleander back in the day (surely one of the most brilliant/least rewarded mainstream performances of the entire decade) so what did the SDFC love this year?

San Diego
Picture Winter's Bone
Director Darren Aronofsky for Black Swan
Actress Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone
Actor Colin Farrel in Ondine
Supporting Actress Lesley Manville in Another Year
Supporting Actor John Hawkes in Winter's Bone
Original Screenplay Jesse Armstrong, Sam Bain and Chris Morris for Four Lions
Adapted Screenplay Aaron Sorkin for The Social Network
Foreign Language Film I Am Love
Documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop
Cinematopraphy Wally Pfister for Inception
Animated Film Toy Story 3
Editing Jonathan Amos & Paul Machliss for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Production Design Dante Ferretti for Shutter Island
Score Rachel Portman for Never Let Me Go
Ensemble 44 Inch Chest
Body of Work Rebecca Hall (Please Give, The Town, Red Riding)
Kyle Count Award Duncan Shepherd (Film Critic)

• Congratulate them for at least thinking for themselves. This dangerous activity, thinking for oneself can yield results both beautiful (John Hawkes!) and horrifying (Rachel Portman's aural assault. You are not the lead actress of your movie, Ms. Portman! Let Mulligan do that.)

Toronto

Picture The Social Network
[Runner up: Black Swan & Uncle Boonmee]
Director David Fincher for The Social Network
[Runner up: Darren Aronofsky & Chris Nolan]Actress Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone
[Runner up: Natalie Portman & Michelle Williams]
Actor Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network [Runner up: Colin Firth & James Franco]
Supporting Actress Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit[Runner up: Amy Adams & Melissa Leo]
Supporting Actor Armie Hammer in The Social Network[Runner up: Christian Bale & Geoffrey Rush]
Screenplay  Aaron Sorkin for The Social Network
[Runner up: The King's Speech & True Grit]
Foreign Language Film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
[Runner up: Mother & Of Gods and Men]
Documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop
[Runner up: Inside Job & Marwencol]
First Feature Exit Through The Gift Shop
[Runner up: Get Low & Monsters]
Animated Film How To Train Your Dragon[Runners up: Despicable Me & Toy Story 3]
Jay Scott Prize for Emerging Talent Daniel Cockburn
Special Citation Bruce Macdonald for directing four movies in 2010 This Movie is Broken, Trigger, Music From the Big House, and Hard Core Logo 2
Rogers Canadian Film Award Nominees Denis Villeneuve's Incendies, Vincenzo Natali's Splice and Bruce McDonald's Trigger

• Toronto's TFCA weirdly decided to honor a real supporting player (Armie Hammer) in one supporting category and then play fraud (Hailee) in the other. Why do critics organization do this? It's not like the Toronto Film Critics Association influences Oscar votes, so why lie? Also isn't it a touch bizarre that Uncle Boonmee (my review) is their runner up best picture AND their winner in foreign film but still can't manage to even be a best director runner up when the only reason anyone loves it so is that it's such a distillation of What Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul does? Joe is the reason people love the movie, period. It's the very definition of an auteur film.
  

San Francisco
Picture The Social Network
Director (tie) David Fincher for The Social Network and Darren Aronofsky for Black Swan
Actress Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine
Actor Colin Firth in The King's Speech
Supporting Actress Jacki Weaver in Animal Kingdom
Supporting Actor John Hawkes in Winter's Bone
Original Screenplay The King's Speech
Adapted Screenplay The Social Network
Foreign Language Film Mother
Documentary The Tillman Story
Cinematography Matthew Libatique for Black Swan
Animated Film Toy Story 3
Marlong Riggs Award for Courage and Vision in the Bay Area Film Community Elliot Lavine who is a teacher, exhibitor and repertory curator for Bay Area programming. He helped revive popularity of film noir and pre-Code feature films.

• I love the specialized local awards that film critic organizations usually gives. That's a good use of their power. Oscar predictions is not a good use of their power. Just sayin'. Not that that's what San Francisco has done this year exactly... though they probably got a few "right"

Familiar Faces. The David Fincher Hierarchy

By now you've undoubtedly confirmed for yourself that Brad Pitt is not in David Fincher's The Social Network... Unless you count that "Tyler Durden" Facebook profile on a computer screen in Jesse Eisenberg's room (blink and you'll miss it but I did catch it the second time through).

A Fincher sandwich. Brangelina brung the bread.

