Thursday, July 21, 2011

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

The Office, Season Five:
The first half of this season was so-so, with silly devices to keep geographically remote characters still involved in the the plot. The Super Bowl episode started strong with Dwight's fire drill (and I watched 2:45 - 2:52 at least twenty times, laughing every time) but then got weird and petered out, as The Office does when any given episode is longer than twenty minutes. The last half of the season is much better, probably because shifts in the plot allow the action to play out in new situations.

Final Grade: B

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (R):
The Millenium Trilogy is a peculiar set of books because it's alternately meandering and page-turning (not unlike me when I'm assisting on a traveling piano recital). I theorized once that you really need to be a fast reader to not give up on the books before they start getting good, and the sheer number of characters in the first one is a little daunting. The movie solves a lot of these problems -- it's a perfect distillation of the text into screen time, maintaining the intent of the movie without being a slave to every detail. The problem with this, though, is that once you trim away many of the Byzantine details of the mystery, it's not much of a mystery anymore. I enjoyed watching this, although having to read the subtitles kept me distracted from any cinematography.

Final Grade: B-

The Girl Who Played With Fire (R):
The litmus test for this movie in my head was how they would handle the 900 pages in the book where the main character walked around IKEA buying things, and again, the movie is a good summation of the reason behind that scene. This movie was a little better than the previous, because the main plot was more relevant to the main characters. It occasionally suffered from the "too many old similar-looking white guy characters that they don't trouble to name" syndrome, although most of them return in the third movie, giving you time to figure out why they're important.

Final Grade: B

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (R):
The second movie ends in a cliffhanger, and you really need to watch this back-to-back to appreciate it (unlike Kill Bill which could be best appreciated by watching zero parts of it). The action in this one is a little more abstract, and the last half is a courtroom drama, but it does a good job of tying everything together and giving relevance to the brief scenes from the earlier movie that seemed out of place on their own.

Final Grade: B

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