Argo

Well, didn't Argo do well at the Oscars?! Best movie, best adapted screenplay, and best editing -- not a bad haul at all.

It had always quite taken my fancy, and unimportant Academy Awards notwithstanding, I finally checked it out. It's a true story, y'know, based on a just-so-crazy-it-might-work plan to rescue American embassy workers stuck in Iran in 1980. And a fascinating story at that.

Pretend to be location scouting, give the Yanks some Canadian passports and new identities, and smuggle the muthas outta there. Yep, nutso.

And Heisenberg's involved, so you know it's gonna be a hair-raising adventure! 

Actually, it's a pretty incredible all-star cast, and that can often be a bad thing. But here it all works out fine. All the performances are solid, and nobody has one of those OTT turns that upstages everyone else, thankfully.

Of course, John Goodman is in it, because he is now officially in every movie made since 2004. Are filmmakers trying to make the most of him before he drops dead from his obesity or something? I like him enough, but sheesh... enough already.

Anyway, I really liked it. It was a fun ride with a few laughs along the way, coupled with some great casting of convincing enough lookalikes of the real folks involved. And Ben Affleck did a lovely job at the helm, as well as putting in a decent bit of acting.

Scores: 75 out of 100. And if you don't like that, Argo fuck yourself.

Doubt

I've been kind of interested in seeing Doubt ever since it came out, but what with one thing and another, I never quite got around to it. When it popped up on TV a couple of nights ago, though, I thought I'd stay up and watch.

The titular doubt is what we have as a viewer over whether priest Philip Seymour Hoffman is up to a bit of cloister-room kiddy-fiddling, given that he apparently has taken an unhealthy interest in the only black boy in an Irish/Italian neighbourhood church school.

Meryl Streep launches a bit of a character assassination, even going so far as telling the boy's mother.

The story trots along well enough to keep you interested and guessing. And the performances are not bad overall, though it's far from the best performance I've seen from PSH. Amy Adams was fine, though, and Meryl was okay as a vile old nun.

The direction -- by the writer of the Pulitzer Prize-winning original play and this screenplay, Moonstruck writer John Patrick Shanley -- was a bit pedestrian.

For me, though, ultimately the film was let down by its ending, which kind of made me wish I hadn't bothered with the film at all.

Numbers: 44 out of 100.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

When I first heard that David Fincher, one of my favourite directors of the past 20 years, was due to helm a second film version of Stieg Larsson's novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I was not exactly over the moon. Before too long, though, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt, if only because there was the original source material to draw from and [ick] re-imagine, thereby (maybe, possibly, kinda) not making this a remake per se. (What d'ya mean, I'm stretching?!)

Nevertheless, I very much enjoyed the book and its two sequels. And I enjoyed the Swedish films, even though the first one was by far the best of the three, and all of them left plenty to be desired. [NB: I watched the "short" versions rather than the extended cuts.]

So, was it necessary to have a "remake" of this story? And is the new take on it significantly better than and/or different from the first?

Let's start with the opening-credits sequence. I really didn't like it. Fincher usually makes good opening credits, but this one left me cold. Yes, I could see the parallels with the story; I'm neither blind nor stupid. But I just didn't like it. It seemed out of keeping with the film and the story, frankly. I had that sinking feeling...

Thankfully, though, from there onwards, everything goes much more to (my) plan, and the plot starts to unfold almost painfully slowly, just like it does in every version of the story. But once all the expostion is out of the way, we get down to the meat in fine style. And this is where it becomes real Fincher territory, of the ilk of Se7en and Zodiac: investigation.

Some random thoughts: Early on, Fincher sticks closer to the source material than the Swedish film did. But he changes things up at the end. Both versions of the film made changes, yes, and of course that is to be expected with any adaptation of a novel.

A bit of comparisony stuff: Fincher's version is better made, too -- of that there is no question. But of course he has the action taking place in Sweden, with Swedish characters speaking English, which is jarring in its own way.

Q&A: Was it necessary to have another film version of this story? Honestly, probably not. Will I watch either version again? Yes; probably both of them.

