Movie review by Greg Carlson

“The Tillman Story,” documentary filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev’s elegy for misunderstood NFL defensive back turned U.S. Army Ranger Pat Tillman, manages the considerable feat of simultaneously confounding liberals and conservatives who have participated in the mythmaking and hero worship surrounding the slain soldier. Substantially better than Bar-Lev’s 2007 feature “My Kid Could Paint That,” “The Tillman Story” benefits from a wealth of archival material, from clips of Tillman on the field for the Arizona State University Sun Devils and the Arizona Cardinals to the ghastly 2007 hearing in which Donald Rumsfeld and a handful of generals repeatedly claim an inability to recall whether or when they read Stanley McChrystal’s April 29, 2004 memo that warned of the likelihood of fratricide as the cause of Tillman’s death.

Tillman’s death by “friendly fire” – surely one of the most dazzling oxymoronic terms in the entire arsenal of military-speak – invited a bizarre cover-up that saw panicked leadership deliberately lying about the circumstances of April 22, 2004, when Tillman was fatally shot in the head in Afghanistan. Bar-Lev alternates between the construction of a personal portrait of Tillman and the investigation into the government’s decision to withhold information from Tillman’s family members. Neither story feels entirely complete, but the palpable and mounting sense of frustration that clouds the latter issue steers the film along its course.

In addition to the archival photos and videos, Bar-Lev interviews many of the people closest to Pat Tillman. Family members, including Tillman’s mother Mary (known as Dannie), father Pat Sr., brother Richard, and wife Marie appear on-camera. Pat’s brother Kevin, who was serving in the same unit with his brother when Pat fell, declined an opportunity to speak, but can be seen and heard delivering a harsh rebuke during a visit to Capitol Hill.

While Tillman’s incredulous, grieving mother articulately represents the voice of raw familial outrage at the events following her son’s death, retired soldier Stan Goff emerges as the most fascinating of the film’s talking heads. Vaguely channeling the seen-it-all weariness of a “Miami Blues”-era Fred Ward, Goff flays the military leadership responsible for the post-mortem snafu, choosing his words with refreshing candor and grim wit. An echo of Tillman himself, Goff demonstrates exactly how it is possible to simultaneously be a soldier, a patriot, and a skeptic and critic of the government.

Narrated by Josh Brolin, “The Tillman Story” covers much of the same territory as John Krakauer’s “Where Men Win Glory,” the gripping bestseller published after Mary Tillman’s tribute “Boots on the Ground by Dusk.” Despite some kind of falling out between Krakauer and the Tillman family, “Where Men Win Glory” pushes harder and digs deeper than Bar-Lev’s documentary. Krakauer identifies the triggerman who almost certainly ended Tillman’s life, and makes sensible the thousands of pages of documentation that the movie must necessarily condense into feature-length running time. Both the filmmaker and the author grasp the irony, and the miscarriage of justice, that billowed from the American war machine despite Tillman’s clearly expressed wishes that he never be used as a propagandistic recruiting tool, and for this reason both texts are worth the effort.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Loosely based on Jamie Reidy’s memoir “Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman,” Edward Zwick’s relationship comedy/drama “Love and Other Drugs” comes with a lengthy list of harmful side effects. Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway, both as gorgeous as ever, use their substantial charms to paper over blemishes in the screenplay, which lurches from syrupy, commitment issue-oriented melodrama to faint satire criticizing the practices of pharmaceutical giants like onscreen employer Pfizer. The sexual chemistry of the lead performers and Zwick’s brisk pacing cannot fully compensate for the genre’s pro forma expectations, and the movie eagerly embraces too many of the clichés that attend the boy-meets-girl blueprint.

One minute sees a rapid-fire exchange of tables-turning banter upending gender expectations of voracious sexual appetites while the next minute wallows in socially awkward “caught in the act” masturbation slapstick. Also bobbing along is the vague impression that Zwick would like to use the 1990s period setting, built around the astronomic sales success of the so-called “Vitamin V” as it morphed from butt of late-night Bob Dole jokes on Conan to billion-dollar cash cow, as a Capra-corny “Up in the Air” parable about the tension between soulless monetary gain and human connection and romantic vulnerability.

