The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2022: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009), directed by Niels Arden Oplev

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: 'No Rest For the Wicked' by Lykke Li

       The 00’s have been the Golden Age of films based on books. From Harry Potter to Twilight, Hunger Games to the DaVinci Code, film adaptations were enjoying the most success they’d seen since the dawn of Hollywood. Millions, if not billions of dollars pouring into the box office, and studios were riding high on the hog, ready to exploit this cash cow as long as it kept giving milk. There was an amount of backlash of course, mostly from terminally online dudes desperate for the world to know they don’t like these movies made for women and children, but nothing that could really curb the momentum.at the time. It was a YA world, and we were all just living in it.

       The Millennium Trilogy slides right into the ‘also-ran’ category of this boom period. I can remember the buzz around the books when I was younger, I can remember seeing previews for the movie adaptation starring Daniel Craig, but then things just fizzled out. Stieg Larsson, the author of the books had died before the books had even released, so there was always going to be a hard limit to how far studios could ride this gravy train, but after the initial buzz wore off it seemed like America was utterly uninterested in anything Swedish that wasn’t related to meatballs or Abba. That’s how it was for me, a collection of weird titles and covers languishing in the back of my memory like a rusty car frame in the backyard, so when I decided on the theme for this year’s Marathon I figured that October was a good time to do some spring cleaning. Mentally speaking, I’m still a very messy person.

       Released in 2009, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was directed by Niels Arden Oplev, written by Rasmus Heisterberg and Nikolaj Arcel, and produced by Soren Staermose through Yellow Bird, ZDF Enterprise and others, based on the novel of the same name by Stieg Larsson. Michael Nyqvist stars as Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist and publisher of Millennium magazine whose career is in limbo after being set up to lose a libel case against a local corrupt capitalist. With only a hefty fine and some jail time to look forward to, Blomkvist is approached by Henrik Vanger, member of the Vanger Group. Vanger is looking to hire Blomkvist to find out who murdered his niece Harriet, who disappeared from the family manor some 40 odd years ago, and with nothing better to do with his time Blomkvist agrees. However Mikael can’t do it alone, and luckily he won’t have to, after a meeting with the mysterious Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a professional hacker with a penchant for investigation and a chip on her shoulder. Together they will dig into the history of the Vanger family in the hope of finding Harriet’s killer, but when you’re as rich a family as the Vangers you’re bound to have more than one skeleton in their closet.

        A rich family with a dark secret is a plot line that stretches back to Gothic fiction, but Dragon Tattoo does attempt some things to set it apart from the rest of the pack. There’s our female lead Lisbeth for example, the bisexual punk rocker girl with a mysterious past who’s also a professional hacker, which sounds like some Mary Sue stuff but doesn’t really come across that way in the story. Then there’s all the rape, which I’m sure was meant to make things feel ‘real’ and edgy, but I could have done without it.

       I also could have gone without this movie being 2 and a half hours long. Of course when you’ve got a mystery story you want to drip feed information, but everything has a limit. Lisbeth practically has a movie all her own before she even links up with the main plot, and when the mystery is all but solved it still takes an hour to actually wrap things up. Really the movie isn’t bad but it runs on for so long it ended up killing my motivation to write about it.

       I also can’t help but question the motives behind the story. While Lisbeth would go on to become more prominent across the trilogy, it does seem a little telling that Larsson, a journalist and activist, would make the main character of his book a super successful journalist and activist who all the ladies fall for, even women half his age. Which I mean okay, there’s nothing wrong with a little wish fulfillment, but it probably would have been better to do it in a story that didn’t include multiple rape scenes. Look at James Bond for example, power fantasies out the ass with nary a rape scene in sight.

       The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo gets a mild recommendation. If one can maintain their concentration throughout then I imagine the film being appealing to anyone who is a fan of Seven, Zodiac or any of those epic 21st century crime thrillers. Otherwise it’s like a long, uncomfortable car ride, but everyone is talking Swedish. A nightmarish scenario if ever I’ve heard one.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2022: Coraline (2009), directed by Henry Selick

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: 'She's An Angel' by They Might Be Giants

       I’ve talked before about how Tim Burton gets all of the credit for The Nightmare Before Christmas in spite of being the producer, and how the director Henry Selick deserves some more recognition and respect. Unfortunately I wrote that in the review of Monkeybone, which isn’t exactly the greatest example of filmmaking acumen in the world. But this is a new year, a new Marathon, so why not give him another shot at blogging glory?

       Released in 2009, Coraline was directed by Henry Selick, written by Selick, and produced by Selick, Bill Mechanic, Claire Jennings, and Mary Sandell through Laika and Pandemonium Films, based on the novel by Neil Gaiman. Dakota Fanning provides the voice of the titular Coraline Jones, who has moved to the Pink Palace Apartments in scenic nowheresville. Not her choice of course -- she had friends, a life, back in Michigan. Now? Now she’s stuck in a run down mansion with parents who are too busy to spend time with her, and her neighbors are a bunch of weirdos. Life sucks, but one night Coraline is lured by strange mice to a strange door, which leads to an even stranger world. One similar to her own, but… different. In this place her parents aren’t stressed out and overworked, they’re fun and fancy free, and the world isn’t gray and miserable, it’s full of magic and wonder. It all seems too good to be true, and because this is a movie that’s probably the case. Because what happens when your dream world doesn’t let you leave?

