1. Drive
2. The Tree of Life
3. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
4. Midnight in Paris
5. 50/50
6. Hugo
7. Moneyball
8. A Separation
9. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
10. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
———————————————————————————————————————
11. Shame
12. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
13. Warrior
14. Take Shelter
15. Rango
16. Hanna
17. The Skin I Live In
18. Melancholia
19. The Adventures of Tintin
20. The Artist

My personal list:

1. A Separation
2. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
3. 50/50
4. Drive
5. Midnight in Paris
6. The Tree of Life
7. Senna
8. Attack the Block
9. Take Shelter
10. Warrior

Some quick thoughts:

- This year felt pretty weak for the most part. I have issues with pretty much every movie on my list but #1. Although, A Separation is subtitled, eww. Kidding. I did read an essay somewhere that painted it getting past Iran’s censors as a negative.

- I thought Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was disappointingly slow and dry the first time around, even though I still liked it. The second time, I caught countless more things, revealing just how immaculately edited and shot the film was. Some of the characterization is absurdly thin, but I guess that’s the drawback of attempting to adapt into a film a novel which was previously a five-hour television series.

- It might be surprising to see 50/50 up so high, but I thought its mix of comedy and drama was deftly balanced. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is great in the lead role, Anna Kendrick is suitably adorable as an inexperienced therapist, and I’m a Seth Rogen apologist.

- I really don’t have much to say about Drive anymore. Internet hype fatigue, not that I’m above that sort of thing.

- My experience with Woody Allen is pitiful, which apparently is the reason why I really enjoyed Midnight in Paris. I also loved the guy playing Hemingway.

- Maybe I needed to see The Tree of Life in a non-shitty theater to truly appreciate its beautiful cinematography, but the Sean Penn segments were so worthless and the film felt like a bit of a mess. The main growing-up part of the film is wonderful, though.

- Senna is one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen, almost totally devoid of talking heads, and perfectly paced — which means fast-paced, since this is a documentary chronicling the life of a Formula One driver. I knew absolutely nothing about Formula One beforehand other than the name of Michael Schumacher and I was enthralled for the entire running time.

- It’s nice to see a pulpy action movie handle its lack of a budget extremely well. The monster designs in Attack the Block were ingenious, and having the bad kids from the poor part of the city become the heroes ties in well with the whole class warfare awareness going around.

- In retrospect maybe Take Shelter should be even higher, but I do remember coming out of the theater and feeling it was a tad too slow for me. Nonetheless, Michael Shannon being totally overlooked is insane. He put in easily the most impressive acting performance I watched last year. And I watched Shame, ok? At least Take Shelter is a good movie.

- I originally had Hugo in my 10th slot in the official voting, but fuck it, I want to give props to Warrior. I still can’t believe a movie with such shitty marketing came out so not-shitty. It might have been clichéd as hell, but I enjoyed it more than the critically-acclaimed The Fighter.

Over the weekend, the internet “leaked” a red band trailer of the American adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the version I’ve been looking forward to since the announcement of David Fincher at its helm. Many people have put the quotation marks around “leaked” since Sony Pictures could have taken down the YouTube’d bootleg trailer before it came close to accumulating a few hundred thousand views. But it seems now the green band trailer has officially hit the web. The difference between red band and green band is that the former indicates an R-rated trailer, which means the latter has cut out the blood and boobs. I naturally prefer the red band, as it revels in the violent nature of the material more, but the two trailers are in almost every way exactly alike.

Trailer courtesy of Movie-List, via The Film Stage.

Other than Fincher’s involvement, I’m looking forward to the film due to Trent Reznor composing another score for him. I have no clue whether the trailer music is reflective of the film score, but no matter how you may feel about the cover of “Immigrant Song”, you have to admit it fits the trailer perfectly. Add that to Reznor’s fantastic work on The Social Network, and I’m confident he will know exactly how to score anal rape and serial killing.

And that brings me to why I’m looking forward to Fincher tackling this book: he does his best work when dealing with serial killers. Not to mention his movies are stylish as fuck. Anyone who can cut the story of Facebook into a fast-paced two-hour film simultaneously following the initial creation of the website, along with two separate depositions for lawsuits that were spawned by the site, is an extremely talented director. Ok, maybe he had help from Aaron Sorkin in creating the script that made those scenes so entertaining, but Fincher’s directing was probably the star of the film. I need to watch The King’s Speech just so I can say how little directing was even needed for such Oscar bait. “Just point the camera at the great actor with the stutter! People will eat that shit up!”

