The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher, 2011)
I hadn’t read Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (or seen its 2009 Swedish film adaptation), so I went into David Fincher’s version of the story with little knowledge or expectation. The striking credit sequence promises a dark and intense thriller, as you’d expect from someone of Fincher’s talent, and indeed I was intrigued for much of the film …until slowly it became apparent just how non-intriguing it truly is.
The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)
Early in David Fincher’s Facebook origin story The Social Network, nerdy and socially inept Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is chatting to the Winklevoss twins (both played by Armie Hammer). Zuckerberg has proven himself a programming whiz with a campus-blitzing piece of computer hacking; they’re a pair of old-money golden boys looking to recruit him to work on their start-up web business. Despite the modern trappings, the exchange is filtered through more traditional power dynamics, with the tall, good-looking, WASP Winklevosses deigning to let the thin, geeky, Jewish Zuckerberg into the entry hall of their exclusive campus fraternity. It’s at that moment that the analogy between David Fincher’s prestigious Oscar-favourite drama and a campus fraternity comedy such as Animal House snaps into focus.
One of the holy grails of special effects for a few years now has been the fully realistic all-digital animated human. Computer animated human characters have been passed off as real for fleeting shots, most often to replace stunt people, but nobody has ever given one any kind of serious acting to do. Yet people have been assuming it was just around the corner for years, with the general assumption being that someone would use digital technology to try to bring back a deceased star (existing gestures in this direction, like Marlon Brando in Superman Returns, have always used manipulated footage of the original actor).