The Girl Who Played with Fire

Thank goodness I finished the Mesrine duo of flicks and was able to get back to this series.  "The Girl Who Played With Fire," is the second in a trio of films from the books of Stieg Larsson.  The first is/was "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (2009).  This series is so in line with the books by Thomas Harris on Hannibal Lecter which deal in crime, bizarre, and just evil.

SEE IT and the others that are in this series.  All are superbly acted, directed, written and the cinematagrophy is great.  The lighting and angles suit the plot beautifully.  The only bummer to juke in here is that while locating the date of release for "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," I see that there is going to be a 2011 re-release starring Daniel Craig and of course in English...seriously?  C'mon, if this remake is going to be anything like the 1993 remake of "La Femme Nikita" staring Bridgett Fonda and cater to those who can't read/handle subtitles, you have to be freakin' kidding me.  What an insult to the original.

Mesrine: Public Enemy #1

Mesrine is a punk and finally he is killed.  The end.  I watched the first part of this and also watched this the second part.  I am like your film style deity and I killed a few nights for your sins.  Bail.  There is no reason to glorify this dude and pay homage to him by watching this.   Ever been on the fence about the death penalty?  Watch this and come to the darkside.

I did not know that it was based on a real dude and instead thought (because of the cover of the first film) that I was in for something fictional along the lines of the evil portrayed by Javier Bardim in "No Country for Old Men" (2007).  I was wrong.

Mesrine: Killer Instinct

Eh, the only hook that this has is that this is based on a real character.  It lacks the flash and polish of "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967) and a lot of it is close to 1994's "Natural Born Killers" but here it lacks the over the top nastiness.  The dude is a punk.  This is part 1 of a 2 parter and I have the red envelope with Part 2 and will watch it...sadly I have this "finish what you started" curse.

The acting by Vincent Cassel is great as is the acting by Gerard Depardieu- he is big in France!  The writing is fine, and the cinematography is good too.  But there is no real reason to watch this one.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

From those happy folks in Sweden comes this charmer!  Okay, this sure ain't no charmer and really, it comes from a country that ranks 18th in suicide rates.  Now that is a happy country.  Every once in awhile, I am into seeing something along the lines of "Silence of the Lambs" (1991) or its prequel 1986's "Manhunter" and though I didn't expect it, this movie is right in there.  Creepy and (though fiction is) so possible. 

A Swedish journalist accused of slander will be going to prison for an expose on an arms dealing Swedish tycoon.  He has about 6 months before that sentence and during that time, he is hired by another Swedish tycoon to find a girl who fell off the face of the earth 40 years ago.  In that process, he hooks up (as in family friendly sense, not college frat sense) with a girl named Lisbeth who is an accomplished hacker and researcher.  What they find and barely escape from is just knarly and so, this is definitely not something that the kids would want to see or something you might use as a first date movie.  Incidentally, the arms dealing tycoon is found out and commits suicide...NUMBER 18 BABY!!!!

It took a bit to get into the movie, but I am glad that I did and have lined myself up for the other 2 films in this trilogy.  In essence, Stieg Larsson (who wrote the 3 books that these films are based on) is the Swedish version of  Thomas Harris who authored the Hannibal Lecter series.  The acting is good, the directing is good, the cinematography is good, and the script is good as well.  See it.

Saint John of Las Vegas

Oh my gosh!  Funny, bizarre, and one to watch!  Not since Fargo (1996) has Buscemi been this good.  I mean he has been good in other movies, but this was a great vehicle for him and just the odd person he plays serves as a lightening rod for the other oddities in the cast.  Buscemi plays John, a compulsive gambler, who now has a stable job in an insurance company and is given his first fraud investigation case with the potential for advancement and a raise...provided he does well on this case. 

He is paired with Romany Malco who plays Virgil (an experienced investigator who has no time for John) and is just a killer mix of Samuel L. Jackson's portrayal of Shaft (2000) and Chris Tucker's portrayal of Carter in "Rush Hour" (1998).  The conflicts John runs into are not only with his partner but also within himself as the investigation takes them to Las Vegas where temptation becomes too great to resist.  Fortunately, this is not one of those movies in which an "on the wagon personality" falls off into a grave.

The script is just awesome, the directing is good, the cinematography is good, and the acting is consistent and done well.  A good one!

Farewell

Well written, well acted, well directed, well scripted but 'Oh well.'  With all the pluses, I find another film that was good while in it, but not one that I can emphatically say "you have to see this!"  Movies like this kick in places like the Sundance Film Festival and all of that, but I guess that I have to accept that I am not an artsty pootsy kind of guy.  Things that would be described as "Emotionally charged, delicious tension, beautifully portrayed, a gem, etc" scream to me, "boring, chick flick, oh God, run away!" Another thing, there has to be another category for actors that isn't A list or B list, but maybe AB.  Willem Dafoe and Fred Ward are good actors but will forever be known as "that Platoon (1986) guy" and "that Tremors (1990) guy."  They are talented so they can't be placed in a category with the campy crap acting B movie crowd, but after those two movies, neither of them has really had a starring role in any A movie block buster.

Okay, on to the movie.  A French engineer stationed in Russia and becomes the reluctant pipeline of info fed to him by a KGB agent who sees communism as a bad systesm and wants to speed it on its way out.  Now, I am not sure of whether this was based on actual events or not, but Ward's Reagan portrayal is pretty funny.  Sad, but funny.  So things go well with the info making its way to the West, yet as things go on, the engineer and his family starting getting uncomfortably deep.  This bugs me because he has kids and they are put in jeopardy...punk.  The Russian dude is screwed and comes across as a someone who is slowly committing suicide, but who doesn't have the courage to pull the trigger himself.  He is never there for his son, he is going to town on women other than his wife, he drinks too much, and he takes vaguely concealed risks which could get him caught at a moment's notice.  A moment does come up.