noomi rapace – Bad Reputation

At The Movies: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Oh God I Am So Sorry I Watched The Remake First

Markgraf — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 09:00:31 +0000

Oh, by the way? There’s spoilers in this, too, if, like me, you were/are a complete Millenium Trilogy virgin.

I’ve turned over different ways to start this review in my head, and really the best way I can think of is with an apology. I’m sorry. I did a bad thing. I watched the American remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo before I saw the original Swedish. I haven’t even read the books, either. When my own revolution comes, I’ll be first against the wall. And then my revolution will end.

I am often ferociously anti-Americanised-remakes, as the remake trend can assume, on the part of their Western, English-speaking audience, a certain level of can’t-be-bothered-with-anything-not-in-their-own-language.¹ It also assumes that anything not English-language isn’t really worth seeing, and this is fully gross. That said, I avoided Stieg Larsson’s critically-acclaimed Millenium Trilogy until the remake came out, and let me tell you why. It’s quite simple, really.

Rape scenes. That’s why. There’s some notoriously graphic sexual assault in these films. So I avoided them. I avoided them very well until I heard Trent Reznor² was doing the soundtrack for the remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and then, three days ago, I found myself with a spare few hours and a fiver in my pocket, and went, “Hey, I’ll go and see a film that I know will trigger the fuck out of me on my own! What could go wrong with that?”

Nothing went wrong at all. I mean, yes, both rape scenes are absolutely atrocious and I actually felt sick and cried, and if you’re at all disturbed by the portrayal of sexual assault, stay the fuck clear of this film, BUT I saw it again the next day and bought all three of the original Swedish films (well, the extended versions that were two-parters for televised release), and watched the original TGWTDT that very evening. I was going to, in fact, write a comparison piece on the films and talk about how the remake does things differently in terms of the plot and all that, but something magic happened when I went to see the film the first time around and I found myself incapable of doing so.

Have you ever fallen in love with a fictional character? Everyone says it’s impossible to fall in love at first sight, and while that may be true of people you meet in the street, it’s totally possible to fall in love with a character the moment they appear in the story.

I have fallen in love with Lisbeth Salander. So, this review is going to compare the original Lisbeth (played by the divine Noomi Rapace) and the remake Lisbeth (an unrecognisable Rooney Mara), and how her character varies across the films, in part because of some very small design decisions. It’s also a good excuse for me to do some proper fanart of her. I fully accept that my opinion of Lisbeth was shaped by the version of her I saw first.

In Niels Arden Oplev’s original films, Noomi Rapace’s Lisbeth is withdrawn and quite brusque, but perceptive and vengeful. She makes eye contact with people, she touches them, asks questions – she’s pretty easy to relate to, and in the however-many hours of sprawling investigative plot you get, she undergoes a lot of development, morphing beautifully from a quietly damaged, pained creature to this fully-fledged angel of justice. In the final scenes, where she hunts down killer Martin Vanger on her motorbike, she doesn’t ask for permission to do so; she just watches him burn to death, deaf to his pleas for mercy. It’s a beautiful scene. There’s steel in her eyes and mouth. It explicitly echoes her own setting alight of her father – a parallel only hinted at in the remake – and her associate Mikael Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist) is amazed and disgusted with her when he learns of her actions, which allows Lisbeth to give her gorgeous “Don’t make him into a victim” speech.

Original Lisbeth is a human. Plenty of design decisions have lead to this: she has eyebrows, for a start, which do a lot to shape her face and give her expression. She has make-up that looks like a professional taught her how. She wears colours other than black. Her skin is unblemished, and her nails are short and neat. She carries herself with quiet pride, and her eyes are alive with Noomi Rapace’s trademark razor-sharp observational glare. Her hair lies flat a lot of the time.

She’s as brusque and vicious as you’d expect, but she shakes people’s hands. She makes eye contact and says things. And all this fleshes her out as a character in more explicit ways that a viewer can relate to – it’s easier to form an empathic bond with a character who has dialogue, obviously – but she’s a lot more human. And yes, I do actually count that as a bad thing.