Despite its frayed premise, the filmmakers work diligently to sidestep some of the pitfalls of healthy-person-falls-for-ailing-person tearjerkers like “Love Story,” “Dying Young,” and “A Walk to Remember.” Hathaway’s Maggie, a collage artist with an astonishing knowledge of prescription medications, is afflicted with early Parkinson’s disease, and her frank disclosures and self-deprecating wit take precedence over moments that depict the gradual degeneration of her central nervous system. Maggie’s bracing intelligence and verbal dexterity challenge Gyllenhaal’s eager-to-please Jamie, a smooth operator used to getting everything he wants.

Almost a quarter century ago, Zwick directed the adaptation of David Mamet’s “Sexual Perversity in Chicago.” “About Last Night…” which starred Demi Moore and Rob Lowe, shares much in common with “Love and Other Drugs,” perhaps most obviously a sense of erotic electricity. More fuss than necessary has been made of the nudity in “Love and Other Drugs,” and Hathaway offered her thoughts on the matter during a recent edition of “Fresh Air” in conversation with Terry Gross. While Gross hinted that she was taken aback by Hathaway’s nakedness, film critic Stephanie Zacharek spent nearly half of her “Movieline” review backing up the performer and discussing the risks of being taken seriously when appearing au naturel.

True to the narrow confines of its genre, the supporting characters are presented mostly as broad stereotypes. Hank Azaria’s horny physician, Oliver Platt’s burned out company man, and Gabriel Macht’s physically aggressive foil exhibit little resemblance to actual human beings. Worst of all is Jamie’s slovenly brother Josh (Josh Gad, uncharitably described by Eric Hynes as “a poor man’s Jonah Hill”), a newly minted millionaire who crashes on his older brother’s couch as a grating reminder of the adolescent irresponsibility Jamie has begun to jettison as he falls in love with Maggie. While Josh turns up in scene after scene to yammer supportively to his sibling, Maggie – like so many of her cinematic counterparts – never interacts with a close female friend, reminding viewers that “Love and Other Drugs” is far more respectful in its treatment of Parkinson’s disease than in its depictions of women.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Paul Haggis tilts at windmills in “The Next Three Days,” his remake of Fred Cavaye’s 2008 French film “Pour elle.” A wildly improbable prison break thriller that casts Russell Crowe as a “Don Quixote”-interpreting community college professor hell-bent on springing his possibly murderous wife out of the clink, “The Next Three Days” trades potentially interesting characters for grinding plot points. Somber when he should be tongue in cheek, Haggis the screenwriter manages a couple tension-relieving jokes that Haggis the director glides over in favor of a painfully meticulous procedural that leisurely transforms the mild-mannered literature teacher into a cold-blooded lawbreaker willing to risk his own life and his only child’s security in the execution of a escape plan that unfolds like one of Rube Goldberg’s complex and over-engineered machines.

Crowe’s rumpled, shambling John Brennan makes an unlikely spouse to Elizabeth Banks’s Lara Brennan, a hot-tempered diabetic whose combative personality traits plant just enough doubt for the audience to imagine that she is capable of bludgeoning her boss with a fire extinguisher. John refuses to accept the guilty verdict, however, and in what is surely the movie’s bluntest “Screenwriting 101” conversation, arranges a meeting with master escape artist Damon Pennington (Liam Neeson in a single-scene cameo appearance), who outlines a bulleted list of all the things we can expect Brennan to do in the remainder of the movie’s running time.

Haggis has never been known for thematic subtlety, and “The Next Three Days” treats parenthood with an attitude so cavalier, any father or mother in the audience is likely to wonder how Brennan finds time to read bedtime stories and make lunches when he is so busy mapping out a farfetched scheme that requires falsified medical records, sabotaged phone lines, skeleton keys, forged passports, and violent, late-night raids on meth labs. Additionally, the professor creates a mural-sized diagram of his evolving caper on a wall in his house, complete with getaway routes, photos, and scrawled permanent marker reminders of dwindling financial resources (presumably so the audience understands the man’s mounting desperation).

