FILM REVIEW OF ''THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO" (2011)

If you saw both versions of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” side by side, you could spot the differences between the 2009 Swedish original and the 2011 American remake. Nevertheless, the revelations in the other won’t be as surprising. “Fight Club” director David Fincher brings his obsession with serial killers with him to this top-drawer adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s international bestseller. Fincher scored his first major cinematic success with the Brad Pitt & Morgan Freeman crime mystery “Se7en” (1995) about a cunning serial killer, and he explored similar subject matter in “Zodiac” (2007) a film about the real-life murders in San Francisco which spawned Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” franchise. Considering that the gritty subject matter of Larsson’s novel concerns a man who rapes and then murders women, the pairing of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (**** out of ****) and Fincher seems ideal. Oscar winning “Schindler's List” scenarist Steven Zaillian, who received Oscar nods for “Awakenings” as well as “Gangs of New York,” brings his formidable skills to bear as the sole scribe. Indeed, little is amiss in the Fincher & Zaillian retread, except cat lovers probably won’t appreciate the headless feline that winds up on our hero’s door step. The cat was conspicuous by its absence in the Swedish version. Perhaps the biggest difference between the two films is the casting of Lisbeth Salander. Noomi Rapace registered brilliantly as the eponymous heroine in the original, but newcomer Rooney Mara is no slouch. Mara wears insanity as persuasively as her black, boot-polish Goth make-up and her punk rock coiffures. Any preference you have may boil down to your choice between either Ms. Rapace or Ms. Mara. Each deliver chilling performances, and the Lisbeth Salander character qualifies as a biggest milestone in the depiction of women in film since the female assassin in the 1990 French action yarn “La Femme Nikita.”

Aging Swedish business magnate Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer of “The Sound of Music”) fears that he has few years left. The mysterious disappearance of his niece Harriet is the one thing which has haunted him for 4o years. She vanished without a trace one day at a family reunion. Neither the authorities nor Henrik were ever able to find her. To add insult to injury, Henrik has received a framed picture of a flower annually on each birthday. Harriet gave him the first flower, but lately Henrik suspects that all subsequent flowers since she disappeared have been sent by Harriet’s killer. Henrik feels like he is being ridiculed and he has suffered from this torment long enough. He hires an illustrious Swedish political journalist who writes for the magazine “Millennium.” A reluctant Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig of “Casino Royale”) accepts Vanger’s job offer since he has just lost a highly publicized libel suit against a notorious Swedish billionaire investment banker, Hans-Erik Wennerström (Ulf Friberg of “Exit”), and the court settlement has wiped out his savings.

Henrik commissions Blomkvist to write his memoirs in part because he abhors the corrupt Wennerström. Moreover, he possesses files on Wennerström which will damage the billionaire’s reputation and he promises to give them to Blomkvist after he completes his assignment. What Blomkvist doesn’t know is that Henrik’s attorney, Dirch Frode (Steven Berkoff of “Octopussy”), has employed Milton Security to conduct a background check on Blomkvist. The individual who does the background check is a 23-year old girl, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara of “Youth in Revolt”), and she leaves no stone unturned in her thorough investigation. Once Henrik hires Blomkvist, he explains that his family is pretty hideous bunch. Two of his brothers joined the Nazi Party in Sweden during World War II. Some don’t talk to each other even though they live in houses on an island linked to the mainland by a single bridge. Furthermore, Henrik suspects that one of them may have murdered poor Harriet. Henrik installs Blomkvist in a nearby cottage and provides him with every shred of evidence that the police relied on during their investigation of Harriet’s disappearance.

Later, things go awry when Henrik suffers a heart attack, and everybody but Frode expects him to die. At the hospital, some of Henrik’s relatives demand that Blomkvist be dismissed, but Martin Vanger (Stellan Skarsgård of “Thor”) convinces the family to allow Blomkvist to complete Henrik’s chronicle. Meantime, Lisbeth encounters her own woes when her guardian suffers a stroke, and the state replaces him. Lisbeth, it seems, has a life filled with tragedy. We learn that she burned her abusive father over eighty per cent of his body because he beat her mother without mercy. Since her assault on her father, Lisbeth has been in trouble and is now a ward of the state. The state transfers Lisbeth over to the villainous Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen of “Soul Assassin”)who shows little sympathy to Lisbeth. He humiliates her with questions about her private life. Basically, they get off on the wrong foot, but Lisbeth manages to bring the evil Bjurman around to her way of thinking as suffering abuse at his hands. These scenes are the reason that "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" carries an R-rating for explicit sexuality.

Eventually, Blomkvist finds the mystery so overwhelming that he asks Frode for an assistant and Frode recommends Lisbeth. Together, they struggle to not only find clues but also to interpret those clues correctly. While Blomkvist interviews the Vanger family, Lisbeth performs the leg work. She turns out to be a genuis with computers, brazenly hacking into anybody's account to obtain information.

If anything differentiates the two films, the casting disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist does. Stockholm born actor Michael Nyqvist appears more believable in the original, but English born actor Daniel Craig holds his own in the remake. Actually, were it not for radical, off-beat character of Lisbeth, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” would amount to little more than a complex European whodunit set in a scenic, snow-swept wonderland. In fact, it is Lisbeth who gives the film its lurid but gripping quality. She assumes a role of greater significance in the Swedish sequels and probably will in the American sequels. She emerges as a female Rambo with a no-nonsense attitude. If she were a cat, she would claw more often than purr. Although “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” clocks in at a lengthy 158 minutes, director David Fincher doesn’t squander a second. He knows the right moment to cut away from one scene to another to heighten suspense. Furthermore, despite the graphic crime scene photos and the misogyny, Fincher is careful enough to never rub our noses in it.

