Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what I’ve seen over the past week either in film or television. On the film side, if I have written a full length review already, I will post a link to that review. Otherwise, I’ll give a brief snippet of my thoughts on the film with a full review to follow at some point later. For television shows, seasons and what not, I’ll post individual comments here about each of them as I see fit.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Not having read the book, I couldn’t begin to imagine how faithful it was, but the movie is a fairly strong mystery drama with plenty of compelling elements. The problem is that it has a number of unimportant scenes (unless they play better into the second two parts of the trilogy, which I’m not certain they do). On top of this, while some of the winding elements of the mystery are quite entertaining, there are countless moments where I feel like I’m being set up for something in the new future and and then getting exactly what I expected. From David Fincher, I’d expect a lot less conventionality and many more twists and turns. Fincher also is in grave need of a more astute editor. While it’s not hard to follow the action, I couldn’t help but wonder what a faster, tighter narrative might have accomplished. The film seems to meander at inopportune moments. This is the same fault I found with his Zodiac, so it may just be too strict of directorial control. Entertaining, intriguing, but imperfect.