It’s probably going too far to say that Coraline saved stop motion animation. Just four years prior Tim Burton had tried to double dip into his Nightmare Before Christmas with The Corpse Bride (with middling success), and adult swim was turning heads with Moral Orel and Robot Chicken, so it was still around if increasingly niche in the age of Flash animation. What Coraline did do however was to show the audience the power and the potential of modern technology to the medium. You watch Nightmare Before Christmas and while it’s still a masterful piece of art you can feel the limits of what Selick could get on screen. By the time of Coraline however you can tell it’s stop motion but it flows so smoothly that it’s easy to forget that it’s stop motion at all, and it does things effects wise that no other stop motion film had ever done before. It really put the wonder back into filmmaking, as well as put Laika on the map pretty much immediately. That Laika even still exists in the wasteland that is theatrical animation speaks to just how well they were able to utilize the momentum from this movie.

  For Nightmare Before Christmas it was Tim Burton, and for Coraline the big name was Neil Gaiman. Back in 1996 Gaiman parlayed his success in the comic book world into a career in show business, and 2007 in particular had seen two of his jobs, Stardust (based on his novel) and the animated Beowulf, make it to the big screen. Coraline was easily the most successful of the bunch, and that makes sense as ‘dark fairy tale’ is firmly in Gaiman’s wheelhouse, as well as Selick’s with his adaptation of James and the Giant Peach. I wouldn’t say he’s really breaking new ground, in fact Coraline bears a lot of similarities to Clive Barker’s “The Thief of Always”, but his fondness for the strange and the archaic comes through on the screen, or at least Selick’s adaptation of it. The name Tim Schafer comes to mind, the mind behind Psychonauts and Monkey Island, and I would say that’s an apt comparison. If you liked Psychonauts, you’d like Coraline.

One more thing I want to bring up is the score, composed by France’s Bruno Coulais. Going into this film I was expecting something along the lines of Nightmare Before Christmas, because obviously, but Coulais is not the same kind of composer as Danny Elfman. Elfman is forceful in his music, even when he’s being subtle he feels bombastic. Coulais by contrast is soft, often sparse, and the use of a children’s choir gives Coraline an atmosphere that is both ethereal and unsettling. It’s very unlike standard kid’s fare, in fact the comparison that keeps coming to mind is Akira, and I couldn’t help but love it. Music nerd that I am I also loved the cameo by They Might Be Giants, other bands wish they could do as much with a minute.

       Coraline gets an easy recommendation. It’s got the wonder that appeals to young kids, it’s got the edge that appeals to older kids, and it’s smart enough to appeal to parents. That’s what you want in a family movie, and it’s something in short supply in the days of Disney and Illumination. When Halloween rolls around and you’re looking for something to do with the kids, grab a bowl of popcorn and pop this one in. A treat that you don’t even have to leave the house for.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2018: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), directed by Terry Gilliam

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Da Art of Storytellin' (Pt. 1)", by Outkast

       With all these modern day films that I’ve been reviewing on this year’s Marathon, I bet you all were thinking that a piece on Terry Gilliam’s long-overdue creation, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was just waiting in the wings. Well shame on you! Readers should know that this blog isn’t about being ‘up-to-date’ or ‘relevant to current interests’, it’s about me farting out a meandering, incoherent mess of a film critique that no one is ever going to read, and then you folks out there not reading it. It’s a proven system honed over years of trial and error, so I see no reason to change things up now. So maybe in a couple of years if I’m not lying dead in a ditch somewhere I’ll get around to Don Quixote, right alongside watching The Wire and forming a sense of self-worth. 

       But not today.

       If you’re ever walking the streets of London when the time is right, there’s a chance that you might come across a horse driven cart containing the most magical show of all, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Step right up and through the silver door and Doctor Parnassus, immortal mystic of the ages, will transport you into a world of your dreams. Anything can happen in the Imaginarium and everything does, and at the end of the journey all you have to do is make a simple choice. Tough but rewarding, or quick and easy? Moral or immoral? Purification or, as the case may be, immolation?

