(Also known as the latest in an ongoing series which should be titled You Know That Movie Everyone Else Saw Six Months Ago? Yeah, I Just Watched It.)

Actually, let’s get the review part out of the way: For a movie with a familiar, arguably tired narrative, wow is it good. Somehow, no matter how many times I’ve watched or read the young-girl-seduced-by-older-man-who-appears-charming-and-glamourous-simply-because-he’s-not-part-of-her-normal-world plot, I felt as though I were watching something new and different this time. I’m not really sure why that is, but I’m willing to put it down to the script and the cast and the fact that there isn’t a hair out of place.

Everyone talks about Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard and Emma Thompson and Alfred Molina, and rightly so, but my favorite performance in An Education was Olivia Williams’ turn as the spinstery English teacher. I barely recognized her after her role as Adelle DeWitt in Dollhouse, and if I was fond of her then, I have a raging girl crush on her now. (Also I did NOT realize that in the TV special Miss Austen Regrets, she plays Jane Austen. Bumping that DVD up in my Netflix queue now.)

I thought Jenny was a fantastic character. I liked her immediately, from the first shot of her walking in the snow in her school uniform (tell me I’m not the only one who flashed to the schoolgirl groupies from A Hard Day’s Night). I loved the way she’d bait her father, dancing her book smarts around him with word play and bizarro logic.

And that, to me, explains a lot about her attraction to David. I mean, aside from his charm and his looks and his access to this magical mystical (and pretend) grown-up world, I got the impression that Jenny sees in him the first person that could hold his own with her. As for me, I just found him sort of creepy. Was I supposed to? Or was I also supposed to find him inordinately charming?

What I did NOT know before I sat down to watch the movie is that David is Jewish. I spent the rest of the film locked in an inner debate over whether I bought Peter Sarsgaard’s performance as a post-WWII British Jew. I settled on “sort of.” Hearing the word “schvartzers” come out of his mouth was jarring. And while it’s interesting to me that none of the reviews I’d read of this movie mentioned this detail, ultimately I think Jewishness wasn’t as essential to his character so much as it was to everyone else’s. To Jenny, it adds yet another layer of mystique, exoticism, and rebellion (and there’s a whole set of academic footnotes about that, but I won’t get into it now). We see from Jenny’s father’s bumbling introductions that he’s certainly got prejudices, but they’re overcome by the “right” individual. (Imagine if David had been Orthodox.) Emma Thompson’s reaction, that jerk of her body, her stony face, upon learning that the man Jenny plans to thrown her life away on is A JEW — well. If Dame Judi Dench can get an Oscar nomination for six minutes of film work, Emma Thompson deserved a nomination for that look.

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If you haven’t yet, go see this movie. My friend Kim lays out all the reasons I would give, so go read her assessment. And then go.

The one point in which I disagree with Kim is on the title. The original Swedish title of the book and the movie is Män som hatar kvinnor, which means “Men Who Hate Women.” It was changed for North American audiences for reasons I’m unclear on. Possibly because the publisher felt the original title is too stark, too depressing, too blunt, or not zazzy enough. And while a part of me dislikes that the title was changed, I appreciate it on two counts. One, all the English titles in Millenium trilogy start with “The Girl” — The Girl Who, The Girl With — which gives the set a more cohesive feel (if I’m not mistaken, the original Swedish title for the second book is The Girl Who Played With Fire, so the conceit wasn’t made up from nothing). But more importantly, it puts Lisbeth Salander, one of the greatest heroines ever written, at the forefront (though, admittedly, she is reduced to a physical characteristic. However, it is a characteristic she chose to have. I could analyze this all day). While the story is about men who hate women, the title is about the woman who gloriously fights back. I have no problem with that.

I do agree with Kim that it’s one of the best, if not the best, film adaptation of a novel that I’ve ever seen. And that it’s one of the smartest, most suspenseful, powerful movies I’ve seen in quite a while.

If you’re unfamiliar with the story, here’s the nutshell version: Mikael Blomkvist is a journalist for Millennium magazine, and has just been sentenced to a six-month sentence for libel against a big corporate tycoon. Lisbeth Salander is a computer hacker working for a security company to run checks on individuals and has been tracking Blomkvist, who she thinks was set up for the libel fall. That’s all background. She’s been following Blomkvist, hacking into his computer, on behalf of Henrik Vanger, who wants Blomkvist to investigate the murder of his niece Harriet, which happened 40 years ago. Very dark things follow. Very dark.