Several scenes between Brennan and Olivia Wilde’s subtly flirtatious single mom both provide unintentional laughs (as when Brennan explains the reason for his wife’s absence with a halting and awkward claim of her innocence) and reaffirm that the man will not be winning any father of the year awards. Wilde’s character exists as an abstract temptation forecasting an alternate, Lara-free future for John, but instead of forging a friendship, the bullheaded protagonist uses the trusting woman without her knowledge once the daring liberation of his wife is underway – thus reaffirming John’s unshakable love for his spouse.

Unfortunately, Haggis shows little interest in the character of Lara Brennan, and even though the film’s trailer shows a scene in which she (misleadingly?) confesses to her husband, the filmmaker never explores more than a sliver of the moral conundrum inherent in the possibility that John could be transforming himself into a cunning criminal mastermind on behalf a remorseless killer, and by extension, unfit mother. Instead, we are left with ponderous Cervantes parallels on the relativity of sanity and the triumph of irrationality that only really work as signifiers of genre moviemaking.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A somewhat less successful cinematic translation of Kazuo Ishiguro than “The Remains of the Day,” director Mark Romanek’s “Never Let Me Go” duplicates some of the stateliness, formality, and quietude of James Ivory’s 1993 film. While the two Ishiguro stories share tonal similarities, the content of “Never Let Me Go” departs significantly from the author’s Booker Prize-winning novel. Blending a somber bildungsroman that relentlessly dissects innocence lost with an allegorical science-fiction premise questioning the morality of genetic cloning, “Never Let Me Go” presents significant challenges to effective adaptation. Screenwriter Alex Garland, who completed a draft of the script prior to the book’s 2005 publication, efficiently streamlines and condenses, even if the intimate interiority granting readers access to the narrator’s thoughts cannot be fully reconciled.

Following an action-framing prologue, the events described by Kathy H. (Carey Mulligan) return to childhood reminiscences of pastoral boarding school Hailsham, a noble and dignified compound populated by future “donors” and their adult “guardians” as part of a social experiment that seeks to raise the clones in a humane approximation of normalcy. As they move on from their eerie alma mater, a love triangle involving Kathy and her two closest friends, Ruth (Keira Knightley) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield), complicates the confusing transition to a cruelly abbreviated period of maturity.

A certain measure of the movie’s strength may be derived from the whispery manner in which Romanek alludes to the horrifying inevitability of “completion” – the post-organ harvest euphemism for death – awaiting the protagonists. Building steadily to a blunt explanation that provides arguably more clarity to the viewer than to the characters, the movie’s first section finds an exasperated teacher (Sally Hawkins, fine as ever) breaking protocol to tell the awful truth to the doomed little ones in her care. Ishiguro’s purposeful refusal to hint at even the tiniest possibility of rebellion on the part of the unfortunate vessels, particularly as they enter adulthood, echoes with tremendous sadness, and the scene in which the grown-up Kathy and Tommy confront their former caretakers with a desperate plea for a deferment is one of the year’s finest, a shattering epiphany expressed with beauty by Mulligan and Garfield.

While all three of the principal performers deliver memorable turns, Knightley’s role has been sharply pruned from the Ruth of the book, whose intimate childhood relationship with Kathy is a complex web of jealousy, confidence, closeness, and rivalry. As a result, the movie struggles to convey the weight of Ruth’s guilt as she tries to right a perceived transgression against her best friend. Because Kathy’s watchfulness diverges from Ruth’s more dominant and outgoing personality, the latter character’s diminished presence in the film quickly becomes Romanek’s largest liability, and the imbalance disrupts some of the urgency of the trio’s interconnectedness as they hurtle toward their fates.

