Currently browsing the "Christopher Plummer" tag.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Three of the most popular books of 2008-2010 were Stieg Larssen’s Millennium Trilogy. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the first book and there is already one great movie of it in the original Swedish. (Here is my review of that one.) But now we have the David Fincher (Fight Club, The Social Network) prettied-up American version. I could just about recycle my first review for the new one, but there are a few differences. It is in English. Daniel Craig is hotter than Michael Nyqvist. And Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth is a great deal less insular and a lot more one-dimensional than Noomi Rapace’s.

The Last Station

This is a wonderful film! It should be on the expanded Academy Awards list for Best Picture, but sadly it isn’t. At least both Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy and Helen Mirren as his wife Sofya are nominated in their respective acting categories. The Last Station is the story of the last years of the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s life, his tempestuous relationship with this wife, his coterie of adoring sycophants who turned him into a cult figure, and a young man who became his personal secretary and family confidante.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Terry Gilliam does not make mainstream movies. They are always quirky and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is no exception. Part of the strangeness this time is that (as anyone who has not been living in an underground lair is aware) Heath Ledger died while they were shooting and they had to come up with a way to finish it without him. So for three fantasy sequences in the movie (that somehow make perfect sense anyway), the character Tony meant to be portrayed by HL is played instead by Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell — not too shabby as stand-ins, if you ask me.