So, how to score this puppy? Actually, I'm gonna give it 78 points, the same as I gave Zodiac on first viewing. But I think Zodiac is better overall and, having now seen it a second time, deserves to be scored a tad higher.

The Game

I'll say upfront that it's hard-ish for me to be critical of Fincher. I've liked him since Alien³, which I always thought was significantly better than Aliens. Yes, I am that ahead of my time.

So, I thought I'd give The Game another go. I remember it being fun.

Yeah, it's got Michael Douglas in it, but sometimes Mikey is great. I mean, who doesn't love him in Traffic (recently rewatched; review coming soon) or Falling Down? And Sean Penn. Come on. How can this film fail?

And it doesn't.

Conrad (Penn) buys super-wealthy brother Nicholas (Douglas) a gift certificate to partake in a "game" of some sort, but he gives no clues about what it involves. There follows a veritable plague of calamities that befall our hapless (but frankly not very likable) hero Nick.

Is this part of the game? Or has Nick been taken for a ride by a bunch of conmen? Is Conrad involved? How about waitress Christine (Deborah Kara Unger), who Nick has picked up along the way?

Full of twists and turns, this movie should keep you guessing even while it increases the heights to which you're asked to suspend your disbelief. But it's a fun couple of hours, even on a repeat viewing.

Ultimately, though, this is a film that entertains. Nothing more, nothing less. For that, I award The Game a solid 70 points.

Man on the Moon

I stayed up realllllly late last night, till 2am. It was like being young again -- though this morning I'm paying the price. I stayed up to revisit Milos Forman’s Man on the Moon, which I saw on its initial release at the cinema and remembered enjoying a lot.

Telling the story of comedian(?)/performance artist(?) Andy Kaufman (with whom I'm still not familiar, in that I don't think I've seen any actual footage of him), Man on the Moon stars Jim Carrey in a lead role that some might say is almost Carrey playing himself -- a full-on, perhaps annoying, supposed funnyman.

I say, Carrey is at his career best here, playing someone who appears to be a comic genius.

There were barely more than three consecutive minutes in the 118-minute running time in which I didn't laugh heartily. This stuff is gold!

Carrey is wonderfully supported by Danny De Vito and Paul Giamatti. Even Courtney Love puts in a good effort.

And once you've seen Vegas superstar Tony Clifton doing "Volare", you will never forget it. Amazing!

I'm going big here (for me) and giving Man on the Moon 82 points.

The Departed

This has been a long time coming... Back in 2003, I guess, I heard a lot of buzz about a film that was about to revitalize the Hong Kong movie scene, which had been flagging after a flurry of interest in its "heroic bloodshed" genre in the early 90s, thanks largely to much name-checking from the likes of Quentin Tarantino.

The film that was set to have us all stoked up again was called Infernal Affairs. At the time I heard about it, it had done great things in China but was awaiting release in the UK, so I ordered the DVD straight from the Orient. In truth, I was underwhelmed. It was good, sure; but it was no A Better Tomorrow II, no Hard Boiled, no God of Gamblers...

Then a while later I heard it was going to be remade by Martin Scorsese. I groaned. Not because I dislike Marty -- that would be ridiculous -- but because I dislike remakes.

The Departed arrived in cinemas, and very little was seemingly said about its origins in Hong Kong. That annoyed me. I ignored the movie. It arrived on DVD. I ignored it. Last week, it finally came to terrestrial, or network, TV, so I figured, "What the hell?"

A cop goes deep undercover in a criminal organization. Another cop with close ties to said organization works his way to the top of the team investigating it. A mole on each side.

The premise is great -- just as it was in the Hong Kong original. But truthfully, I was unmoved by any of the relationships. And I despised Jack Nicholson as the "big boss". Man, he's such an old ham! Some of the other performances were okay, once you overlooked the odd accents, but I was just not interested. It was just blah.

Oh, and that terrible song that kept playing, about "Sailor Peg and I lost my leg". Jesus Christ on a bike... Give it a rest.

On the plus side, it did make me want to watch Infernal Affairs again, so...

I give The Departed 50 out of 100 and wish I'd departed before I got to the end.