I did get the impression that the movie was made for an audience well familiar with Larsson’s trilogy. There are a few minor details that I wouldn’t have picked up on had I not read the book, but as they are minor, it won’t hurt if you haven’t read the book (although you may question why it is that Salander, at the age of 24, still requires some sort of guardianship). But the movie pares down all the corporate/financial intrigue that takes up the first 50 or whatever pages that made me and a lot of people I know think, “The hell? This is not the book I thought it was going to be.”

The movie does not flinch one iota from depicting the sick, horrific violent acts against women, which we watch unfold or glimpse through police photos of crime victims, and it does so without the sort of simplified melodrama that tends to accompany acts of violence against women in American movies. You know what I’m talking about. I can’t think of any specific examples right now but I can tell you that when movies don’t layer melodrama over depictions of rape and abuse, critics tend to describe them as “gritty.” And I can tell you that if I hadn’t read the book beforehand, I would’ve been extremely uncomfortable and disturbed during these scenes. As it was, I watched, imagining the subtext was “You’re uncomfortable? Good. Because this stuff happens. It happens all the time. And you’re going to watch it. And you’re going to know what it’s like to live with the knowledge that you could be attacked anywhere, anytime, by anyone, for no other reason than you’re a girl.”

But just as much, the story is about fighting back. Interestingly, it would seem as though the only way to stop violence is with stronger, more sadistic violence. Justice isn’t necessarily served here. Street justice, on the other hand, packs more of a wallop. I remember finding these particular scenes extremely satisfying in the book. In the movie, I was more disturbed by them, which again I think was the reaction I was supposed to have.

It sounds as though the movie is nothing but scenes of violence against women, which isn’t the case, though they are prominent. It’s a classic mystery thriller — a genre I didn’t think I really liked until a couple years ago, and now find myself reading nothing but — and as mystery thrillers go, it’s impeccably done.

Never mind the fact that the movie is the strongest endorsement for iPhoto I’ve ever seen. I can’t remember where I read this, but someone noted that it was wonderful to see a movie in which the computer stuff — and there’s quite a bit of it — was all real. None of those crazy graphics that look cool but aren’t based in any computer reality. MacBooks are the weapon of choice, and Blomkvist manages to get clues by going into iPhoto and altering the sharpness, contrast, and exposure of photos he’s scanned in. Sometimes it stretches the imagination, but it’s much better than all that “Enhance! Enhance! Enhance!” crap. In fact, the computer nerd in me was completely won over by the scene in which someone tells Blomkvist that he can’t zoom in for a clear close-up of a particular detail because the original photo is so blurry. That never happens in the movies.

It’s also one of those rare foreign movies that make me forget I’m reading subtitles. It was as if I was watching the book that I’d read a year ago unfold as it did in my head. Noomi Rapace is exactly how I pictured Lisbeth. She IS Lisbeth. I can’t imagine anyone else playing that role.

My understanding is that there will be Swedish movie adaptations of each book in the trilogy — the Swedish trailer for The Girl Who Played With Fire is already on YouTube — and, in fact, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo includes scenes that look forward to the second installment. Wikipedia says it’s slated for release in the states in the fall of this year. I hope that’s true, because I can’t wait.

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So I watched Fame — the 1980 Alan Parker movie, not the (probably) inevitable 2009 remake — for the first time since I saw it as a kid (I must have been 12 or 13). Two scenes had stuck with me over the 20+ years before I watched it again: the Rocky Horror scene where Doris takes off her shirt and goes up to sing “Time Warp,” and the scene in which Coco is coerced into taking her shirt off on camera. And no, I did not put those two scenes together thematically until just now.

The Rocky Horror scene (below, starting at 2:03, though ER fans might want to marvel in Paul McCrane’s AMAZING hair first) was my introduction to the Rocky Horror show (I knew “Time Warp,” sorta, but I didn’t know what it was from) and I was mesmerized by the makeup and costumes and weirdness of it all.

I might have picked up on the fact that Doris was high and that this was what allowed her to finally shed her insecurity and shyness and jump up on stage with the rest of the Rocky Horror people. It felt triumphant, as I think it was intended, but moreso because at the time I was also shy and insecure and Doris’s victory was my victory. Removing her shirt was an obvious metaphor for skin-shedding, but she was still wearing a demure-looking camisole — she’s still Doris. On rewatch, it’s not as vicarious a thrill as it had once been.