While The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is over half a year away (note the “Feel Bad Movie of Christmas” tagline), the next piece of entertainment is even further away. It should be arriving next year, but who knows with Blizzard? I could be talking about either Diablo III or the first expansion to Starcraft II here. But this time I’ll just post the first gameplay footage of SCII: Heart of the Swarm. There’s not really much to get excited about in the video, though, especially considering how shitty appearance of the main character, Kerrigan. I’ll probably make a dedicated post to Diablo III in the near future.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRWzB7T0LBw

To get to something that will come out soon, a trailer for the fourth season of Breaking Bad hit the web yesterday. It consists solely of scenes from previous seasons — whether that’s a positive or negative is up to you. I’m just glad I got a reminder one of the two best shows on television is back in July, which is only one month away. This summer has really sneaked up on me. If you haven’t watched Breaking Bad yet, get started now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alFsfEUtDmQ

I walked into Borders a few weeks ago to pick up the second book of the “Millennium Trilogy” — The Girl Who Played With Fire — and was surprised to see the new paperback prominently displayed right as I walked into the store. It was evidence that I don’t have a clue as to what is popular outside of the internet. Sure, it seemed pretty popular in the places I spend time online, but many times that hasn’t exactly indicated mainstream appeal or popularity. Even when I went up to the register to pay for the book (using my 40% coupon — the only time I’ll shop at Borders), the cashier said how much he loved the book and then started talking about the film adaptation of the first book and then I mentioned the American remake and by that time I’m sure the line behind me hated both of us; I seemed much more concerned about this than the cashier. Man, I knew the books (and film) were big hits over in Europe, but I didn’t realize they had already elicited such a fanbase over here.

So if you’re wondering, the first book is in the title of this blog entry: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. As for its myriad forms: there’s the original Swedish novel; then its Swedish film adaptation; and coming in 2011, its American adaptation. I experienced the first two practically back-to-back, and I’m still looking forward to the American version solely due to confirmation of David Fincher directing it. Yeah yeah, needless American remake — but the guy behind Se7en and Zodiac directing another dark, murder mystery film? Count me the fuck in.

And yes, that’s what The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is; it’s an exceedingly dark novel that delves into some of the most sadistic stuff imaginable, while also being a very entertaining crime mystery. It revolves around two main characters, Mikael Blomvkist and Lisbeth Salander. The former is a relentless, uncompromising journalist who believes his magazine Millennium is the last bastion of true journalism, while the latter is an introverted, cold, miniature whaif of a girl whose fashion sense is about as “punk goth chick” as it gets (see above). But the other side of Salander is a brilliant researcher who can be brutally vicious to anyone who wrongs her or someone she cares about.

Their paths don’t intertwine until about halfway through the novel, when they’re both pulled into an almost 40-year-old murder of a girl on a Swedish island. The body was never found, but the uncle of the girl can’t see it being anything but a murder. It was a high profile case due to it involving the illustrious Vanger family, but like most things, it was quickly forgotten by anyone not initimately involved or affected. The uncle, Henvik Vanger, hires Blomkvist to investigate, while giving him the cover of writing a history of the Vanger clan — but not until Salander shows up do the pieces truly start to come together.

It does take quite a while for the book to get to the interesting action, as a lot of the early-going is dry and filled with exposition, but it didn’t really bother me — which is something I can’t say its sequel. But that’s a story for another post.

It’s hard for me to say whether the book or movie is better, but if I had to choose I’d most likely have to side with the movie (a random observation: book:novel::movie:film, right?). Stieg Larsson obviously wrote the novels in Swedish so I really don’t feel right criticizing he prose, but 1) I have on good authority — @waxinthaksin — that any book translated in the past decade or so is probably pretty faithful; and 2) it’s just not good. But once again, it most definitely annoyed me more while reading the second book; there were some passages and lines in that that were just plain embarrassing. The books could also use a bit of editing; but hey, Larsson died before the trilogy was published, so maybe he felt the same way.

Meanwhile, the film adaptation of the The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo streamlines everything about as perfectly as one could possibly hope. Some of the details are switched around, and there’s practically no mention of a few of the bigger relationships in the novel, but none of them are integral to the main plotline of the disappearance mystery. The film even manages to throw an extra bit of misdirection that I thought was a nice touch. But the best part of the film in comparison to the novel has to be the removal of Mikael Blomvkist’s pussy magnetism. I’ll just leave it at that.

While I thought that maybe the friend with which I saw the film wouldn’t be able to keep up with the much quicker pace compared to the more detailed and deliberate novel, he only asked me one quick question while watching. And after he walked out, I think he loved the film more than I did, possibly because he wasn’t comparing the two versions to each other the entire time. The film is brutal, tense, disturbing, but also immensely satisfying. I think Fincher has quite a bit to compete with. At the very least, I do think Fincher will make a better looking film. I just wonder if there are any high-profile actresses — because you just know that’s going to be required — that can play the role of Salander as perfectly as the Swedish actress Noomi Rapace did, while also fitting the diminutive frame described in the novel. As I read the second novel, any image I originally had of Salander was replaced with her performance.

I could go on about the second novel, but this blog post is long enough already. I did not enjoy it as much as the first, but it does have some interesting plotlines and definitely sets up the third novel — The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest — well. Too bad I won’t bother to read it until the paperback version comes out in the states. Fuck hardcovers. Unless it’s a Library of America hardcover — those are awesome.