Reviews

That reference to The Wicker Man May be lost on a younger generation but it was the first thing I thought when the four unfortunate Americans arrived at the summer festivities in Sweden. I knew things were not going to go well. I thought the film very well done and totally creepy. There was not as much violence and gore as I was expecting but when it did come, it jumped up on you. There were some great comic relief scenes. But the audience that I saw this with was a bit on the young side and laughed at some fairly inappropriate things. I am pretty sure that was nervous laughter. I completely recommend this film.

I wanted to like Vinyl. It's my time period. I was 20 in 1973 and very involved with local music and musicians. But Vinyl is not really about the music of 1973. It is about out of touch record executives scheming to find the next person they can screw, both literally and figuratively. So much of it seems like a parody of 1973 rather than reality. The scenes with the German Polygram executives seemed straight out of Fawlty Towers ("Don't mention the war"). The treatment of the Lester Grimes character is pretty much criminal for a man who is supposed to be able to spot talent. Too much name dropping - e.g. constant references in the first episode to Led Zeppelin, and a painfully awkward scene backstage with a preening Robert Plant. The cocaine use seems like simply part of the required checklist - after all it is New York in the 70s. Have to include massive amounts of coke, right? The acting is uniformly good. The sets are great and costuming nearly perfect. Hairstyles are embarrassingly accurate. (Check out one guy's mutton-chop sideburns.) But for all the surface perfection, Vinyl feels hollow and inauthentic. Nothing but the anarchic punk club scene seemed anything like reality to me. And that seemed to come right out of Sid and Nancy. Beautifully done but ultimately empty and disappointing.

An exceptionally well done version of the novel of the same name about a profoundly dysfunctional young woman computer genius who teams up with a disgraced male journalist on the verge of middle age to investigate the disappearance 40 years ago of the great-niece of a wealthy industrialist. Readers of the book will not be disappointed in this excellent film treatment. Some subplots and characters were discarded or altered, but the book was so densely plotted that was inevitable. The two leads are both compelling but Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander is absolutely spellbinding. She has the perfect combination of toughness and vulnerability with a hint of possible psychopathy. You cannot take your eyes off her while she is on screen. The movie is very violent in some scenes, a violence that women will be much more sensitive to. There are rape scenes that are graphically violent although not sexually graphic. Some may not regard these as very violent simply because they do not involve blood or gore but they are very disturbing and hard to watch. Salander's revenge is a little more traditionally violent. There are some scenes that foreshadow the second book (The Girl Who Played With Fire) as well as cover the material from the first book. To fans and non-fans alike, I recommend this movie highly. The likelihood of an American version soon to come is quite depressing. Don't wait for it. See the original Swedish version.

This is a silly and not very frightening movie. Horror films have one single and simple function and that is to scare or at least disturb you. If they fail at that, they are pointless. This movie is pointless and silly. It starts from the beginning with our heroine who is simply unbelievable as an up and coming would-be assistant bank manager. I see her as a contender for head cheerleader at best. Throughout the movie, she does not engage our sympathy at all. Frankly, I couldn't give a damn what happened to her. Certainly after the kitten scene I was actively on the side of the lamia. I agreed with his mother that Mac Man could do soooo much better. Multiple silly things have been noted by other reviewers, my favourites being the anvil in the garage, the spectacular nosebleed, and the heroine's remarkable ability to dig out a 8' x 3' x 6' grave with a small shovel in the pouring rain in a few short hours. And she really needed a different spiritual adviser. He takes $10,000 from her for a ridiculous and futile exorcism and, only after that fails, he remembers to tell her a rather simple trick he could have told her the first night they met. The major fault here is the script which really did not do justice to the underlying idea in the movie. These days, dragging unsympathetic loan officers to hell has a very attractive ring to it. But the writers blew the promising story idea. Overall, not a movie for which I would demand my $5 rental fee back. But equally, I wish I had waited until it turned up on free TV.