But more than that scene, I remembered Coco’s “screen test.” She’d been approached in a diner by a man claiming to be a director, who flatters her and asks her to audition for his new movie. And when she gets to his place everything is a little weird, but she rolls with it because she so desperately wants to be famous. But then he tells her to take off her shirt, and she freaks, and he calls her a silly little schoolgirl, and then she takes her shirt off because she thinks this is what it’s going to take, but she’s crying the whole time, and this scene TRAUMATIZED me. Still does. The fact that she’s crying doesn’t bother the guy at all; in fact, he’s probably getting off on it. There’s no metaphorical skin-shedding here; Coco’s left vulnerable and raw, and we don’t know what happens next.

There are so many dark moments in the movie, many of which I had blissfully skipped over when watching it as a kid. In addition to Coco’s “screen test,” Ralph’s five-year-old sister gets brutally attacked, Montgomery lives completely isolated from his family and, once Ralph and Doris get together, his friends; one dancer almost kills herself, another has an abortion, Leroy is homeless in 1970s New York. And while by the end of the movie Leroy’s gotten himself an invite to join Alvin Ailey’s dance troupe, we don’t actually see his “poor kid makes good” moment of triumph, which is interesting. Should we have? The movie doesn’t really spend that much time on him, other than to highlight his refusal to turn in English homework and the way he gets used by whatshername to get back at her parents. We don’t see him dance, really, after his audition scene.

He’s not the only character left out in the cold, either. Bruno starts as a musical genius, snobbishly refusing to play “old” instruments, and ends up as a musical genius who may have learned his lesson about classical music, or not. He gets that one iconic scene with the movie’s theme song blaring out of his dad’s taxi while the students all dance in the street, but it’s not really HIS scene. He doesn’t really have a story, he’s just there. (The TV show gives him — and Leroy — more to do.)

Mostly what I was struck by, in both the movie and the TV series (available on Netflix Instant Watch — you’re welcome), is how normal everyone looks. Would any of these actors get roles in a high school musical movie or series today? Has it really been since the early 80s that we’ve had a TV show about high school kids so diversified in terms of socio-economic background? Not to mention race and sexuality — Montgomery’s homosexuality may not have been treated with significant depth and it is completely erased in the series, but he’s at least given not one, but two coming out scenes (one to Doris, one to his entire acting class). The only one I can think of is My So-Called Life, but Rayanne and Rickie were set as contrast to Angela’s comfortable middle-class heterosexual normative world — she’s the central character, and she reacts to them. In Fame everyone is pretty much given equal footing, and the norm is no one really has a comfortable life.

Oh, and there’s Glee, of course, which is as cheesy and campy as Fame was, with kids from a variety of backgrounds (in Ohio, no less!), though the show tends to focus primarily on the Jocks vs. Arts dichotomy rather than on the kids using art to raise themselves up. Do kids think that way anymore, anyway? What with arts funding slowing to a trickle if it comes at all and shows that promise insta-fame and celebrity without requiring either dues-paying or talent, are the ideas in Fame so outdated now?

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First impression: I am going to hate this movie. Reason: the titles! Again! This time it was a ridiculous assemblage of cliches. Well, two cliches: 1) Split-screen ubercute home movies of our main characters, set to 2) one of those this-side-of-twee generic indie songs voiced by a woman who probably looks like a pixie. (It’s not a secret that I prefer my indie to be on the other side of power pop than this.)

I also didn’t care for the (fake?) disclaimer at the beginning that called the (real?) woman we’re meant to think is the woman who broke the screenwriter’s heart a bitch.

Plus there’s a wholly unnecessary narrator. And a number of things I thought were maybe a little too precious. The two best friends were bland stock characters (and they seem to only serve the purpose of showing how well-socialized the main character, Tom, is. Summer, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have any friends, and this is just one more thing Tom and the audience simply don’t know about her. I found that refreshing). And for some reason I was disappointed that the movie takes place in L.A. I wanted it to be set in Chicago. Don’t ask me why, but seriously — it really felt like it should have been an urban Midwestern movie. (Although I suppose it is nice to have a movie set in L.A. that has nothing whatsoever to do with The Industry; in fact, it’s kind of amusing that the main character works as a greeting card copywriter . . . but even then, he’s only doing it because he supposedly failed as an architect so there’s some sort of parallel thing being set up and I’m going to ignore the nagging “how did he nail this job in the first place” question at the back of my head and get out of this parenthetical.)

