Ref: Mulhern
#9 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Unlike B, I went into this movie having read all the full Millennium trilogy, albeit a couple of years ago. He gets some things wrong and some things right in his recap of the story, which indicates the difficulty of conveying the nuances of a complex, (sometimes too) detailed novel on film. At the same time, the film's comparative streamlining of Steig Larsson's text cuts out some overly-lengthy exposition and brings additional intensity to the narrative.
Rooney Mara experienced an extreme transformation to prepare for this role, among other things getting pierced in about nine different places (including her ears, which weren't previously pierced), and she embodies Salander admirably. Daniel Craig is also good, although his investigative character isn't much different than others he has played before. The landscape is especially evocative, mirroring the isolation and bleakness of our imperfect protagonists. One warning: the violence is extremely explicit, so much so that two people walked out of the showing we attended.
#8 Moneyball
I did not read Moneyball, but I understand that the text itself doesn't have much in common with the movie; while the book details how moneyball is played, the film is more about conveying how moneyball was developed. I knew the basics of the story but no details going in, and I was happily entertained by the inside baseball tale.
Well-written and well-acted, the movie makes the statistician's science behind player selection understandable and the manager's art of making a deal interesting. Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill have a great rapport, the grizzled coaching staff members show the appropriate amount of skepticism at the ideas of Hill's young upstart character, and the players add (for the most part) a nice dash of levity and authenticity.
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