The Churl with the Dragon Tattoo

Of course Ralph Fiennes picked Coriolanus for his directorial debut and of course he didn't consider anyone apart from himself for the title role and of course he cast Gerard Butler on account of the latter's "great personal charisma." I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to see the movie but decided it was better to sit through two hours in the big screen at the BFI Southbank than to have to endure three-plus hours in a theatre at some later date. So, what did I think of the film? Well, I didn't hate it and although I found myself almost drifting off during some of the more complicated politics in the middle, I persevered and thought Fiennes did a decent enough job with a crap play. Some spoilers follow.

Fiennes plays Caius Martius Coriolanus, son of the proud feisty Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave), husband of the ethereally beautiful Virgilia (Jessica Chastain), father of a kid who get about two lines of dialogue, and friend of Menenius (Brian Cox). And he will totally have his vengeance on the people of Rome, who turned on him and exiled him soon after his moment of glory.

Fiennes' Rome is contemporary and is supposed to be any-city but it definitely has a very Balkanesque feel to it. As the film opens, the Romans are at war with the Volscians, led by Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler), and Caius Martius proves his prowess on the battlefield, capturing Corioles and earning the name Coriolanus, having added two new scars to the 27 he already has. He is soon elected consul but his political rivals, including Sicinius (James Nesbitt), aren't best pleased and manage to turn the masses (who have never been Coriolanus's biggest fan) against him, forcing him to flee the city. 

For the first half of the film, we see Fiennes' unflinching, pale blue, Snape eyes staring impassively from his blood-drenched face. During his exile, he grows some hair and a beard and cleans his act up and goes to find Aufidius, begging his old enemy to let him fight with the Volscians against Rome. Aufidius is suspicious at first but eventually agrees to take Coriolanus on as a partner in his attempt to take Rome.

The Romans find out about this development, mainly from the BBC News 24-like news coverage from "Fidelis TV" (presented by Jon Snow!), and send Menenius to try to talk Coriolanus down but to no avail ("this Martius is grown from man to dragon," he says--with a tattoo to match, it seems). Luckily, Mommie Dearest is more persuasive, telling Coriolanus to think of his wife and his soon and the children, goddamnit. And because he clearly has something of an Oedipus complex, he agrees to a peace treaty between the Romans and the Volscians. Aufidius, who has been standing around uncharismatically, has been won over too, "Yeah, OK. I was totes in tears too," he says. But before the ink on the peace treaty is even dry, Aufidius starts to think that he has been gazumped by his rival and sets his goons loose on our anti-hero (spoiler: he has more than 29 scars by the end of the film). "Dude, I thought you agreed with my momma," Coriolanus complains. "No, dude, you tricked me," says Aufidius. "It's all those long words you keep using. And that crazy old-fashioned slang. I can't keep up, man."

The first half of the movie is very violent but as with many Shakespeare plays, the final act is very talky and drags a bit. Butler's performance was mediocre and Chastain didn't have very much to do other than stand around looking pensive and trying to find the way of Grace; Redgrave, however, was excellent and Fiennes was convincing as the unlikeable, arrogant Coriolanus. 

The screenplay contained only dialogue from the original play and this worked well, in general, other than seeming to confuse Gerard Butler at times. Fidelis TV, which pops up to update us throughout the film, was a clever idea but I found it a bit distracting — a little like a cross between Private Eye's Nursery Times and Brass Eye; besides, Baz Luhrmann used a TV newsreader to play the prologue in his Romeo + Juliet. Coriolanus is not a cheerful film and it's not really my kind of film, but if you like explosions and/or Ralph Fiennes, you will probably love it.

Dance Anthems Is Dead, Long Live Dance Anthems!

