The 90-second teaser for David Fincher’s remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo came out back in May and people lost their sh*t, so I can only imagine what’s going to happen now that we have almost four minutes of it. I wasn’t as impressed with the first one as everyone else seemed to be, mainly because it was just random action cut to the beat of music, and that’s like high school video editing 101. Cutting video to music makes it look cool: fact. It’s kind of cheating. Anyway, this new one has no such tricks. Just four minutes of intrigue from the movie without really giving away much about the plot. Pretty damn impressive.

The film is based on Stieg Larsson’s internationally best-selling novel centering on a murder mystery looking as far back as 40 years at the disappearance of Harriet Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden’s wealthiest families. All these years later, her aged uncle continues to seek the truth. He hires Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), a crusading journalist recently trapped by a libel conviction, to investigate. He is aided by the pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara). Together they tap into a vein of unfathomable iniquity and astonishing corruption. [RopeofSilicon]

Anyone else find it strange that the original book was in Swedish, as was the first film adaptation, and now that we have an English version, it’s still set in Sweden, but now all the Swedes speak English with different accents? There are two or three Englishman, Rooney Mara sounds Scandinavian, a couple vaguely Germanic-sounding dudes — we always just accept it because it sounds fancy and continental, but it makes no logical sense. Just once I’d like to see them try this with a chola, some dudes from Mississippi, three Hawaiians, and a Ukrainian. It’d be like a murder mystery set at my apartment complex. “Hey, Bra. I know you’re lesbo or whatever, but I hear you’re pretty good at investigateen. You know, for a haole.”

“Fack you, cawksuckah, can’t you see I’m fackin’ busy? Didn’t ya queah mothah evah teach you ta knawk?”

"Can you help us catch the eyebrow thief who did this, Lispeth?"

No eyebrows = nothing to lose. Opens December 21st. [via TheDailyWhat]

I DON'T LIKE TO BE TOUCHED!

Unlike The Great Gatsby, I haven’t actually read Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (thanks a lot, high school English class), so I may not be the best person to explain what’s going on in these new pictures from David Fincher’s adaptation (opening December 21st). Here’s what I do know: that’s Rooney “boring tits” Mara as Dame Lizardbreath von Salamander on the left, consoling Dutch actor Yorick van Wageningen (as Nils Bjurman), whose last name seems to have at least one vestigial syllable. I’m not sure what he’s so upset about. Maybe a møøse bit his sister?

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Cowboys and Aliens is an absurdist pastiche of overused action movie tropes (Bourne in the old west! With aliens!), which is occasionally compelling, if only for the sheer audacity of plot choices. That is to say, it’s ridiculous. And I’m a big fan of the ridiculous (see also: Lieutenant, Bad; Werner Herzog version of). I just wish Cowboys and Aliens‘ preposterousness wasn’t so couched in pre-fabricated stories and characters. It’s a lot like Lost, but even black smoke monsters and polar bears seemed more fresh than Cowboys, Indians, aliens, rocket hands, and amnesia. It plays like a producer brainstorming session that never got edited, which makes it all the more shocking that no one turns out to be a vampire or a hot cyborg lesbian (spoiler alert).

It’s hard to believe Lost exec producer Damon Lindelof had five co-writers, because the whole thing reeks of black smoke musk, from the character daddy issues driving every single plot point right down to the fat-faced kid with a dog who seems totally unnecessary to the plot. I imagine the writers meeting went something like this:

Alex Kurtzman: Cowboys!

Robert Orci: Indians! Aliens! James Bond! Indiana Jones–

Steve Oedekirk: (*loud gurgle, extended fart sound followed by terrible stench. the rest of the gang rolls his wheelchair outside before continuing*)

Lindelof: Amnesia! Religious themes! Re-incarnation–

Iron Man writers Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby: [together] ROCKET HANDS! (*they smash their beer steins together, down the rest, and stomp off like the Bushwhackers*)

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Oscar-nominated director Jim Sheridan is known for movies like My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father, In America, and Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (one of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn’t belong).  He seems to be continuing his “lol wut” career trajectory with Dream House starring Daniel Craig, Naomi Watts, Rachel Weisz, and Elias Koteas, all of whom deserve better than this.  The film releases September 30th, one year after it was supposed to come out.  The delay was for reshoots (always a good sign), which had to be delayed a year because Daniel Craig had better sh-t to do.

Kind of sad that the guy who made My Left Foot is now making a horror movie reminiscent of cheesy ’70s gimmicks like haunted houses, secret dwarf hookers, “it was all a dream OMGZORS”, and “the killer was you the whole time”.  Let’s just plow through this depressing development and describe this awful, movie-spoiling trailer.

Daniel Craig quits his “high power job in Manhattan” to relocate his hot wife and two adorable, never-bratty kids to a “quaint New England town”.  This never happens in cinema.  Soon weird things go down and they find out a murder occurred before they moved in, which they weren’t informed of by the realtor because laws don’t exist in this movie universe.  The wife and two kids who used to live in the house were murdered and the only suspect was the husband, who was institutionalized because deinstitutionalization never happened in this universe either.  Craig goes to the mental institution to talk to the guy for some reason, and he finds out *record scratch/spoiler alert* he is that guy and his family was dead the whole time. WHAT A TOTALLY ORIGINAL CONCEPT, AND PERFECTLY BEFITTING INCLUSION IN THE TRAILER.  Gaaah, f–k you, Dream House trailer.  I hate you so much.

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With MGM’s financial woes in the back seat and production under way, the 23rd installment of the James Bond franchise is making up for lost time (and Quantum of Solace) by adding some big names to the cast, notably Javier Bardem and Ralph Fiennes. Bardem will play Daniel Craig’s newest villain while Fiennes will presumably play the head – or a very powerful figure of authority within – the Quantum organization.

But who cares about them? Producers have also cast Naomie Harris (28 Days Later) as Miss Moneypenny, a character that hasn’t appeared in a Bond film since Die Another Day, the last installment of the Pierce Brosnan era. The addition of Harris is shaking some martinis, though, as Moneypenny has been always been played by white actresses. So of course this is just some ploy by the producers to appease the mobs of angry ethnic Bond fans, right? RIGHT???

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