Failed Oscar Campaigns: "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (2011)

Scene from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

As awards seasons pick up, so do the campaigns to make your film have the best chances at the Best Picture race. However, like a drunken stupor, sometimes these efforts come off as trying too hard and leave behind a trailer of ridiculous flamboyance. Join me on every other Saturday for a highlight of the failed campaigns that make this season as much about prestige as it does about train wrecks. Come for the Harvey Weinstein comments and stay for the history. It's going to be a fun time as I explore cinema's rich history of attempting to matter.

Theory Thursday: "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (2011) is Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' Best Score

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) promotional material

Welcome to a weekly column called Theory Thursdays, which will be released every Thursday and discuss my "controversial opinion" related to something relative to the week of release. Sometimes it will be birthdays while others is current events or a new film release. Whatever the case may be, this is a personal defense for why I disagree with the general opinion and hope to convince you of the same. While I don't expect you to be on my side, I do hope for a rational argument. After all, film is a subjective medium and this is merely just a theory that can be proven either way. 

A Comparison Between "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" Films (2009 and 2011)

Left to right: Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig

As the years have dragged on and the culture continues to find new fads, it is interesting to note the legacy of author Siteg Larsson's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." While the book itself is a behemoth - accumulating 15 million copies sold worldwide - there are two camps on the two main filmed versions and the heroines that are at the center. With American star Rooney Mara claiming that the sequel is pretty much not happening and David Lagercrantz writing the first book since the author's death in 2004 called "The Girl in the Spider's Web," it seems as opportune of a time as ever to look back on the two filmed versions and see how the language and visual outlines play into each other.

A Look at Why "Gone Girl" Might Not Be a Best Picture Contender

Director David Fincher's latest film Gone Girl has been garnering a lot of attention both for its actual quality and for the performance of Rosamund Pike as "Amazing Amy" Dunne. It is a film that manages to explore some very pressing matters involving media, morality and marriage. In fact, it is one of the year's best films and is one of the best subversive hat tricks in cinema of 2014 with the second act twists creating an unpredictable role reversal for the movie. However, despite its great execution and rather solid work overall, I have a theory that things aren't meant for Gone Girl in the Best Picture race. As blasphemous as it sounds, it is actually very keeping in both Fincher's and the Academy's reputation towards his films.