I've written before about my former love of dance anthems (pronounced dance anfems, of course) but a random conversation in the office earlier this week about late nineties and early noughties dance music sent me back to my dance/trance playlist on iTunes. I used to own hundreds of these songs, most of them bought as CD singles, but on reaching university and embarrassed by my teenage taste, I deleted most of them from my computer and chucked the CDs. Since then, I've been slowly re-acquiring some of my old favourites.

For years I listened religiously to Dave Pearce's Dance Anthems on Radio 1 on Sunday nights, which was great because they tended to play a lot of the same songs week after week and there wasn't too much D&B, which I disliked even then. Yes, you had to put up with all the listeners who had been "having a wicked weekend, largin' it in Basingstoke" calling in with their requests for shout-outs for their Basingstoke buddies. I probably tuned in to the show a few times while I was at university and had assumed it was still on in the same slot but alas! It turns out that the programme was shunted onto Radio 6, to which I have never knowingly listened, and then finished altogether last spring. Alas!

I can't even listen again to the last show but they did include the playlist and I'm pleased to note that it seems hardly to have changed since I last tuned in: a nice little opener from Armand van Helden (which, I seem to remember, often opened the show), and then Liquid, Delerium, William Orbit, Matt Darey, Rui Da Silva, Paul van Dyk, Energy 52, Underworld, Push, Mauro Picotto and Rank 1, they're all there. And with the exception of the latter, which I have just re-acquired, every single one of the songs I've just listed is still on my computer (or on my computer again), proving my point about the repetition.

Anyway, in the name of nostalgia, I've put together a list of my top five dance anthems (this is all relative, of course; only the top two get four-star ratings in iTunes):

1. Silence (radio edit) — Delerium ft Sarah McLachlan
2. Insomnia — Faithless
3. Liberation (For an Angel) — Matt Darey
4. Angel — Ralph Fridge
5. 9 pm (Till I Come) — ATB

Forgotten gem: I had completely forgotten about the Rank 1 song, Airwave (surprisingly, given that the song is also extensively sampled in another trance tune I did still have called True Love Never Dies), but after listening again to the radio edit, I conceded that either this or Café del Mar by Energy 52 would be my first reserve.

"What Is Right Can Take on Multiple Interpretations"

When I saw the trailer for J.C. Chandor's film Margin Call a few weeks ago, my first reaction was, not another movie about the evils of capitalism. To be fair, the two most recent such films were both documentaries and one by Michael Moore, so I decided to give Margin Call a shot, not least because with Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany and Jeremy Irons, it seemed to have a fairly solid cast.

The movie centres around a crucial 24-hour period in the life of a Lehman Brothers-like investment bank. It's Manhattan in 2008 and the shit is about to hit the fan, or, as CEO John Tuld (Irons) more delicately puts it, "the music is about to stop." At first though, we just see some suited ladies coming in to the bank, taking aside various employees to talk to them. 

Initially, I thought they might be the feds but it turns out they are consultants brought in to fire a lot of employees, including Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), who is somewhat concerned about some important data he has been working on. He is ushered from the building by security but before he leaves, he manages to hand over a data stick to one of his analysts, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), telling him to "be careful." Sullivan looks at some of the models, staying late to finish off what Dale started, and the news isn't good: the company is holding some very dodgy positions in sub-prime and other crappy mortgages.

He tells his buddy Seth (Penn Badgley) and Dale's boss Will Emerson (Bettany), and slowly the message of "we're screwed" passes up through trading director Sam Rogers (Spacey) and two risk senior partners (Simon Baker and Demi Moore) to Tuld himself, as they try to decide what to do. The only real option, though, is to sell as much of their dodgy holdings as possible the following morning before their clients and the other banks realise something is up, a move that will probably kill the traders' careers because the people they screw over will never buy from them again and will, of course, tell all their friends.

Even though you know what's coming, the film is suspenseful and engaging, partly because we grow to care about or at least sympathise with some of the characters, although others are more stereotypical caricatures. Sullivan is a handsome and well-intentioned if sometimes naive former MIT propulsion expert ("so you are a rocket scientist"). 