Remake Lisbeth, in David Fincher’s film (co-starring Daniel Craig) is a tiny, vicious monster. She is easily the greatest thing about the film, with Rooney Mara effortlessly stealing every scene she so much as breathes on, but unlike Original Lisbeth, she starts out as being so viscerally damaged, so visibly broken and so fucking furious with the world around her, that it feels as though she remains quiet just to barely contain the thrashing, clawing monster that she constantly keeps under skin. Where Original Lisbeth becomes more overtly monstrous, the character development with Remake Lisbeth is that she becomes more human, almost – she seeks out Mikael because she has, as she says in a one-sided conversation with her former guardian, “made a friend”.

Everything Remake Lisbeth does and says is carefully tailored to make her as cold as possible – fitting perfectly into what is visually an ice fucking cold film, all in blue, black and white. “I have a high metabolism, I can’t put on weight,” she deadpans, as though she’s said it a thousand times before, when she’s asked when she last ate, even though that wasn’t the intention of the question. Her make-up is sloppily crayoned-on as if she simply couldn’t care less. She doesn’t care. She prowls through the film as though everyone she meets couldn’t affect her life if their own lives depended on it, and if they tried, she’d literally bite them to death. Her eyes are wild, fiery and bestial. In the last shot of her face, when she watches Mikael walk off with his lover, Erika (the painfully hot Robin Wright), she honestly looks like a wolf. Her eyes are almost red. It really does feel as though in everything she does – including sex – Lisbeth performs only the very basics of what she needs to be received at all in society, because that’s in her best interests. Everything else can burn.

And that, my friends, is why I liked the remake better than the original: because Lisbeth is a werewolf. Also because she gets better consensual sex scenes and her revenge upon her rapist isn’t filmed to be a precise echo of her own rape. Perhaps I’ll write a second Lisbeth Salander Please Can I Be Your Friend Why Are You Biting Please Stop Biting Me essay comparing all the sex she has.

But for now, here’s a potted summary of why you need to see the remake, honest.

YOU SHOULD SEE THE REMAKE BECAUSE:

It’s bleak, disgusting, savage and beautiful all at once
It’s very nicely paced
The acting is superb, and it contains predominantly European/Swedish actors!
It doesn’t feel very Americanised, product placement aside (why do I suddenly want an Epsom printer?)
LISBETH LISBETH SHE’S AMAZING LISBETH I LOVE YOU LISBETH
I literally do not have the words for how perfect Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s ethereal, terrifying soundtrack is

YOU SHOULD SEE THE ORIGINAL BECAUSE:

It plumbs into the mechanics of the story with more depth
Lisbeth has more dialogue, particularly showing her social politics
The sex scenes (as opposed to the sexual assault scenes), particularly between Erika and Mikael, are more loving and personable
You get more backstory to the characters in general
It’s a lot less bleak and disgusting-feeling than the remake (although the endless shots of dead women’s faces at the end is horrendous)

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THESE FILMS BECAUSE:

I am not joking when I say that, between them, both films contain two of the most personally painful rape scenes I have ever seen (Rape 1 is worse in the original, Rape 2 is worse in the remake, but that’s obviously completely subjective!)
A cat is mangled in the remake (but not the original)
Seriously, it’s actually quite horrible in its violence, both portrayed and alluded to, so steer clear if that ain’t your bag

Did you know they’re making a Hollywood remake of Troll Hunter? I know, I know, I set everyone around me on fire, too. It’s okay. It’s a natural reaction.
I would crawl through fire to get to this man’s trousers.

At The Movies: Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Making Them As Married As Possible

Markgraf — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 11:10:57 +0000

Beware, gentle reader! For this fair review contains those demons known as SPOILERS!! While they are not major plot spoilers, there is mention of Stuff That Matters, so if this causes your brow to sweat, TREAD CAREFULLY! And you might want to skip the entire review and just look at the picture at the bottom.