FILM REVIEW OF ''BOLT 3D"

The new animated 3-D Walt Disney family flick “Bolt” (*** out of ****) is pretty doggone funny. Combine elements of the Arnold Schwarzenegger epic “Last Action Hero” (1993) with the dogs trekking across America in the 1963 Disney classic “The Incredible Journey,” and you’ll have a fair idea about what this cute canine comedy delivers. “Bolt” is the first Disney animated feature produced by the Mouse House since Pixar genius John Lasseter of “Toy Story” fame assumed creative control. Like previous Lasseter movies, such as “Cars,” “A Bug’s Life,” and “Monsters, Inc.,” the animation in “Bolt” is something to bark about. The incomparable 3-D digital projection is what distinguishes this lighthearted flick. Meanwhile, “Mulan” co-scripters Byron Howard and Chris Williams, who teamed up to helm this hilarious hokum, drum up a lot of jokes about a deluded doggie who dreams that he possesses super heroic powers. “Pulp Fiction” star John Travolta furnishes the voice for the feisty German shepherd puppy, and Disney singing sensation Miley Cyrus voices Penny, the teenager who adores Bolt at first sight when she spots the little nipper at an animal shelter.

The premise of “Bolt” is as fetching as it is far-fetched. Bolt—complete with a jagged lightning insignia across his ribs—becomes the top dog of a prime-time, Google Generation, sci-fi TV show. The contemporary equivalent of Lassie, our four-pawed protagonist shows no fear in a crisis. In the context of the show, Penny desperately searches for her father who has been abducted by an evil Bond-type villain, Dr. Calico (Malcolm McDowell of “A Clockwork Orange”), flanked by two haughty cats. Before Penny’s poppa got kidnapped, he enhanced Bolt with cybernetic powers that make this man’s best friend as powerful as Will Smith’s “Hancock.” Bolt’s prime directive is to protect his ‘person,’ Penny (Miley Cyrus of “Hannah Montana”), from Dr. Calico’s black-clad henchmen. Bolt is so strong that he can smash head-first into a car and send it spinning end-over-end 50 yards in the air. He can turn eyes into molten lasers and burn through anything. Furthermore, he can hightail it down a street faster than a greyhound on afterburners and leap above a hovering helicopter’s whirling rotor blades!

In reality, however, Bolt is nothing more than an average bow-wow. Network TV executives have fooled our hero into thinking that he has cybernetically enhanced brawn. After Bolt has dealt with the villains and gone back to his trailer, the technicians step in and remove the debris. The dead and the wounded get up and brush themselves off. Network executives refuse to let Bolt out of his trailer for fear that he will discover the truth about himself. Nothing Bolt does is real; it’s the result of carefully staged special effects. You can see the resemblance between Bolt and the “Toy Story” character Buzz Lightyear. Everything changes radically for Bolt when two sarcastic cats lure him out of his trailer. During a frantic chase, Bolt traps himself accidentally in a box of pink Styrofoam that is shipped off to New York City. In the Big Apple, three moronic pigeons lead Bolt to a cynical, declawed, black alley cat, Mittens (Susie Essman of “Curb Your Enthusiasm”), and our deluded hero takes her hostage so that he can find Penny. Leashed together like Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier were in the 1958 civil rights thriller “The Defiant Ones,” Bolt drags a reluctant Mittens across America to Hollywood. Along the way, Bolt realizes that he is an ordinary mutt. He succumbs to hunger pangs and begs for scraps at an RV park in Ohio. Infinitely wiser than Bolt, Mittens helps the whelp make his transition from super dog to normal hound.

At the Ohio RV park, Bolt and Mittens encounter Rhino. Rhino (voiced by Mark Walton of “Chicken Little”) is an energetic hamster who rolls around in a transparent plastic exercise ball. His favorite pastime is watching TV with his sphere balanced on the remote control so he can channel surf. The clueless Rhino worships Bolt as the super hero of his dreams and accompanies Mittens and Bolt to Las Vegas where they dine off left over casino buffet food in dumpsters. Along the way, Bolt discovers the simple pleasures of riding with his head stuck out a window of a moving vehicle, his ears sailing in the breeze, with his tongue trailing from the corner of his muzzle like a pennant. Just as Bolt is ready to surrender to the brutal, harsh grind of everyday life, Rhino refuses to let his hero sink into self-pity. Actually, this highly strung little hamster steals the show once he joins them, especially in a scene where Bolt and he rescue Mittens from an animal pound.

The biggest problem with “Bolt” is its anticlimactic plot. Nothing after the electrifying first scene can match Bolt’s clash with Dr. Calico’s attack choppers and the phantom motorcyclists that blast away with missiles at our genetically-altered hero. The finale at the studio where Bolt finds that he has been replaced by a doggie double is particularly heartbreaking, but co-directors Howard and Williams don’t let us down. The animators do a splendid job of replicating Travolta’s facial expressions on the snout of the heroic canine and Travolta reads his lines with admirable restraint. Children should enjoy the antics of these talking animals, and the fantastic 3-D digital projection will knock the eyes out of the adults who are worried about surviving this 81-minute comedy without reward. Watching “Bolt” in any format other than 3-D is a waste of time.