Never rising about the trite and tawdry nature of a Harlequin novel, the “erotic” drama Adore feels more sleazy and silly than emotionally charged. It’s a stunning miscalculation and an uneasy, unpleasant film to watch at the best of times. It’s extremely soft core mommy porn for women who would breast feed a child until they were 12.
Despite being the mind behind the brilliant L.A. Confidential, writer James Ellroy's work rarely transitions well to the big screen. Much like graphic novelist Frank Miller, Ellroy needs a director who can temper his sometimes unnecessarily over the top and formulaic material into a watchable package. With Ellroy’s latest outing Rampart, director Oren Moverman show’s that he’s simply not up to the challenge leading to film that feels wholly indistinguishable from the author’s past big screen outings about dirty Los Angeles cops.
The only real issues with David Fincher’s take on Stieg Larsson’s best selling The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are problems that were in the original story to begin with. It’s overlong, needlessly convoluted in terms of pacing, and the plot is sleazy and dumb as a box of hammers. Having said that, this remounting of the Swedish pop culture juggernaut firmly establishes Fincher as one of the best in the world at what he does. A technical maestro of the highest order, Fincher teams up with two pitch perfect leading actors to make the pulpy material vastly more watchable and entertaining than it probably should be.