       The truth is, perhaps, a bit less glamorous. Yes Doctor Parnassus is immortal and the Imaginarium is real, but he’s not much of a mystic anymore. He’s more like a bum, drinking himself into a stupor as his troupe, Anton the young ward, Percy (played by the late Verne Troyer) and the Doctor’s daughter Valentina cart their wagon across the city. One day however, Parnassus is visited by his old betting partner Mister Nick, played by music legend Tom Waits. Seems that that’s almost Valentina’s 16th birthday and based on the outcome of the last wager, that means she’s going to be coming with him (hope she likes fire & brimstone). Unless of course if Parnassus wanted to make another wager, say, the first person to sway the souls of 5 people to their side wins? Parnassus eagerly accepts, although with the way the show has been doing lately there seems little hope that Nick won’t run away with the whole thing. That is until the Imaginarium happens to find a hanged man under a bridge, with a pipe in his mouth and strange symbols on his forehead…

       Now before we move on to the nitty-gritty, you can’t really talk about this movie without mentioning that this is Heath Ledger’s final film, passing away before its completion and being replaced in select scenes by Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell. I didn’t have much of an experience with Ledger prior to this film, a couple of snippets of A Knight’s Tale and a half-remembered viewing of I’m Not There and The Dark Knight years ago, but I think his final performance shows him off well. Hell, he’s probably the best character in it. Using substitute actors was the best choice in the long run, not only in the context of the story/character and also as a nice gesture of support during a tragic event. Don’t know how many othe actors would’ve been honored like that.

       Imaginarium presents itself as having a underlying theme of telling ‘stories’, although most of the allusions tend to lean towards the religious, particularly East-Asian beliefs. Parnassus is depicted as various types of holy men, a yogi, a Sikh, even a pseudo-Krishna at some point, while Mister Nick is clearly analogous to Satan. Parnassus was once a leader of men, until he’s tempted by the pleasures of the material world and ultimately falls from grace. Heath Ledger’s character, as a Hanged Man, symbolizes self-sacrifice in Tarot and is occasionally represented as Judas. Then of course there’s the crux of the film, Parnassus and Nick competing with each other over people’s souls, the struggle between yin and yang played out right on your screen and the positively Buddhist implication that the answer lies beyond them. Gilliam lays it on pretty damn thick too, so if the boats with Anubis’ head don’t make you get the hint than there’s about a dozen other things that will.

       However, while analyzing all of this imagery can be entertaining, the film itself struggles to do the same. The opening scene with the Imaginarium is quite interesting; this bizarre caravan with oddly dressed people just appears on the street, an aggressive drunk chases Valentina through the silver door and he ends up in a giant cardboard forest where his face completely changes, he’s launched into outer space with giant jellyfish and eventually gets blown up by a bar. It’s all wonderfully surreal and mysterious and really draws you into the film. Then they keep going into the Imaginarium, or they have flashbacks, and every single time it’s not as good as the first time. CGI is quite obvious in 2018, and in 2009 a blind man couldn’t miss it. Seeing Johnny Depp pretend to dance on some floating plate is probably funnier than any joke in this movie, and they throw out a lot of jokes here. For a director that I have sung praises for in the past for creating such fanciful, visceral settings for his films, this almost feels like an insult. I came to see something like Brazil, not Shark Boy & Lava Girl.

       Ironically though, those scenes still end up being the highlight of the film, because everything else just sort of stands there awkwardly. A whole bunch of time in this movie is waiting for the plot to catch up with the audience, and then trying to gaslight you with trippy ‘mind-bending’ visuals. Just throwing more and more stuff onto the pile that we’re supposed to accept without explanation, like the eternal story bit or the declaration that black magic doesn’t magic, or that some people change faces in the Imaginarium but not everybody, until you’re so tired and numb to it all that you throw your hands up in the air with exasperation. Hopefully you’re already in the second hour of the movie by then.

       Then we get to characters. Not the acting per se, which is fine, but the characters, which the movie utterly fails to make me care about. Parnassus is barely relevant in his own film until the last 15 minutes or so when the movie decides he’s actually the protagonist. Anton is the typical doormat character who’s there to take abuse until the plot decides he has a spine. Valentina is an overbearing angsty teenager who is constantly pushed into romantic and sexual, and while yes it’s normal for a 16 year old girls to be interested in sex, that doesn’t mean I want to see Heath Ledger put his dick in one. Percy is okay but he’s also immortal for no adequately explained reason so screw that. Which leaves the entire weight of entertaining the audience and moving the story along squarely on the shoulders of Heath Ledger’s character, Tony Shepherd, and while Heath and his substitutes are certainly charismatic enough to entertain an audience, this is not one of those films that can be carried on the performance of one character (even if they’re played by four actors).

       It pains me to say it, but The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus might be the first film by Terry Gilliam covered on this blog that isn’t going to get the recommendation. It’s a two hour long mess of special effects and half-baked philosophy that feels like watching Larry Byrd going for a free throw and hitting the popcorn vendor instead. You can’t judge his entire career based on it, but it certainly takes the shine off it. If you’re interested in movies with a lot of subtext to unpack this Halloween, especially if it's tied to religion, you might want to try Circle of Iron, Jodorowsky’s El Topo, or even David Lynch’s Dune if you’re feeling saucy. Or perhaps you can hang out with your friends and not even bother watching a movie at all. Either way you’re missing out on much if you decide to give this one a pass.