Despite its shortcomings, “Never Let Me Go” invites viewers to consider a number of the same questions posed in Ridley Scott’s dystopian masterpiece “Blade Runner.” What does it mean to be human? How differently do we live our lives if we know the end is coming sooner rather than later? Is it justifiable to treat something identified as non-human with less consideration even if “it” can express joy, pain, and love? Both films invite readings that encompass social and political concerns, and despite their contrasting styles, they remind the viewer that what we choose to do with the time we have is a dear commodity.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Only the naïve would argue that a single, feature documentary has the necessary platform and scale to effectively tackle an issue as complex and frustrating as the woefully underfunded American public education system, and Davis Guggenheim’s “Waiting for ‘Superman’” has been criticized for the narrowness of its vision, which appears to be substantially poorer than the Man of Steel’s eyesight. A grim and sobering contrast from the director’s rock guitar exploration “It Might Get Loud,” “Waiting for ‘Superman’” returns to the filmmaker’s roots as social advocate, incorporating brief clips from Guggenheim’s 2001 PBS-aired work “The First Year,” which followed five teachers through their initial school year. “Waiting for ‘Superman’” will at least superficially and temporarily attract attention to educational issues, and this represents one measure of the movie’s success.

Like Guggenheim’s Academy Award-winning “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Waiting for ‘Superman’” relies heavily on graphics-intensive statistics, here rendered through a series of animations created by Sean Donnelly and a team from Awesome + Modest. The impact of these images is much closer to the use of animation in “This Film Is Not Yet Rated” than “Waltz with Bashir,” and occasionally the result feels facile and streamlined. Along with the animated sequences, Guggenheim uses plenty of stock footage, including one memorable sequence outlining the post-World War II potency of United States public education. Talking head interviews, which include an appearance by Bill Gates, are also plentiful.

Editorial elision creates problematic “good guys versus bad guys” scenarios, embodied most dramatically in the positioning of American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten as a diabolical bully, protecting incompetent screw-ups behind the shield of a powerful union. Guggenheim includes horrifying, clandestinely shot footage of a derelict educator completely ignoring students, as well as the so-called “rubber room” in New York, where teachers who had been removed from classrooms and were awaiting disciplinary hearings collected full salaries while spending their days playing cards, sleeping, or reading.

The “good guys” emerge in the figures of District of Columbia Public Schools chancellor Michelle Rhee (who announced her resignation on October 13, 2010) and activist, reformer and educator Geoffrey Canada, leader of the Harlem Children’s Zone. Rhee’s crusade to radically alter business as usual within her school system by targeting bad teachers, firing principals and administrators, and attempting to implement merit pay while dismantling aspects of the oft-maligned tenure policy is highlighted by Guggenheim as an example of the intractability of the teacher’s union as a monolithic juggernaut. Canada passionately endorses charter schools – an educational model which the film strongly positions as a potential solution to the crisis – and shares the anecdote that provides the movie’s title.

Guggenheim builds to a heartbreaking dramatic climax by cutting together scenes of several families whose children the film has been following as they wait on pins and needles to be chosen by lottery for acceptance at charter institutions. In most cases, the odds are daunting, crushing even, and the entire sequence resonates with Kryptonite-like debilitation, especially when it becomes clear that most of the endings are not going to be happy. “Waiting for ‘Superman’” has attracted outspoken opposition, including the critique of University of San Francisco adjunct education professor Rick Ayers, who argues that the movie shortsightedly endorses the privatization and corporatization of our schools. Whether or not Ayers is correct, “Waiting for ‘Superman’” should be seen and discussed.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Artist Sam Taylor-Wood, whose “Crying Men” project captured tearful shots of famous movie actors, makes her feature motion picture directorial debut with “Nowhere Boy,” a mostly straightforward biographical portrait of the young John Lennon. Many hardcore Beatles disciples might weep at the movie’s wildly speculative attitude, which focuses on the intense psychological triangle formed by Lennon (Aaron Johnson), Lennon’s birth mother Julia (Ann-Marie Duff), and Lennon’s aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas).

Taylor-Wood burnishes the mythology of Lennon’s formative years with a relentless Oedipal tug-of-war that pulls young John between the stiff, sensible woman responsible for raising him and the wayward but far less stable free-spirit who chose to give him up. The sexual tension between John and Julia is liberally applied, occasionally to the point of distraction. The director, whose off-screen relationship with star Johnson has raised a few eyebrows as something like life imitating art, is more than two decades older than her lead performer, and if nothing else this bit of biographical reading juices the film’s otherwise moderate pulse.

