2011 - THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO - the remake

A failed attempt to start an Americanized version of the Stieg Larsson trilogy chronicling the adventures of journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the goth Lisbeth Salander an almost unbelievable female character who is part Superwoman, computer genius and a scary Agatha Christie detective type of character.

 The remake was  meant to cash in on the Larsson trilogy by making a film set in Sweden without those pesky subtitles to translate the Swedish dialog.  However this was no cheap rip off.  The director is David Fincher who kind of specializes in creepy thrillers like Seven, Zodiac and Panic Room.  The writer was Steven Zaillan who has been associated with classy films like Schindler's List and Gangs of New York.   This was not some lame Roger Corman production.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo 2011 version appears to follow the original 2009 film fairly closely to the best of my memory.  Maybe it's a little to close, I felt like I was watching the same film over again except no one this time sounded like that Muppet Swedish Chef puppet.  It appears there was some attempt to streamline the last part of the plot but this version has the same issues as the original film, a very messy episodic story that doesn't seem to be able to focus on one main plot.

This is one of those films where the production company wanted to have their cake and eat as much as possible.  The filmmakers wanted commercial success and awards.  In this case the end result was middling on both accounts.

158 minutes.

2010 - THE SOCIAL NETWORK, entertaining, super slick, empty

The message of The Social Network is, don't be in the same room with Mark Zuckerberg without checking to see if he is holding a knife that he might stab you in the back with.

This is an incredibly entertaining slick Hollywood production written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher that is about as shallow as the characters it is telling the story about.  These filmmakers want the audience to come away with the thought that these people are so mean, nasty and petty that in spite of the fact they will end up rich, they are ultimately hollow, empty soulless, people unable to have relationships with anyone.  It looks like that great unwashed mass of "little people" living in the Midwest where they still believe in God, are right about those Harvard east coast elites after all.

Jesse Eisenberg plays Mark Zuckerberg as some kind of autistic savant techno nerd running his mouth at 100 miles per hour.  I guess this is the role of the lifetime for Eisenberg and that's probably going to be a problem for him. How many of these motor mouth maniacs can he play in his career?

At the beginning of the film the girl he is dating  calls him an asshole.  He then spends the rest of the film proving it.  Then, at the end of the film, an attorney tells him he's not an asshole.  Is the audience supposed to believe this after what they have been watching for the last two hours?

Some critics have made comparisons to Citizen Kane with the search for the real truth structure that Kane used, but the whole idea that Zuckerberg founded Facebook because he was dumped by a girl seems like a weak idea to hang a Rosebud like plot device on.  Then again Rosebud was always just a gimmick that Orson Welles used to tell his story, so who knows?

121 minutes.