Number crunching is the same wherever you do it so you might as well try to make some more money, he says. He's a nice, hard-working guy, though. Spacey's character Rogers is also big on doing the right thing, although clearly his job is his whole life; as the film closes, we see him trying to bury his just-deceased, much-loved dog in the garden of his estranged ex-wife. His world has just collapsed and he doesn't even have anyone to tell. 

Emerson is more ambiguous: he seems quite cold and ruthless throughout, not really caring that Dale and the others had to lose their jobs as long as his own was safe, and talking about spending a large chunk of money on booze, drugs and strippers and billing it all to clients. But when asked if he can be relied on to lead the troops in selling the bad holdings if Rogers chickens out, he just says that he's sure Rogers will do the right thing. "What is right can take on multiple interpretations," warns Jared Cohen (Baker), one of the characters on the greedier, self-aggrandising side of the spectrum.

Then there is Seth, who is a 23-year-old analyst, who is obsessed with money (he is played by Penn Badgley, who also plays Dan Humphrey in Gossip Girl). He is the kind of guy who asks his boss — and his boss's boss — what their salaries are and diverts a 1am search for his former boss to a strip bar. He's the kind of guy who watched Wall Street on DVD for the first time while at university in the mid-noughties and decided that Gordon Gecko was exactly the person he wanted to be when he grew up (I should know; there were plenty of guys like that at St John's). 

Needless to say, when he realises he's probably going to get fired — despite his solid performance for the company and all his help during the 24 hours from hell — and goes to the bathroom to cry, we don't feel very sorry for him. "This is all I've ever wanted to do," he tells an unsympathetic Cohen.

Overall, then, there are good and bad eggs in this company, just like in every other company. Margin Call manages to convey this effectively without too many detours into the characters' personal lives. A scene involving Sullivan and an ex-girlfriend (played by Meryl Streep's daughter) was apparently cut from the final version, perhaps to keep this tight focus. With good performances from Spacey and Irons and, to a lesser extent, Bettany, the film is definitely worth checking out — if you haven't already seen enough movies about the banking crisis, of course.

Lady Day

I went to see The Iron Lady yesterday, even though I suspected I might not like it, which is unusual for me. The reviews have been decidedly middling but I figured that there is a good chance Meryl Streep will win the best actress Oscar for her performance as Margaret Thatcher, so it was worth seeing even just on that basis. As it turned out, the reviews were mostly right: Streep is very convincing as the Iron Lady and Jim Broadbent is also great and very funny as Denis Thatcher, but Phyllida Lloyd's movie felt like it was somehow missing the point, or, at least, missing the interesting parts of Thatcher's life.

Part of the problem is the framing device: an ageing, present-day Thatcher is suffering from some form of senile dementia and having hallucinations of her long-dead husband. She is supposed to be finally sorting through and getting rid of her husband's belongings and while she does so, she looks back on her life and career. This framing device would be fine if it simply opened and closed the film but it felt like almost half of the movie featured the present-day Thatcher, rather than focusing on her rise to power and her successes and failures as Prime Minister. 

We did get to see some of the latter but it was mainly portrayed through a series of brief snapshots: "oh, I want to be an MP"; "oh, now I've got kids"; "oh, I think I'll run for leader of the Tory party"; "oh, let's take back the Falklands." As such, the portrait painted was highly superficial and almost seemed to trivialise many of the events. The director may have said that the film is really about ageing but if you wanted to make a film on that subject, surely you didn't need to choose Margaret Thatcher as the central character.

I am, technically, a child of the 1980s but I'm too young to remember most of it and my knowledge of British politics after the 17th century is shockingly bad. The Iron Lady is definitely not the film to see if you want to know more about Britain in the '80s. My other problem is that I didn't recognise most of the politicians and so unless they were mentioned by name, I had no idea who they were, although clearly they were supposed to be recognisable. As I say, there were some brilliant performances in The Iron Lady but overall, the movie was poorly structured and too shallow for my taste.