If you foolishly expected Brad to pop up for a cameo, you're forgiven on account of your totally understandable great love of David Fincher movies, in which Brad often stars (Se7en, Fight Club, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). They're friends in real life and only one year apart in age. But for now, no new movie collaborations are on the docket. 

<--- Fincher winning an MTV Award for Se7en (1995). It wasn't the first time MTV honored him but more on that later.

Beyond the obvious and uncurious case of Brad Pitt, does the popular director even favor repeat actors?  He's not visibly a creature of habit like Woody Allen, previously featured in this new series, but he does reuse actors, like favorite daubs of paint on his auteurial palette. Let's investigate!

The David Fincher Acting Hierarchy
(Quantitatively Speaking)

4 Films.
There's a three way tie for the top honor, each beating Brad Pitt by one film, albeit with much smaller roles than Brad's movie star status would allow.

• Richmond Arquette. Yes, that's the least famous member of the Arquette clan (brother to Alexis, David, Rosanna & Patricia). Fincher always gives him tiny roles but some are key: he makes the dread box delivery at the end of Se7en, makes the first two kills in Zodiac and also appears in Fight Club and Benjamin Button.
• Bob Stephenson, who you might reconize as a series regular from TV's Jericho or The Forgotten, is part of the SWAT team in Se7en, a security officer in Fight Club and a killer in both The Game and Zodiac.
• Christopher John Fields stretches the furthest back with the director, all the way to Fincher's debut feature Alien³ (1992) where he played "Rains" one of the first victims of the acid-blooded beastie. Poor guy. He also appears in The Game as Detective Boyle, Fight Club's dry cleaning man and he's a copy editor in Zodiac.

3 Films.
A man that needs no introduction.

• Brad Pitt delivered his two best performances,  Se7en (1995) and Fight Club (1999), under the director's guidance. Their third union for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), though a substantial hit, didn't deliver in the same way. It's one of Pitt's duller performances, Oscar nomination be damned, and entire scenes are stolen from him by the make up f/x and the supporting actors.

2 Films.
The Fincher filmography is, we hope, just barely starting its second act. He's currently making his 9th feature (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and several people have now appeared in two. It's possible some of the smaller character actors will show up in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo but we won't know they're there till the credits confirm their existence. We'll take the two-fers in semi-random order...

• Holt McCallany is the tattooed prisoner who tries to rape Ripley in Alien³ (clearly he had never seen Alien or Aliens) and he's also one of Tyler Durden's disciples/bruisers in Fight Club.
• Jared Leto Remember that Fight Club line "I felt like destroying something beautiful?" used in connection with the destruction of Jared Leto's dreamy face? Leto and Fincher both obviously took that to heart in subsequent projects, too like Panic Room. (What a strange career Leto has had since the teen heartthrob days.) And think of the visual beating Brad Pitt takes in every Fincher film! Fincher definitely wants to destroy his beauty.
  
• Elias Koteas is one of dozens of cops caught up in the Zodiac case and he's also in Button.
• Rooney Mara is onscreen now in The Social Network and so good in it, too. Like "Mark Zuckerberg" we'll be refreshing our screens until she returns in Fincher's version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

• Paul Schulze, is probably best known as Nurse Jackie's pharmacist / lover. He appears in both Panic Room and Zodiac (with hair!)
• Charles S Dutton is the prison colony's spiritual leader in Alien³ and a cop in Se7en
• Andrew Kevin Walker is the screenwriter of Se7en but he also acts in the film (he plays "Sloth" ... shudder one of the dead bodies). He's also in Panic Room as "Sleepy Neighbor". Hee.
• Michael Massee who'd you recognize as a regular on one season of television's 24 or FlashForward appears in The Game as an EMT and in the massage parlor in Se7en. I think he's also in Madonna's "Bad Girl" video, directed by Fincher but I'm not positive on this. (But that'd make him a 2+)
• John Getz is Zuckerberg's lawyer in The Social Network and Templeton Peck in Zodiac. Poor man is always shot sitting behind a desk. Does he have legs?
• John Casini is one of the cops in Se7en and a "man in airport" in The Game.

1(+) Film

• James Rebhorn appears in The Game but he's also in the Madonna video "Bad Girl". Just think. If his date with Madonna had gone well, maybe she wouldn't have gone home with that serial killer!? Fincher sure loves the serial killer trope. And "Bad Girl" sure is an interesting piece in understanding David Fincher; the "angel of death" is visualized as a film director.
• Trevor Wright appears in The Social Network but when he was a little kid he appeared in the Fincher directed Paula Abdul video "Forever Your Girl".

