Day: January 18, 2012

Back by popular demand, we have more Zac Efron! I am also right now confused, because I thought he was supposed to star in the new Footloose. Now I realize why the cool kids didn’t laugh at my jokes. Shiiiiiiit.

After three High School Musicals and one Hairspray, he didn’t want to be type-casted. Huh. Too late for that?

Efron plays the title character in the movie, Charlie St. Cloud, and near the beginning his younger brother (Charlie Tahan) is killed in car accident with him behind the wheel. Well shit! Charlie is at least brought back to life thanks to an Ambulance doctor, Ray Liotta, but not his brother.

FIVE YEARS LATER.

Turns out Efron is still in the same town. Never left, despite a scholarship to Yale for sailing, or something like that. He now works at the graveyard, super angsty. Oh yeah, he sees dead people now, kind of. Plays catch with his brother every day at sunset, to get him prepped for baseball. Yeah. Sometimes he sees other people too, but that isn’t importantly. Clearly he is fucked up.

Enter Amanda Crew, someone he knew from high school, who also likes sailing. She is going to sail across the world in a race! Her dad is trying to help prep her (Donal Logue), and is worried that Efron kid will ruin it all up. Since he is creepy now anyways.

This could have been Efron, damn it.

So yeah. Stuff happens. Efron kind of gets interested in sailing again. But what if he joins her on the race? Will he lose his brother officially forever if he isn’t there to play baseball? There is also a secondary very important plot but telling you about it is just major spoilers so I wont. Was an interesting surprise, needless to say.

The movie was a lot sadder than I had guessed. I mean, the sadder moments happened at the beginning right? You’d think wrong. The camera work was surprisingly good too, for what I expected to be some cheesy teen movie or something. I liked the story, but it might have been too slow. Also, Liotta was way too creepy for his like, three scenes. Religious zealot much?

The Girl Who Played With Fire is the sequel to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo in the Girl Who Has Long Titles, trilogy.

This one doesn’t have an American version yet, so I won’t put Swedish in the title. Heck yes!

She looks more normal in this film. Well, in this scene. Others she looks just as weird.

So this movie takes place a year after the first? I think so. Year is a relative term. Since the last movie she only a had a year left of having a guardian, but in this movie, guardian seems to still be a problem. I didn’t like it, seemed force, mostly because it seemed like Lisbeth said the same exact shit as the first movie, and it was just unnecessary. So that bugged me.

Michael Nyqvist still plays the detective dude. This time instead of focusing on rape, they are working on sex trafficking. So kind of rapey. I guess.

Talking about the plot of this seems silly. You would only watch it if you’ve seen the first movie, and unless you hated the first one, the plot summary wont convince you to watch this one. So what does this one have? Less rape, as I said. Plus more lesbian sex. Also long lost family members, set ups on crime, and some more computer hacking. But that is about it.

Personally, as just a movie, I found this one to be kind of a mess. Maybe its the transition between book and novel, or mini series and movie? But it was just hard to follow. A lot of stuff was assumed.

Like they assumed Lisbeth did the murder because of some fingerprints? A lot of weird shit happened in this movie, and most of it seemed to come not from the main sex offender plot.

This might have been a deleted scene from The Warriors?

The only reason I am giving it the “one watch and thats all you need” rating, is because acting wise they did pretty good. But me understanding the point of the movie? That was low. Wouldn’t want to watch it again. I can at least see why there would be a third movie after this, based on the ending. So that is a plus too.

2 out of 4.