On the subject of ladies, however, my parents were in town and we managed to get last-minute tickets to see The Ladykillers in the West End. I haven't seen either versions of the movie and wasn't sure quite what to expect but it was a great production. Peter Capaldi was excellent as Professor Marcus, and the other actors were good fun too, including James Fleet (trivia: the actor who played the father of his character in The Vicar of Dibley, Gary Waldhorn, was sitting behind us in the audience). 

The set design was also fantastic, consisting mainly of the interior of a crooked, spiral-staircase-filled house, which rotated to reveal the front of the house, next to King's Cross Station (cleverly, for a scene involving a robbery, small, remote-control toy cars and trains were driven on tiny tracks up the side of the house, getting around the problem of portraying an action-packed car chase). The Ladykillers was definitely much more fun than The Iron Lady...

The Mission Remains the Same

I watched the first of the revamped Mission: Impossible movies on the back of a school bus somewhere in Benelux. The small screen didn't really do it justice (I mean, Tom Cruise looks small enough on an IMAX screen) but it was entertaining enough--more so to my 14-year-old self than episodes of Yes, Minister, sanctioned by my history teacher, anyway. 

I never bothered to check out M:I-2 or M:I-3 (and it doesn't seem like I missed much) but as I had finally caught up with my cinema to-watch list, I decided to give the fourth film, Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol a shot, despite there being too much punctuation in its title.

IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has been set yet another impossible mission: proving his innocence in the face of damaging allegations made by a range of women from hotel maids to journalists. Oh, wait, that was the other IMF. What really happens is that he busts out of a Russian prison, with the help of his crack team of feisty Jane (Paula Patton) and geeky Benji (Simon Pegg). 

In a recent botched mission, the IMF lost some valuable nuclear launch codes and must now recover them from a mad Scandi physicist (Michael Nyqvist, not looking much like Mikael Blomqvist) before he brings "peace" to the world through the medium of nuclear war. To make things more challenging, the IMF has been implicated in an explosion at the Kremlin, triggering Ghost Protocol, which disavows the team and means they have no help and no back-up and are going to have to work jolly hard if they are going to save the world and, more importantly, their reputation. Along the way, they acquire the services of government analyst William Brandt (Jeremy Renner), who makes even n00b Benji look like an experienced field agent.

If you like big explosions, cool gadgets and impressive stunts (Cruise reportedly did his own stunt work on the scene where Hunt scales the tallest building in Dubai using only a pair of 50% functional Spidey gloves), you won't be disappointed with M:I - GP. There are no great surprises and not much great acting but the plot certainly ticks along and Pegg definitely gives the stand-out performance, although he also gets the best lines. 

As for Cruise, he mainly runs around looking all serious, although I find it hard to take his running style seriously. Overall, M:I - GP is a solid, if not particularly special or otherwise outstanding, action thriller.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Take 3

Much as I enjoyed reading Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and, to a lesser extent, its two sequels, I was wondering how much more time I was willing to invest in the franchise. I watched all three of the Swedish movie adaptations, the first of which was very good and the last two were simply good. This adds up to nearly 2,000 pages and over seven hours of screen time. 

The Swedish movies were, I thought, well-edited, cutting out many of the unnecessary and/or over-complicated sub-plots and, crucially, the excruciatingly detailed background information about the ins and outs of the Swedish legal and political systems, and making the movies watchable and edgy, if sometimes rather ordinary, thrillers.

But then along came David Fincher, who decided the world needed an English-language version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I like many of Fincher's other films, especially Zodiac and The Social Network, and I thought that if anyone could produce a creative adaptation of the book with an interesting new angle or hook, it would be him. 

