Film Review: "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"

"They say that I'm insane. Don't worry. You can nod. I am insane."

When you kick off your film with as beautifully disgusting a title sequence as the one in David Fincher's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", you are typically expected to keep up that kind of stylistic intensity. If we expected anything out of this film, it was a film of stylistic means, which it almost seemed like we were heading into. The eight minute long trailer seemed like the perfect abbreviation and promotion for a film that's a great deal more than your average serving in terms of size. But if I learned anything in the first ten minutes of the film, it was how appropriate the marketing for the film was, as this is ultimately a 2 hour and 38 minute promotion trailer, except there's nothing more to receive from it.

Ficher's film seems to follow Mikael Blomkvist, a newspaper editor who ends up soiling his reputation by falling into a libel prosecution by... someone. It's vague at best, but whatever to free him up in order for him to be sent off to investigate the disappearance of the niece of the head of a rather important corporation. How is it important? Well, that's also rather vague. And why should we really care about the death of a 16-year-old girl? To be honest, I'm not at all sure. The way you bound from subject to unrelated subject in a film trailer is very much true of how the first meeting between Blomkvist and Henrik Vanger goes. It's speedy, abrupt, and we barely get any idea of what's going on. We don't get any room to care about the mystery.

Film Review: "Melancholia" (***1/2)

How can you possibly not feel bad for poor Lars? The man's been beaten down like a hideous dog for his brutal and uncompromising honesty, now to the point where he's had enough. It's such a tragedy in and of itself that his least controversial and most recently acclaimed film, "Melancholia", come when media disillusionment has kicked him out of Cannes, and now off the visible stage. Lars von Trier has taken himself out of the publicity game, doing no more interviews from here on out, and it's a damn shame. Yet despite the unfortunate recent events, the film does take on something of a stronger form. In it, Lars takes out his vengeance on the entire planet.

The film is broken up into three segments, starting off with a near-hallucinatory prologue introducing the main characters of Justine and Claire as Lars the Destroyer conjures up a series of bleak and extravagant imagery, with Wagner bellowing triumphantly in the background. The film could end after that 8 minute opening and still receive glorious accolades, but it serves as a reminder of where we're headed, and how inevitable it is. Cue Lars' trademark scribbled title card, and we're off to the races, at which point Lars puts a hold on his wilder visual stylings, as he's got a delicate story to tell.

Theatrical Trailer: Melancholia

Lars Von Trier has made some severally messed up masterpieces in the past, and each has achieved some sort of classic status amongst the more detailed critical community. However, despite everything we've been able to pick up from his films, he's maintained that each of them had a happy ending. That is until Melancholia, which he says is his first film that doesn't have a happy ending. If you're looking for an experience far more terrifying than the typical horror film, look no further than Von Trier. He looks to be delivering another terrific piece of filmmaking, and I look forward to being kept up for days thinking about this film.