Father Christmas begins his judgement of whether or not potential gift recipients have been Naughty or Nice well back in February. January is his holiday month, where no paperwork is done. It all starts in February, that judgement process. He’s got a lot of people to get through, and the judgement of Naughty or Nice is perilous. Some people write him letters. That makes it easier; except those bastards who write something extolling how such a polarised morality system is flawed, and the whole concept of “Naughtiness” is subjective. These people usually get a lump of coal, a black top hat and the GPS location of my bedroom.

As you can imagine, the more Father Christmas can mass-judge and dispense identical recompense or reward – known as “blanketing” – the easier his job is. So any opportunity he has to reward an entire section of humanity in one go, he takes it. Of course he does. Wouldn’t you?

Anyway, that’s why Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows exists. Father Christmas noticed that an awful lot of people who had exhibited exemplary behaviour this year were linked by their communal desire to see Robert Downey Jnr. touch Jude Law with as much of his naked body as possible, and pulled a few strings at Warner Brothers – he has fingers in many pies, you see – and here we are.

I got all this, incidentally, from a few of my double-agent elves stationed in his workhouse. I intend on repurposing his operation for my own, er, purposes.¹

So: Sherlock Holmes 2 (let’s call it that for short) follows in the grand tradition of making Holmes and Watson as blatantly married as possible without allowing them to actually kiss. From my perspective as an audience member, it looks almost like a game directors (in this case, Guy Ritchie) play: given that both Holmes and Watson have female love interests, how can they convey just how deeply involved with each other they are without resorting to boring, obvious techniques such as having them snog or surreptitiously shag in a train? Ritchie leaps the first hurdle – that of the lady interlopers – with little difficulty. He kills off Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) in a single scene with no ambiguity or remorse. Thought she was fun and interesting and looked forward to seeing more of her in this film? Tough! Down she goes in a fit of unceremonious bloody coughing under the impassive gaze of Dr Moriarty (the terrifying Jared Harris) from behind a teacup.

Watson’s wife, Mary (Kelly Reilly), though clearly a bit of an unflappable, gun-cocking badass herself, gets about ten lines in total, and is dressed up and polished as a dreadful gooseberry to Watson and Holmes’s gay domestic bliss. It’s a shame, and, you know, I’d hiss and spit about it more and about how it seems that people are resentful of any differently-gendered third party to a homoerotic pairing (canon or not) as if any hint of heterosexuality immediately ruins everything like bisexuality or polyamory don’t fucking exist BUT YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND, THERE WAS HALF-NAKED SPOONING AND LOTS OF HURT/COMFORT. I CAN’T STAY ANGRY AT IT.

I just penned a paragraph listing all of the things Holmes and Watson do or say to each other that could have been replaced wholesale with extended, visceral scenes of them fellating each other’s tongues, but then I ran out of recommended wordcount for the article and I don’t want to anger my editor. Suffice to say, it’s a lot, verging on ALL THINGS. You’re probably not very surprised. I did say the film was a reward for the RDJ/JL cabal and the Holmes/Watson contingent. That’s a lot of people who’ve been basically Mahatma Ghandi this year. Well done those people.

But it does bring me back to the point I always get up in my grill when I watch “bromances” such as this, and that is: it’s not enough. Don’t you dare call this a queer film because it isn’t. It mollifies, rather than actually addresses any visibility issues. It flirts, but is ultimately a bit of a cocktease. I know there’s the argument that emotionally intense (but not actually sexual) relationships between women get a lot of screen time in fictional media, and intimate inter-female friendships have a bigger presence in the collective conscience of Western culture (that group toilet trip thing, for instance) so it’s not fair that men can only slap each other tentatively on the back or – gasp! – they’ll be branded as “gay”, but what I’m most concerned with is the abandonment of all this bollocks heterocentrism. Let’s just stop erecting the acceptable-emotional-involvement barricade just shy of physical intimacy just in case we end up ruining Western civilisation with these thoughtless same-gender relationships. Go the whole bloody hog, would you? Or are you only flirting with the idea of homoeroticism because you think it’s ridiculous? Neither is good.