I think your opinion of this movie may depend a lot on whether or not you are prone to believe the concept of alien abduction or you are a huge skeptic. I fall into the latter category. After the movie, my companions tried to taunt me into some sort of admission that this movie threatened my skepticism. They asked me to explain the "authentic" footage of how a man floats in the air, a child disappears, a police officer sees an abduction actually taking place. I had no prior knowledge of these events and so I fell back on a classic tactic of mine (and most skeptics). I suggested that the movie makers had not given us all of the facts and that there were details in the real cases that would explain these things. After I got home and did some basic research, I am pretty sure I have my explanation. The truth is out there and it is not a Fox "Spooky" Mulder truth. 'Nuff said. You probably will enjoy the movie more if you don't know too much about the "real" story behind it. I give the movie a 5 because it was entertaining and gave me the chance to spend some quality time with some people I love (no matter how credulous they are). It did have some good creepy bits and overall I thought it was not a total waste of time. I think its a rental movie at best or a movie to enjoy with a group.

First off, I do need to make it clear that I am a huge fan of the original movie, so I came to watch this remake with deep reservations. The trailers and commercials I saw before actually seeing the movie suggested to me that this would be bad. But it was worse than I thought. The whole basis of the original story was that the Pagan cult living on the island needed a pure sacrifice to atone for whatever wrongs they had done that caused a bad harvest the year before. Sgt. Howie (a great performance by Edward Woodward)in the original movie was a virginal fundamentalist Christian with deep religious convictions and a strong sense of duty. Cage's character is simply a stock guilt-ridden Nicholas Cage character that we have seen in god knows how many movies previously. Sgt. Howie is outraged and offended by the paganism of the island and in particular its overtly sexual practices. Cage is offended because the island is run by women who appear to enslave men and use them only for heavy lifting and breeding.

This last thing is one of the things that irritated me most. The original Summerisle was ruled feudal fashion by Lord Summerisle, the deliciously suave and malevolent Christopher Lee. The men were willing and equal partners with the women of the island in all of their practices and there is a nice little scene in the schoolhouse of the girls being taught to worship penises.

The remake has stolen ideas from the old made for TV movie Dark Secret of Harvest Home, (some of the mutilation scenes are straight out of Harvest Home) and made the men irrelevant for the most part. Was this only so that Cage could shout out at the end "You bitches!!"? Cage's outrage in the movie seems strongly related to the matriarchal culture there, and I sense a strong thread of misogyny throughout the movie. There is no real development of the pagan culture here, unlike the original movie. There are just the stock clichés that make the whole thing seem ridiculous as opposed to frightening.

This is a horror movie for those who need everything explained to them. You are not permitted to slowly develop the dawning realization that there is something really bad going on here - everything has to be explained. Cage also needs everything explained. And if he can't find people to answer his questions, he conveniently finds a book that tells him what he needs to know.

Really dumb stuff: 1. The missing girl becomes his daughter in the remake thus changing his motivation from that of a dedicated police officer to that of a father. 2. He waves his gun around and threatens people with it but the only time it would have really been useful to him he does not use it. 3. The missing girl's last name is changed to Woodward. As Cage's character's name is Edward, was this some sort of homage to Edward Woodward? 4. The women's names are all changed to add "Sister" in front of them, "Miss Rose" becomes "Sister Rose" etc. 5. The island's name is changed to "Summersisle" - with the addition of an "s" - probably because there is a real Summer Isle, and they wanted nothing to do with this botched up remake.

One good thing about the movie is that they did not change the ending. I really worried that they would and Cage would run off with his new wife and child to live happily forever after. But still, the ending has none of the creepy power of the original with the whole village joining hands and singing "Summer is a-comin' in" while poor Sgt. Howie is praying to God and reciting biblical verses. (Parenthetically, when I showed the original to my older sister a few years ago, she was outraged at the ending and accused me of having no morals for enjoying a movie where a decent god-fearing man was burnt to death.)

Sadly,I doubt whether or not an American movie could be made in these days where a deeply fundamentalist Christian could be killed off by pagans, and that is really too bad, because losing the element of the conflict between belief systems really weakens this movie. Plus, it eliminates the whole sexual element that underlay the original movie so effectively.

The only reason I gave this film a 3 rather than a 1 was because it was professionally done with good production values and I suppose that has to count for something. The actors did what they could with a really bad script. I don't mind Nicholas Cage but he really should just retire if he plans on playing the same guy in every movie from now until the end of his career.