"You choose who you want to be" (from movie)

(No plot spoilers in this movie review)

I have a new mystery/drama in my top 10 list of all time: "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo."

Actually it is in my top 5. Actually, I think it's my favorite movie of all time.

It is riveting, fast-paced, perfectly written drama that is steadfastly about justice and independence, uncompromisingly so in the main character: Lisbeth Salander (played with stunning virtuosity by Noomi Rapace, photo). At one point in the movie, a hard-ass journalist tries to make a few excuses for a murderer/rapist. Lisbeth, who suffered enormities as a child that continue into the present, turns her fierce eyes to him and says about the murderer: "He had the same choices as everyone else. You choose who you want to be. He wasn't a victim. He was an evil motherfucker who hated women."

That scene doesn't end with the stare. Lisbeth continues to quietly but ferociously watch the journalist to see if he will face up to what she said. She wants to see who he has chosen to be! As hard as Lisbeth is, she is played with unsentimental vulnerability in scenes that are breathtaking in their acting and their writing.

The second time I watched the movie (within 10 days), I replayed that scene about five times, and each time, my spine got shivers and my head shook with disbelief at perfection that you will rarely see in modern-day cinema.

If that scene sounds fantastic to you, you will find other scenes that are more powerful graphically.

There are a few, sympathetic anti-capitalist remarks in the movie and a few other tangential problems, but nothing that egregiously takes away from a nearly perfect movie. I have never given a movie a "10" rating, but I would give this one a 9.9 -- even above my beloved "Shawshank Redemption." It has better pacing; it is more visceral in its life-threats; it is more awe-inspiring in its evocation of how the main character handles the life-threats and those who threaten her; and it shows Lisbeth as an ingenious person with the singular focus of a moral predator.

Go see it and let me know what you think.

(I no longer reveal plot lines or key plot scenes on movies, so the moviegoer may go into the movie fresh.)

Watch "Informant" and then take a good shit

(some plot spoilers)

Watching a brilliant actor portray pathology would be like watching a top athlete carry a licey bum through 3 miles of a leech-infested swamp.

It is a waste, a moral debacle. It is not art; it is cinema realite, European-style, scrounging up the worst in humans and splattering it upon a screen.

Such is the case with Matt Damon and the wretched "Informant," a movie about a pathological liar who ostensively is informing on the corrupt activity of his bosses but is instead about the maniacal self-delusion of a man who knows not what he does or why he does it -- for attention perhaps, but who knows? He's not the man on the white horse of earlier cinema. He's Quasimodo hurling shitballs from the flying buttresses of Notre Dame. He's incapable of telling the truth, incapable of a moment's sincerity, incapable of immersing himself in the connective tissue of reality and other people.

Damon is riveting and pathetic, a man caught in the abysmal gray fog of personal anonymity, perplexed by his own charade, causing perplexity in the few moral people around him, zipping through an infinitely twisted mental labyrinth of confused motivation and deceit with the purposeless inner dialog of the idiot savant.

Some reviewers of the movie have called Damon's character "bi-polar." No, he is modern, utterly confused with his own self-identity, amoral, narcissistic, entangled far down the jungle path of his own escapism and reeking destruction, confusion and mayhem upon the people who bravely deal with the real world.

As if the plot and drama of "The Informant" weren't abominable enough, we viewers are subjected to the simplistic device of voiceover, or inner dialog, that only a few movies in cinematic history have executed with any good effect (namely "Blade Runner" and a few others). It is "Catcher in the Rye" on steroids.

Here's one such nugget from Damon's character, who spouted 10 or more such meaningless nuggets throughout:

"When polar bears hunt, they crouch down by a hole in the ice and wait for a seal to pop up. They keep one paw over their nose so that they blend in. Cuz’ they’ve got those black noses. They’d blend in perfectly if not for the nose...

So the question is. How do they know their noses are black? From looking at other polar bears? Do they see their reflections in the water? And think, “I’d be invisible if not for that.” That seems like a lot of thinking for a bear."

OK, if you're high, sitting with friends and one of you comes up with this little insight, it's really funny. But the obvious purpose of this *during a movie* about a freight-training pathological liar is to highlight his disease, which, of course, is what this movie is all about (except the writer's own self-conscious Leftist attempt at cleverness). It's the lowest common denominator in art, the modern "empathy" for psychosis, the Leftist Hollywood projection of its inner turmoil and alleged superiority to hoi polloi.

The canvas equivalent of this putrescence is a neon pile of colorful shit. "Yes, yes, isn't it interesting how the purple dung segues easily, mellifluously, into the yellow worms feasting? Brilliant!"

Don't watch "The Informant." If you do, cleanse yourself. Take a good shit and then drink a glass of palette-refreshing wine.

Oh, and by the way, Damon is one of Hollywood's most vocal Leftists.

So FUCK YOU, Damon!