Actually, though, Fincher's TGWTDT is a lot like Niels Arden Oplev's. It's still set in Sweden, the characters all speak with vague Scandinavian accents, and Stockholm is still very dark, cold, rainy, snowy and monochrome. Even Noomi Rapace reportedly turned down the opportunity to reprise her character Lisbeth Salander in the Fincher version because she'd already been playing Lisbeth for three years and couldn't face acting out the same old stories.

This isn't to say that I didn't enjoy the new film. As with its predecessors, it was long (2h40) but didn't drag and didn't get bogged down in the heavy research component of Lisbeth and journalist Mikael Blomqvist's investigation. Blomkvist, played here by Daniel Craig, who deigned to gain a little weight to remind viewers that Blomkvist ain't no Bond (not that this stopped him sporting some extremely brief briefs in several scenes). He still wasn't slubby enough for Blomvist and I would probably have preferred to see Michael Nyqvist reprising his role. 

Rooney Mara was excellent as Lisbeth, a brilliant but troubled young hacker with a penchant for piercings. Mara brings a hint of frailty to the role, whereas Rapace's portrayal was definitely harder. In this film, the character of Lisbeth remains a cipher, to a large extent (if Fincher decides to remake the second and third films, her character and her background will become more central to the plot). She and Blomkvist don't meet until about halfway through and even then, when they try to find out what happened to the niece of a wealthy industrialist who disappeared 40 years earlier, they tend to work separately, taking a very occasional break together in his bed.

TGWTDT 2.0 is not a bad movie, then; I enjoyed it a lot. It's just not especially necessary and I wouldn't recommend that anyone who has seen the Swedish movies goes out of their way to see the new film. But if you are new to Lisbeth Salander (or have just read the books), Fincher's new adaptation is a dark, well-paced, action-packed thriller and is definitely worth a watch. Trent Reznor's score fitted especially well with the mood of the film, the opening credits looking and sounding a lot like a Nine Inch Nails music video — unsurprising given that Reznor founded the band and Fincher directed one of their videos.

A Year in Leaps

I have now officially given up on the idea of compiling a list of my favourite five songs of the year. In 2011, I added about 50 new songs to iTunes, of which only ten were released in 2011. For what it's worth, my favourite was, by a long shot, This Ain't No Hymn by Saint Saviour, which I've played over 60 times since October.

Far more worthwhile is for me to rank my top five leaps of the year. 2011 has been a great year for leaping and although I managed to whittle down my favourite leap photos down to a list of 12 fairly easily, the final cull was harder. Some of the leaps that didn't make the top five included: my current blog header, taken on Christmas Eve in Cannes; my leap-in-a-birdcage in London (best use of a supposed art installation); and my reconstruction of the original leap outside the Louvre in Paris. Now, here are the top five:

1. Highest leap — Atlas Mountains, Morocco. This was definitely my highest leap — in terms of altitude, anyway. Our tour guide was highly amused by the fact that I would insist of jumping for the camera at every available opportunity, despite having a horrible cold.

2. Highest leap II — New York City, USA. This photo, taken on the High Line in June, made good use of one of the benches to give me some extra height. Bonus points for retaining some of my modesty.

3. Earliest leap — Nowheresville, UK. Not bad for six-thirty in the morning! This was taken at the very end of my college's May Ball in June. St John's famous bridge was all decked out in college colours so it was too cool a photo opportunity to pass up.

4. Coldest leap — Cannes, France. Cannes was actually very sunny and fairly warm this Christmas. However, this leap was taken shortly after a very cold and extremely brief swim in the Med, so it was lucky we got the photo in one take.

5. Narrowest leap — Stockholm, Sweden. Mårten Trotzigs Gränd, the narrowest alley in Stockholm, provided the setting for this leap. It was quite hard to jump safely (hence the spirit fingers) but I liked the way the perspective came out.

I considered taking a leaping photo every day in this leap year but leaps are quite hard to capture well using a self-timer so I decided to can that idea but I may still highlight one leap per month. In the meantime, happy leap year, everyone!