“Nowhere Boy” is no worse than several other attempts to imagine events in the lives of the Beatles, and like “The Hours and Times” and “Backbeat,” a pair of films in which Lennon was played by Ian Hart, plenty of liberties are taken for the sake of narrative coherence and plot velocity. To the credit of Taylor-Wood, screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh, and actor Aaron Johnson, “Nowhere Boy” makes a point of showing John at his most abusive, sarcastic, and churlish. Lennon’s teenage rebelliousness emerges as one of the movie’s strong suits, and the future superstar’s capacity for cruelty will startle those expecting only peace and love.

Despite the deliberate refusal to utter the “B” word at any point in the movie, visual portents of John’s future pop up throughout, including the July 6, 1957 meeting of Lennon and McCartney following a Quarrymen show at St. Peter’s Church in Woolton, sketches of a walrus in John’s notebook margin doodles, and name-checked landmarks like Strawberry Field children’s home and the Cavern Club. More intriguing is the adroitly selected soundtrack, which features prime cuts ranging from Jackie Brenston’s thrilling “Rocket 88” to Big Mama Thornton’s indispensable “Hound Dog” to an entire sequence built around Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You.”

In addition to the influential records that would guide Lennon’s musical sensibilities, “Nowhere Boy” employs the classic proposition that presents musical exploration and release as a shelter from anguish, frustration, and emotional pain. Fleeting glimpses of John maturing as a musician, songwriter, and performer pale when compared to recordings of the genuine article (the only actual Lennon on the soundtrack is the appropriately placed “Mother” over the closing credits). Johnson, in addition to McCartney portrayer Thomas Brodie Sangster and others, credibly re-records material performed during John’s youth, and early composition “Hello Little Girl” features in one scene. Like many biopics, “Nowhere Boy” concludes with a montage of historical photographs, a tactic that both reminds viewers of the skills of the production and costume designers and presents the “proof” that these incredible events really transpired.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Based on a steady, nearly one film per year output, the term “minor Woody Allen movie” classifies a sizable number of titles in the legendary director’s canon. Although Allen currently holds the record for largest number of Academy Award nominations for screenwriting – fourteen if you are keeping track, and none of them adaptations – “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” is not likely to add his fifteenth. A fine ensemble engages in Allen’s typical roundelay of marital infidelity, but the result is an average if not unpleasant excursion – more “Melinda and Melinda” than “Husbands and Wives.”

Naomi Watts plays Sally, whose crush on her natty, art gallery owner boss Greg (Antonio Banderas) is exacerbated by the lack of warmth and affection channeled her way at home by ne’er do well husband Roy (Josh Brolin), a cranky and blocked novelist who may have only had one good book in him. Roy’s own wandering eye ogles across-the-way neighbor Dia (Freida Pinto), a vision in red who sometimes undresses without first pulling the shade. While Sally and Roy hurtle toward spousal disloyalty, Sally copes with the news that her father Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) has tossed aside mother Helena (Gemma Jones) for a garish, featherbrained slattern, Charmaine (Lucy Punch), young enough to be Alfie’s daughter.

While Allen’s game cast enlivens even the most mediocre dialogue, the scenes between Banderas and Watts are among the movie’s strongest exchanges, perhaps because the outcome of their employer-employee flirtation does not strictly adhere to expectations. The weakest of the threads circles around the later-life crisis of Hopkins’s wannabe playboy, whose clumsy overtures and wheezing exertions are meant to inspire laughter, but wither as tired sight gags. Allen has explored prostitution in a handful of previous films – most notably “Deconstructing Harry” and “Mighty Aphrodite” – with mixed results, but Punch’s uncouth call girl is merely a punch line, leading one to wonder if the outcome would have been any different had the part been played by original choice Nicole Kidman.

