It took me a long time to get to a second screening of this film, but I felt it was needed for me… and it was.

The basic problem I have with this version of the story is that it tries to add more nuance than the story from the book can comfortably absorb.

I haven’t read the book, but I did see the earlier filmed version of the material, and that and this film both point pretty clearly to this being a pot boiler of high style and fairly simple ideas. One reason that I think Noomi Rapace’s version of the title character was so intensely embraced was that she didn’t flinch much. She remained a puzzle. And the filmmaker didn’t try to crack the code. Here, Steve Zaillian, adapting the book, is trying to bring us closer. But it’s almost as though for that to work, Fincher had to put his harshness petal to the metal… and that didn’t really happen. Perhaps the single most disturbing image of the film is the murder of a cat, which has been chopped up in some very specific ways.

SPOILERS BEGIN!!!

For instance… I didn’t feel much of a parallel between Mikael being strung up for murder and Lisbeth being tied to the bed for anal rape when watching the first movie. I felt much more intensity from both acts in watching the Niels Arden Oplev version. There are multiple reasons for this, I think, The others I will get into outside of this Spoiler. But one is that Fincher’s visual style now makes the two events more strikingly similar and yet, more sterile. What is the meaning of the reflective events? In one case, Lisbeth has no help on the way and her only option is revenge. In the other, Mikael is saved by Lisbeth. In the former case, Lisbeth doesn’t expect to die. In the latter, Mikael should.

It seems to me that the screenwriter and director of the newer film understood intuitively that there was a connection between these two events. My problem is that after seeing it twice, I don’t know, emotionally, what that connection is.

Another problem for me in this version was Daniel Craig. His performance is excellent. But he’s Daniel Craig and we never forget it. Besides the fact that his Mikael is a much more dominant character in this version of the material, he is also a movie star. And when his life is threatened, I am not fearful, in terms of storytelling, that he is really in harm’s way. And there is a moment in which we are really meant to feel like he could die. I didn’t. Not for a second.

Likewise, Rooney Mara is a very interesting canvas for Fincher. But naked Rooney Mara becomes more like a Playboy photo spread than a connected experience of a character. I’m not sure how that could have been better. Perhaps hiring an unknown who was really unknown. But I have to say, I know Noomi Rapace was very physically exposed in her performance, but lovely as she is, I don’t remember specific shots of her nudity from that film. In this one, I remember very distinctly feeling like Fincher was cutting within a few frames of labia or somewhat fetishizing Mara’s nudity.

For me, one key moment is when Lisbeth is anally raped. We never see her face clearly. To me, watching Rooney Mara’s lovely lithe ass flipping about in the air and she grunts through a gagged mouth is like soft-core kink. Her pain, methinks, would be shown in her eyes. Is she resolved to get through it? Does she really think she can break free (another reflection of what is to come with Mikael being strung up to die)? Has this happened before and is it putting her in an place we, as an audience, have never seen her before? To me, a violation like that is defined, dramatically, by the person’s reaction. The terror of someone about to be shot and thrown in a mass grave is far greater than seeing a corpse thrown in a mass grave. The death part is the same. But only the living can be terrified.

I find Ms. Mara’s performance very hard to judge. The script and direction give us a lot of glimpses past Lisbeth’s hardness. But while I found myself wanting to scream at the writer who suggested that Lisbeth, in this film, is a victim of Hollywood’s sense of movie patriarchy, I saw pretty clearly why this writer was upset when I saw the film a second time around. Lisbeth’s sexuality in this film is all over the place and quickly flips from rape victim to lesbian to sex toy to a middle-aged man, the last of which never quite fits.

I don’t know what Zaillian and Fincher think her sexual motives with the Mikael character are here. But they aren’t clear. This isn’t a “I take what I want” girl, no matter what she says. Even when she takes home a woman for, presumably, pleasurable sex, she seems to have gone out looking for a comfort fuck, not anything remotely fun or intimate. She specifically notes that Mikael doesn’t perform cunnilingus on his girlfriend enough… but instead of training him to make her come, she rides him – without him making any kind of move on her – like a fairly traditional male fantasy of “if you harden it, she will come.”