And I know a million people before me have complained about the lack of queer visibility in mainstream media, and how mixed-gender couples get an awful lot of privilege in terms of representation, but seeing something like Sherlock 2 – whereby the two heroes come so close to just coupling it up all over the screen but are clearly prevented by the fear that the merest hint of consummation will send the Straight Cis Male audience members fleeing like Bill Bailey from the Trollhunter – just makes me see red. The Rage Cage descends. (I have actually written this part of the review through the Rage Cage after all!)

…Which might explain why there’s very little actual review. I’m sorry. Let me fix that. The violence is up in this film: it’s very gritty and very hard-hitting compared with its predecessor, and there’s a lot of Ritchie’s favourite slo-mo impacts and explosions. A lot of the violence focuses on the militaristic, rather than the directly interpersonal as in the first film. There’s a scene wherein our heroes and the amazing Noomi Rapace (who was Lisbeth Salander in the original Girl With The Dragon Tattoo films) as a tousle-haired “Gypsy” knife-fighting fortune teller (oh my god I’d bloody love to see a Traveller character of any ethnic background who wasn’t at least one of those things) charge through a forest whilst being shelled by heavy artillery. They all survive, miraculously, but the actual filming of the ballistics in graphic, almost comic-book-style, all slow motion and muted sound, makes it so brutal that I found it quite difficult to watch. And I’m all over my violence, usually – as we know. It was probably the intended effect, anyway; so a winner is you, Mr Ritchie! You harrowed me out with artillery explosions, and this isn’t even a “war film”. Well done.

As this film also caters to those steampunk kids, there’s lots of machine porn: lots of mechanical extreme close-ups and sweeping racks of armaments. Everyone gets armed with new, shiny, extremely destructive firearms. Bullet-holes are examined, and Watson’s military past is brought up often. War pervades. Terrorism happens: “extreme political movements” and “anarchists” are framed for the detonation of bombs, carefully engineered to pit the European powerhouses against each other in bloody conflict.

With this backdrop of indiscriminate, impersonal violence, Watson and Holmes’s adoring, frequently tactile relationship sticks out like a sore, er, thumb. It’s amazing. Their emotional interplay – the most profound moment for me was when Watson fished Holmes out of a collapsed tower and stroked his hair – is like a warm, soft thing in amongst rubble and bullets. Ahhh. It’s ever so nice. Still not enough, though.

But I wish they’d had Rapace’s lovely lady in it more. She was resourceful and believably earnest; her performance refreshingly down-to-earth and human next to RDJ and Law’s saucy ping-pong. There’s several gorgeous scenes where Mycroft (played by the oozingly lovely Dame Stephen of Fry), Sherlock and Watson have a sort of banter-off, and Simza sits watchably increasingly perplexed, alternately following their conversation and letting it pass her by. She was very real. She even bled and reacted to pain in real, non-dramatic, human ways, which is unusual in films of this genre – and makes a particular contrast with the theatrical, fancy-hatted Irene. But she didn’t have nearly enough presence, losing out drastically to Sherlohn Watsolmes in terms of screen time – which, you know, fair enough: the film is about them, but she really was wonderful. I think she and Fry’s Mycroft should have their own spin-off where they ooze and stab their way around Europe in search of the perfect hat.

Actual photographs from the set.

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

It’s very funny
It’s very beautiful to look at
The action sequences are slick and well-designed
Moriarty is well hot
IT IS A SPECIAL PRESENT FOR THE HOLMES/WATSON FANDOM
A SPECIAL PRESENT FROM PROBABLY GOD

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

Er.
Well, it’s quite violent, I guess? If that’s not your thing, you should leave it aaht
Moriarty hangs Sherlock on a meat hook and tortures him while singing Schubert’s Die Forelle no wait that’s a reason to see it

If you read to the end of this sentence, you will forget everything I have said in this article. No! Wait! Not all of it! Remember the review! Remember the rev- bugger.