Helena’s ongoing relationship with an entrepreneurial psychic allows Allen to simultaneously ridicule the gullible mark and hold forth on the unfathomable beyond. Too many of the ideas in “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” are treated superficially, however, and the movie’s passing curiosity with the occult (which includes an ambiguous séance) fails to adequately examine the consequences of Helena’s dependency on fortune telling. Allen chooses to end the film abruptly, and some viewers may not appreciate the hovering cloud of uncertainties, dictated as they are by Helena’s firm belief in the advice of her crystal-gazing therapist.

Expectedly, the title of the movie functions as both memento mori and hopeful romantic expectation. By now, Allen must have a virtual playbook outlining methods for confounding the vain, naïve, and often luckless dreamers who populate so many of his tales. Even limiting comparison to Allen work made in the last ten years, “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” falls far short of the quality of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” and “Match Point,” even as it shuffles through the director’s once enticing but now mostly shopworn thematic terrain.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The success of “Catfish,” a slippery curiosity described by its creators as a documentary, depends on Universal’s calculated marketing strategy, which begs critics and audience members to avoid spoilers. If you intend to see it and would like to do so without knowing its twists and turns, stop reading now. “Catfish” has been aptly described as “the other Facebook movie,” and Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost’s fable-like construction shares much in common with “The Social Network,” most notably an unsettling subtext that concerns the diffusion of interactive media from insiders/haves to outsiders/have-nots.

Presumably tech-savvy New York City photographer Yaniv “Nev” Schulman, whose faux-sweetness often smells like smug condescension, forges an online friendship with 8-year-old Abby, who paints copies of Nev’s photos and mails prints to his office from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Nev soon falls hard for Abby’s beautiful older sister Megan, exchanging text messages and cell phone calls. As the long-distance electronic romance blossoms, Nev grows suspicious that his new friends are not who they claim to be, and the filmmakers take a road trip to get to the bottom of the mystery. Eventually, they come face to face with Angela Wesselman-Pierce, a duplicitous dreamer who tricked Nev by posing as both Abby and Megan.

The revelation that awkward housewife and diabolical prevaricator Angela Wesselman-Pierce fabricated her daughter’s artistic achievements as well as the entire persona of Nev’s crush Megan will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen Amir Bar-Lev’s “My Kid Could Paint That.” Since the feeding frenzy over “Catfish” began, Wesselman-Pierce has been scarce, appearing in Jay Schadler’s fluffy “20/20” piece to corroborate the film’s content (and declare herself schizophrenic). Amy Kaufman’s “Los Angeles Times” article raises more questions about the mysterious woman, hinting that many Ishpeming, Michigan locals do not know her at all.

Kyle Buchanan, reporting from the Sundance Film Festival last January for “Movieline,” was among the first journalists to address the possibility that the Schulman brothers and Joost were presenting a story that didn’t add up. Buchanan zeroed in on the queasy way the Schulmans and Joost appear to exploit Wesselman-Pierce on camera. Other voices have made bolder accusations. It is entirely possible that some – or all – of Wesselman-Pierce’s actions were concocted expressly for the movie.

Many additional details seem too good to be true: a pulse-quickening, “Blair Witch”-esque visit to a decoy farmhouse in the middle of the night follows a scene in which Nev rummages through a stranger’s mail to conveniently discover the postcards he sent to Megan. The movie’s title is explained in a weirdly poetic and eloquent monologue shared by Angela’s marble-mouthed husband. If this guy is for real, a screenwriting agent should acquire his services immediately.

“Catfish” has been grouped with “Exit Through the Gift Shop” and “I’m Still Here” as a stunt documentary more than willing to adjust and tweak what we might desire to identify as real into a kind of cinematic decoupage, varnishing layer upon layer of “truth” until we have no way to know – or much incentive to care – whether anything that unfolds is non-fiction. Ultimately, the question of the film’s veracity doesn’t matter, since the constantly rolling cameras remind viewers that every shot has been collected and assembled to pique enough interest to make us want to buy the ticket and take the ride.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

“Cloverfield” director Matt Reeves respectably re-shoots Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 “Let the Right One In,” the sharp adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s debut novel about the relationship between a bullied boy and the petite vampire who moves in next door. Despite the filmmaker’s claims to the contrary, the Americanized version, re-titled “Let Me In” at the expense of the Morrissey lyric, is slavishly faithful to the style, tone, and mood of the original Swedish article – which could be good or bad depending on one’s attitude about remakes in general and “Let the Right One In” in particular.