Thing is, I don’t think that Lisbeth yearning for something that Mikael might give her is ridiculous. But it’s not really in the movie. The Swedish movie is boiler plate. Lisbeth is kind of a caricature. But here, made more human, she doesn’t have enough depth to feel completely real. How much of that is Mara Rooney and how much of that is the intent of the filmmakers? The attempt seems to be Edward Scissorhands as Lisbeth Salander. But unlike Edward, Lisbeth can remove her sharp edges. And she does. And it never quite feels right or fulfilled. It’s not that it couldn’t have been. It’s not that the filmmakers aren’t completely capable of doing amazing things. It is, I think, that they are stuck with the book and the end that would have felt right, I think here, is where she goes in the second book… where, I am told, she goes off to heal. Instead, this film stops with her in a kind of Han Solo stasis… which is not dramatically satisfying, especially after we have felt her changing so much. There is a reason why Han is “frozen” after the second film and not at the end of the first. You can’t cliffhanger like that if you don’t know whether you have fully captured the heart of the audience.

The other thing is, we know, as an audience, that Mikael isn’t a man who could make her happy. He is too weak. He’s cool and smart and principled. But not unlike James Bond, he’s somewhat unknowable and he and we like it like that. If she is ever going to be fully honest with a man or woman, she needs someone who can be the same in return. So we don’t have a big investment in a relationship potentially blooming either. And again, as long as everyone is a cipher and this is a murder mystery with some cool characters, that’s fine. When you ramp it up with Fincher and Zaillian, all of a sudden, it’s all out of alignment.

So I guess that’s my review in a nutshell. Beautifully made. Acting is strong across the board. But making pulp into something more real is very, very hard. It’s a magic trick, not a straight-forward skill. And failure, even by the best, at achieving that, is more likely than not.

I don’t think TGWTDG is a failure. I still think it works as an entertainment. But I wanted more than I had gotten from the very compelling, but very TV film by Niels Arden Oplev. And I got a little less.

So… “The 10% Principle” worked on the smaller films… not so much on the bigger ones,in this case, M:I4 and Holmes2. Those two ran between 35% and 40% off of Monday’s number all week. What does it mean? (shrug) People didn’t stay as excited about them as they did for Avatar or the first Holmes movie.

Trying to do box office analysis in the situation of a holiday and shifting days of the week connected to holidays and so forth is a bit maddening. So I’m not going to kill myself today with it. But I did think about perspective and that led me to last year’s numbers. These are the Top Ten numbers at the end of the holiday weekend of New Year’s 2010 into 2011.

Little Fockers – 103.1
True Grit Par – 86.7
Tron: Legacy – 131
Yogi Bear – 65.7
Narnia: Dawn Trader – 87
The Fighter – 46.4
Tangled – 167.9
Gulliver’s Travels – 27.1
Black Swan – 47.3
The King’s Speech – 22.7

Note that this year’s holiday movies still have 3 more days of holiday in which to add to their coffers.

Mission and Sherlock surely surpass Fockers and Tron. Chipmunks kicks Yogi’s butt. There is no True Grit in this year’s group, with Dragon Tattoo running about 30% behind it. Tangled clearly held much better than any November movie this year. Titnin won’t end the year with Narnia numbers given very different release dates, but in the end, they could well be fairly close. Zoo should be at Fighter/Black Swan numbers by Tuesday and War Horse will be pretty close… even though last year’s two films had a big head start.

Overall, I’d say this December is looking a lot like Last December. No big break-out. Last year, two sequels and two remakes were on top at this time. This year, it’s 3 sequels and 1 remake. The only animals last yer were animated or medicated. This year, we have animated, medicated, owned, and miraculous. But last year did have surprise on its side. People were genuinely surprised by how well True Grit did, as well as Black Swan and The Fighter. This year, even the underdogs are overdogs, whether they were directed by Spielberg, Scorsese, Crowe, or Fincher.

More year-end box office digging to come…

The e-mail below arrived today from Patrick Graham with the Subject Line, “An Open Letter – Clarification of Rules Violations.” Publishing it does not mean that I agree with it 100%. But I agree with more than 80% of the detail and 100% of the spirit of Patrick’s inquiry, which I made myself with Ric Robertson and Leslie Unger back in October. They took a loose and undefined position that the event was within the rules. Multiple sources have confirmed that the event was vetted personally by Academy President Tom Sherak and that he helped define the structure that would allow it to proceed without overtly breaking Academy rules.

