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I Can’t Wait Not to See This

August 17, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I really enjoyed Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy, starting with ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,’ and I really enjoyed the Swedish film version. It was well acted, perfectly paced, and captured the atmosphere of the book brilliantly.

So news that Hollywood is planning on remaking the three films does not thrill me with anticipation. Rooney Mara is too prettty, but make-up can do wonders.

But Daniel Craig (in my view the best Bond ever) as Mikael Blomkvist is definitely off, a Hollywoodish choice. Craig is tough, a charismatic and manly action figure. Blomkvist is not particularly physical, a plodding and doubt-filled investigative journalist.

Sigh. Of course, I will go to see it, or at least rent it from the video store.

Occasionally Hollywood does do a remake better than the original. The Ring films, for example. The Hollywood versions were scarier and more atmospheric, with a more coherent storyline.

But the Millenium trilogy? I am not hopeful.

Avatar

December 12, 2009 / / 4 Comments

Darn.

Early previews of Avatar were stunning. But it looked preachy right from the beginning – like a magnificent sci-fi retelling of the noble green fight against logging in Tasmania.

Jim Schembri at The Age has seen it, and says this is exactly right:

THERE’S no argument that, as a showcase for the immersive potential of 3D visual effects technology, James Cameron’s long-awaited $300 million sci-fi epic Avatar – his first film since 1997’s world-conquering Titanic – is an unqualified triumph.

But as a story designed to engage, enthral and entertain adult audiences for almost three hours, it is a major disappointment strewn with weak characters, environmental platitudes and anti-progress cliches. …

The lush alien world Cameron creates is a magnificent, photo-realistic landscape of multi-coloured dragons, dinosaurs, endless waterfalls and floating mountains. But with its patronising, predictable images of noble savages, evil technology and gigantic bulldozers crunching their way through precious alien rainforests, the film often feels like a megalithic piece of green propaganda. As superbly rendered as his 3D world is, Cameron has populated it with characters who are strictly 2D. And sometimes not even that.

A compulsive envelope-pusher, Cameron invented a pioneering camera system and ground-breaking visual processing techniques for the film, but perhaps he should have spent a little less time obsessing over the technology and a tad more developing the story beyond the compendium of cliches it regrettably is.

But I’ll still go and see it.

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