1 Film. Hundreds of people share this distinction but the two actresses we'd really like to see David Fincher reteam with are Helena Bonham-Carter who was so against-type revelatory in Fight Club and Nicole Kidman who was supposed to get locked up in that Panic Room but ended up just being a disembodied voice on a phone in the same film.

To come full circle from his music video days, wouldn't it be fun to see three actors Fincher used there in one of his feature films? Why not cast Christopher Walken (Madonna's "Bad Girl"), Elijah Wood (Paula Abdul's "Forever Your Girl" when he was only 8!) or the egregiously underused Lesley Ann Warren (Aerosmith's "Janie's Got a Gun") in a future movie?

Finally... 
We must dedicate this list to the woman who introduced us to one of our favorite directors. David Fincher famously built his visual rep on a series of gargantuan Madonna music videos (Fincher won an MTV Video Award for "Express Yourself" though the big M did not) before escaping to feature films.

 Most people went to see Alien³ because it was the third in a franchise. I went to see it because I wanted to see if the man behind the frankly incredible images in Express Yourself, Oh Father, Vogue and Bad Girl had a feature career in him. He clearly did though most critics and audiences were not impressed. That movie needs a critical reevaluation because it was plain as day even then that he was already a cinematic wizard. My suspicion is that the shockingly nasty and merciless tone threw people off and he lost them in the opening shots by killing off Newt. It was always going to be roughly received, no matter how well made, coming after James Cameron's untoppable Aliens (only among the greatest action films ever made) but the tonal shift further chilled that inevitably cool response.

The second woman we reluctantly must dedicate this to is Paula Abdul since she's also a 4 time Fincher graduate. His videos for her aren't as good but he didn't have as much to work with, you know?

This series is about director's actor preferences but we'd like to note that Fincher, like most great auteurs reuses behind the scenes personell as well. Frequent collaborators include composer Howard Shore (3 films), editors James Haygood (3 films) and Angus Wall (4 films), cinematographer Jeff Cronenwerth (4 films), and production designer Donald Graham Burt (the past 4 films).

If you enjoyed this article, pass it on to your [ahem] Social Networks. Wink! Nudge!
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further reading? SEE THE NEW BLOG
also... "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" on Se7en
and Oscar discussions regarding The Social Network

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Pandora's Link and JGL's Bad Romance

Due to the long holiday weekend which put me behind and a busy screening week, I've decided to postpone this week's HIT ME WITH YOUR BEST SHOT. The series will be back next Wednesday the 15th with Pandora's Box (1929) so you have another week to watch this awesome silent classic whether on DVD or Netflix Instant Watch. Thanks for understanding and please join in the celebration of the immortal Louise Brooks next Wednesday. On Wednesday the 22nd we'll do David Fincher's Se7en (1995) for its 15th anniversary. Honestly, it's the movie I was thinking of picking -- it'd been on my mind and I had an itch to scratch with it -- and then I looked up the release date and couldn't believe my eyes. Obvs, It was meant to be.

Links!
The Big Picture George Clooney's box office pull and the fate of The American.
/Film interviews Aron Ralston. James Franco plays him in 127 Hours.
Cinematical strange stories surfacing from 127 Hours screenings. Medics called in.
MTV Movies Mulan is getting a live action version with Zhang Ziyi returning to action heroine mode. Jan De Bont (Speed) will direct. This message has been brought to you by the year 2000.
Lazy Eye Theater an important message from Machete.
Movie|Line The Verge: Keir Gilchrist. I like this regular feature at Movie|Line.
Mind of a Suspicious Kind would like you to reconsider Megan Fox... as a silent film star.


CHUD Natalie Portman offered the Gravity lead. So much for our casting suggestions last week. I like Portman quite a lot but every actor has their weaknesses and so far she hasn't shown any skill at acting with green screens. Can Cuarón take her to where she needs to go?
Movie City News a cool press kit for Never Let Me Go. Uhhhh, I didn't get this. Boo.
Rooney Mara Network They're already filming The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo? David Fincher is breaking speed records he is. Perhaps he's hurrying to complete filming before the awards season long haul for The Social Network.

And finally here's another Joseph Gordon-Levitt performance. He does love singing the girl songs. This time it's "Bad Romance"



This is my favorite part OF COURSE

For those still doubting the artistic integrity of Lady Gaga, this next verse has three Hitchcock references and the use of the word "shtick"

Heh.
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