But somehow the movie manages to stay grounded, and at the risk of sounding cliche myself, I have to say that the story strikes more true moments than any other relationshippy movie I’ve seen, at least in recent years. It’s not a story of how boy met girl, it’s not even a story of how boy loses girl, it’s a story about after boy loses girl, that “what the hell just happened” stage, and in that it reminded me a little bit of Annie Hall. With a more unabashedly romantic male lead who rejects ironic detachment — even, I would say, by the end.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is really wonderful. There’s one tiny moment, somewhere during the post-breakup wallow phase, where he shuffles into a convenience store in his robe (shades of The Dude) to buy liquor and Twinkies (like you do) and the cashier gives him this “SRSLY” look and Gordon-Leavitt shoots an absolutely perfect weary/irritated “DO YOU HAVE A PROBLEM” look back and it’s so, so funny. There are more of those moments, bursts of unexpected humor (I’m also thinking of the musical scene set to Hall & Oates, in particular the beginning when he checks his reflection), that counteract the “here’s where we establish our faux-indie cred” moments. And there’s a brilliant split-screen segment near the end; one side labeled “Expectations” and the other labeled “Reality” that . . . well, for me that would have been worth the price of admission had I gone to see this in the theater.

Duff summed it up well — this isn’t the cutesy but maybe a little edgy rom-com you might think it is. I liked the way it upended gender stereotypes in a way that wasn’t played for laughs as it usually is, that “see what we’re doing here? SHE’S the DUDE, and HE’S the CHICK” anvil that by now is fairly overplayed. Summer’s reluctance to be in any sort of serious relationship is on the surface borne out of real psychological issues — deeper than that we don’t see because she refuses to let anyone into her head, including us. I really liked that. And then that Tom believes in true love and soulmates and fate isn’t taken as a mark of his emasculation, but rather it folds in neatly with how he was brought up — listening to sad British pop music. I mean, that TOTALLY makes sense.

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I’m trying this new thing of watching movies within a week of getting them from Netflix. I’d heard relatively good things about Duplicity and who am I to turn away Clive Owen, so I watched it last night.

Straight off the bat the movie ticked me off in a couple different ways: first, within the first five seconds, before the dialogue even kicks in, there’s a lingering shot of Julia Roberts’ cleavage. It’s such blatant ogling (in fact, in my memory it’s as though the camera starts panning up but then does a double take, which doesn’t happen but may as well) that it can serve no other purpose than to remind us that this is a movie made by heterosexual dudes for other heterosexual dudes. And it doesn’t matter if Julia Roberts isn’t your cup of tea, because cleavage is cleavage — amirite fellas? It wasn’t that I was morally or feministically outraged (I’m as appreciative of other women’s breasts as the next heterosexual woman, though I don’t care to have someone else repeatedly poke me, hollering “lookit lookit lookit THOSE PUPPIES”), it was more like resignation: “Oh. It’s going to be THAT kind of movie.” (To be fair, it’s actually not that kind of movie, but . . . well, first impressions and all that.)

Second, the titles all have words spelled out in capital letters except for one or two lower case letters — “DUPLICiTY,” for example, which only makes me think of that inanity that is WriTinG eVeRyThiNG LiKe THiS.

(There was another small moment in which Clive Owen wishes Julia Roberts a happy 4th of July — they’re at the U.S. Embassy in Dubai, on the 4th — and she says “And to you” or something, which at the time bugged me because he’s British, and it wasn’t at all clear from her expression whether it was meant to be funny, but in retrospect it doesn’t bother me all that much now, because really, it’s just a silly small talk thing that I’d probably do as well.)

But then after the titles they’re in Manhattan, with an amusing little “stupid slow people walking around in Manhattan” moment, and I have a major weakness for movies filmed in New York, no matter how bad they wind up being, so . . . I decided to give it another chance.

And I sort of liked the movie. While the script does have several genuinely witty moments (and there’s one reveal at the end that I won’t give away but did make me gasp), there were still a few too many places I was able to say “Well, that wasn’t necessary” (starting with the cleavage shot). The narrative device got tedious halfway through, as did those Soderbergh-esque frame fades. Overall the movie lacks momentum.

Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti are hilarious as battling CEOs, but then they’re always fun to watch, which made me wish the movie spent more time on them. That any consumer products company would engage in such shady spy practices in order to get an edge in the market is 100% believable — very easy to imagine it was Johnson & Johnson vs. Proctor & Gamble.

I’m not a Julia Roberts fan but liked her in this, and would like her to do more of this sort of movie because she does “inscrutable” very well. Clive Owen was . . . well, to be honest, there was something about his performance that I didn’t quite like, but I’m having a hard time teasing out what it is. The best I can come up with is this: It was like he was in a slightly different movie than Julia Roberts. She was playing more toward a mapcap romantic comedy, while I think he was a little more serious, playing more to the espionage thriller aspect. Duplicity tries to be both — it doesn’t always succeed at both.

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In my more pretentious and pompous years (I like to think that I have grown less pretentious as I’ve gotten older — I still have clear ideas on what is and isn’t culturally worthy, but my tastes these days follow their own path and not some dictated-from-on-high cultural fascist institution or individual) I was dead set against putting 20th-century spins on classic works of literature, in the interest of . . . purity, I guess.

I was convinced that contemporary filmmakers couldn’t possibly understand the context or spirit of something that had been written 100, 200 years ago. That they weren’t smart enough (see: “my more pretentious years,” above) to fully comprehend the social, cultural, economic, and political contexts of the time period in which Shakespeare or Austen or . . . who else gets adapted to within an inch of their lives . . . maybe it’s just those two. At this point the idea that the socio-political aspects of a story written in 1601 or 1815 could have any significance to my own time didn’t really occur to me. I was pompous and pretentious and also a little clueless.

At this point in time Kenneth Branagh basically ruled over all Shakespeare adaptations, and they’re stunning and gorgeous and brilliant, and he didn’t feel the need to transfer Henry V or Much Ado About Nothing to modern times¹. So when Baz Luhrman did Romeo + Juliet, the plus sign alone set my teeth on edge.

Then again, the Ian McKellen Richard III that came out a year before was brilliant, I thought. So maybe that’s just a matter of preferring Ian McKellan and Annette Bening over Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes and really, in the mid-90s, I do think that’s a reasonable, if not wholly airtight mentally sound choice.

Thing is, I’m having a hard time trying to reconstruct these almost 20-year-old arguments, which seems to me means that I really didn’t have a leg to stand on back then, and was only holding my position out of stubbornness. Every time I proffered this argument someone would readily refute it — all they really needed to do was invoke West Side Story, and I would be forced to concede the point.  And then Clueless came out and I was forced to admit that I didn’t know a damn thing. Especially since, as many many people have heard me pontificate, the Gwyneth Paltrow Emma — a period adaptation — comes very close to failing completely to capture the spirit of the book. (What saves it is the very wise choice to end the movie as the book ends. With the obligatory wedding, yes, but more importantly, with Mrs. Elton’s critique of Emma’s wedding dress. [Oh, dear. Spoiler?] It’s a “perfect” moment marred by this vulgar character, and it’s brilliant, and I can totally see some filmmakers or studios not wanting to have it in the movie. So I’m glad it’s there.) ²

And Clueless remains, to this day, my absolute favorite Austen adapation. Sense and Sensibility is a close second — yes, over the Colin Firth P&P. You know why? Because Emma Thompson wrote a script that’s actually — hard-core Austenites, read no further — better than the book. I may think this because I read it long after I had read the brilliance that is Emma and Persuasion, and S&S is an earlier novel and while it shows the promise that later novels deliver . . . it’s just not as good. Period. But Thompson’s script is pitch-perfect and even adds things that seem SO very Austen yet aren’t in the book at all. (P.S. get the DVD and watch Thompson’s acceptance speech after winning the Golden Globe for best screenplay. She channels Jane Austen, I swear to god. I love her.) (P.P.S. Emma Thompson and producer Lindsay Doran do a DVD commentary ranks as one of my all-time favorites, so the DVD is worth getting just for that.)

My point here, to bring it back to Pride and Prejudice, is that I’ve grown way more relaxed about tweaking classic literature — as long as it’s thematically sound and done thoughtfully and done well, then have at it.

(You see where this is going, right?)

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