The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Directed by David Fincher

USA, 2011

Cornerhouse, 8 January 2012

It is a competent remake, there’s no doubt about that, a good workable serial-killer thriller.

But it is not a patch on the original Swedish film, which had a glacial, alien, sinister quality that’s wholly missing here.  Some of the scenes – the one with Daniel Craig stumbling in the mud, say – seem amateurish.  Did that one appear in the first film also?

What strikes me now, as well, is that the main storyline is very similar to the key mystery in Thomas H. Cook’s Instruments of Night.  That’s got to be put down to Stieg Larrson, mind.

Beginners

Beginners
Directed by Mike Mills
USA, 2010
Cornerhouse, 24 July 2011

For all the fact that it is complicated, multi-layered and full of many delights, this film has a simple subject: the search for love.

Shortly after the death of his father Hal (played by the great Christopher Plummer, here giving another consummate performance), Oliver (Ewan McGregor) meets Anna (Melanie Laurent) and, in wooing her, Oliver gains strength from remembering his father’s faltering yet ever-forward steps towards intimacy in later life.  Hal had declared himself gay on the passing of Oliver’s mother.

Imagine a superior romantic comedy, or rather two romances for the price of one, and you’ll have a fair idea of the rewards that this film has to offer.  It is funny, sad, poignant and joyful.  Just stay in the game, keep searching for love, is the take-home message.  In the words of the song, People who need people are the luckiest people in the world…

We are all amateurs when it comes to life, as Charlie Chaplin pointed out once.  Beginners is a film with its heart in the right place.

My Dog Tulip

My Dog Tulip
Directed by Sandra Fierlinger & Paul Fierlinger
USA, 2009
Cornerhouse, 8 May 2011

This is a charming film, an animation of J.R. Ackerley’s memoir of his beloved dog.

We are given the book ‘straight’, as it were, and virtually all of the film is narrated by Christopher Plummer, who provides the voice of Ackerley.

It is a beautiful work, halfway between W.H. Hudson’s nature writings and Patrick Kavanagh’s The Perfect Stranger.  Ackerley writes (and in the film speaks) of Tulip as an ideal friend, a celestial princess come down here on a visitation.  She became an essential part of his life.

There’s a lot of humour to the film, much of it centreing on attempts to find Tulip a mate, but touching also on her prodigious feats of shitting and pissing (the latter mainly in its territorial and social aspects) and other bodily functions.  The bodily function that formed the basis of a brilliant book by William Kotzwinkle is, however, not mentioned.

I think it was Francis King who called Tulip Ackerley’s best book; this fine film does full justice to it.