Three Films Make A Post: Pull over, park, and pray.

AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004): Having said quite a few nasty words about Predator 2, I’m of course now turning around to praise, if mildly, Paul W.S. Anderson’s Alien/Predator crossover movie. But then, this film does feature a simple method to bring Aliens and Predators together that makes enough sense for a SF/action/horror movie, has Lance Henriksen being Lane Henriksen, and seems to be perfectly alright with being a cheap and cheerful monster movie with a couple of iconic monsters. The first part of the film is a bit slow – this is one of those films where the doomed character showing family photos needs to do it three times so it sticks even with the slowest audience member, because him getting chest-bursted is apparently not enough to make us care – but once Anderson gets going, the film turns into a series of fun, not always totally dumb action set pieces of the type the director is often rather good at.

One Crazy Summer (1986): I’m not really into random style comedies, but I do tend to make an exception for the films of Savage Steve Holland (or, you know, two or three of them). Mostly, I believe, because here the randomness isn’t so much based on a lack of discipline but on an imagination too great to be constrained by silly things like discipline or proper movie structures. And hey, if it’s good enough for young John Cusack, who am I to naysay?


The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011): David Fincher’s version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a perfect example of the pointlessness of Hollywood adaptations of pretty contemporary movies (well series, if you want to be anal about it) from other countries. It’s not at all the fact that this is a bad movie – the cast, particularly Rooney Mara, is certainly great, and one of Fincher’s underused strengths is his ability to depict investigations in a visually interesting but also meaningful manner – but the film doesn’t really add anything important or of interest at all to what was already there in the original. Why remake a thing (or re-adapt a book) when you don’t actually have anything new or different to say about it? On a commercial level, I get it – audiences can’t abide looking at all those foreigner with their terrible foreigner faces (I am being sarcastic, you easily offended). But what’s someone like Fincher getting out of it, who can choose projects that are actually, you know interesting?