I still feel, as Patrick does, that the event violated the marketing rules and even more clearly, the spirit of the rules. And one of the creators of the event confirmed that last year this event would have clearly been “illegal” under Academy rules.

I’ll wait until some other time to get into how unsuccessful the event was at keeping an audience after the panel on Saturday and all day on Sunday and how, after touting the exclusivity and “sold out” nature of the event, Finke & Co had to reach out to other guilds the week before the event to pad attendance. Not the point. Patrick has the floor…

==============

Hello,

I’ve sat on the sideline for too long on these matters – the Deadline Contenders event is by all accounts WAY beyond the pale of the intended rules set out by the Academy!

This is a screen shot of this morning’s front page.

How does this exact sentence not violate the Academy’s long held line against direct marketing to your members?!?

“….invited members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and select Hollywood Guilds.” – Nikki Finke

How is this not direct marketing?
- AMPAS members and select others?
- AMPAS members specifically and an unlisted group known as ‘Hollywood Guilds’?
- How is it within the spirit of the rules to specifically invite AMPAS members NOT as it relates to the larger entertainment community?

Forgive me, but I thought ANY specific segregation of your members as it relates to ANYTHING was a violation of your lengthy and somewhat specific rules.

Below the Line, as it approaches its first decade in June 2012, has lived by the written rules and the very spirit of what the Academy deemed inappropriate as to direct advertising including what we believed Variety and for the most part The Hollywood Reporter (in its prior incarnation) followed -
- Using the word ‘Advertising’ on covers that a studio bought out
- Always respecting the ‘AMPAS’ logo any time we use an image of the statue
- NEVER using an image of the statue UNLESS reporting on something directly related to the awards or the institution
- NEVER directly soliciting to members of the Academy for screenings, receptions, special events
- ALWAYS including ALL other guilds, societies and unions in anything we do for the larger craft community
- NEVER offering free subscriptions to AMPAS members
- NEVER inviting the entire AMPAS membership to sign up to our (almost decade old) screening series nor BTLNews.com

For years we’ve sat on the sideline watching minor infractions come and go with little or no repercussions.

This issue with Deadline is so outrageous, I think it sends a very clear message to publishers (online and print) and studios – everything is fair.

As long as there is no ‘fee’ it’s all ‘okay’ – really – does any person at the Academy really believe Deadline is NOT getting compensation for a two day event that blatantly puts your members in a room to be pitched (while being fed) by all the major studios?

From our start, Below the Line has fostered and maintained a VERY warm and respectful relationship with the Academy – probably because we fit a need the Academy wasn’t fully able to – we celebrate the crew – that’s it. Day in, day out, our writers interview the incredibly hard working and talented below-the-line men and women, union and non-union that are the absolute backbone of our industry. Without whom, nothing would be shot, lit, designed, dressed, fed, transported, painted or posted.

Through tough times and fat years, we have survived to serve one purpose – to be The Voice of the Crew.

Not one award season passes without a studio, marketing firm, publicist or awards consultant asking us to ‘bend’, ‘skirt’ or out and out ‘break’ your rules. To our credit and to some extent out of fear, we’ve always come back to the spirit of your rules and said ‘no’.

Please, I need clarification from the Academy on this matter.

And, I have a suggestion: Going forward, on a voluntary basis, designate someone at the Academy to be the Marketing / Rule Compliance Authority (I know how you guys like acronyms – MRCA has a nice ring to it).

If I as publisher of Below the Line want to put on an event like the Deadline shindig, AND, if I felt so compelled to get the Academy’s stamp of approval, I could go to MRCA and ask them to, well, literally, give me a little stamp / logo – ‘Academy Approved’ or Academy Sanctioned or Academy Rules Verified or some such verbiage.

This would accomplish a couple things:
- Create comfort to studios and marketers alike that their event, lunch, screening, etc. is ‘okay’ in the eyes of the rules committee.
- Give reasonable cover to all interested parties related to the awards season.

IN ADDITION to that, please list and or report infractions – it’s one thing to say no, but it’s a far greater thing to show how you dealt with the infraction to the larger community.

Below the Line’s commitment to the Academy and it’s ideals remain unchanged. As a long time participant, promoter and, at times, partner with the Academy, I feel there needs to be some level of transparent accountability on these matters.

Most Respectfully,
Patrick

Patrick Graham
Publisher / Owner
Below the Line