As Owen (formerly Oskar) and Abby (formerly Eli), actors Kodi Smit-McPhee and Chloe Moretz effectively navigate the sometimes subtle and tender emotional terrain traversed by their youthful characters, even if they do not improve on the performances of Kare Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson. The invaluable Richard Jenkins, who plays the pathetic blood-hunter misidentified by neighbors as the vampire’s father, elicits a disproportionate amount of sympathy in his limited screen time, especially given the gruesome nature of his vocation and his implied pedophilia (scrubbed from the movie but explored in detail in the novel). One wishes Reeves had spent more time exploring the character, if only to allow the audience the pleasure of Jenkins’s company for a longer duration.

Lindqvist has diplomatically praised both cinematic incarnations of his book, which makes a great deal of sense given that he wrote the adaptation upon which the movies are based (despite Reeves’s dubious “written for the screen” credit on “Let Me In”). Newcomers to the story who missed “Let the Right One In” are advised to see Alfredson’s film prior to “Let Me In,” and will notice a few key differences between the movies. Reeves’s biggest departure and most interesting alteration from “Let the Right One In” is the re-imagining of Father’s bungled attack in the locker room as a tense, automotive urban legend. Reeves also intersperses clips from Ronald Reagan’s March 1983 “Evil Empire” speech and envisions Owen’s perpetually obscured mother as a devout evangelical.

Thirsty fans hoping that Reeves might return to Lindqvist’s sizable tome rather than the author’s condensed script for the 2008 film will be disappointed. None of the novel’s significant subplots that were cut the first time appear in the American edition. The multiple narrative points of view, the group of adults affected by vampire attacks, Oskar/Owen’s sympathetic ally Tommy, Eli/Abby’s feeding encounter with the medicated old woman, and Hakan/Father’s resurrection and morgue escape are almost entirely absent. Lindqvist was wise to eliminate most of these elements the first time around, and Reeves would have been hard pressed to improve on “Let the Right One In” by squeezing in more plot.

The early 1980s setting, the dreariness of the working class, and the sober and pervasive sense of doom and desperation in Owen and Abby’s world contrast sharply with the glossy depiction of the Cullen clan’s wealth in the “Twilight” series and the hyper-sexualized vampire/human couplings of “True Blood.” Abby’s missing genitalia and gender ambiguity, more explicitly addressed in “Let the Right One In” than in “Let Me In,” as well as her struggle to understand Owen’s urges to go steady, position Lindqvist’s tale as a romantic bildungsroman that uses vampirism as a lens through which to examine adolescent confusion. In this capacity, “Let the Right One In” and “Let Me In” share intriguing variations within the surging vampire genre.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin print the legend in “The Social Network,” a sleek and confident imagining of the creation of Facebook. Agile enough to withstand nearly as many readings as there are Facebook users, the film pivots around a cautionary tale of a bright entrepreneur who wagers his soul gambling for fortune and recognition. In addition to his meteoric rise to the top of a media empire, Mark Zuckerberg’s single-mindedness and mercurial persona parallel Orson Welles’s Charles Foster Kane, and “The Social Network” swiftly transforms into something greater than another revenge of the nerds celebration to be cheered by the Net Generation.

Protests decrying the movie’s lack of accuracy – mostly from grumpy technology writers unhappy with the absence of computing detail and Facebook insiders shouting down the raging egos and emphasis on Dionysian socializing over the drudgery and hard work of endless coding sessions – will fail to be heard over the buzz of audience excitement. Like Oliver Stone’s “JFK” once upon a time, “The Social Network” represents history according to the movies, and as many of the essays in the Mark C. Carnes-edited volume “Past Imperfect” point out, fact-based truth can never be fully reconciled with dramatized fiction.

Sorkin’s dialogue is heir to the lightning exchanges and dueling witticisms of Preston Sturges, and “The Social Network” opens with a killer scene in which future billionaire Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) pours out buckets of insecurity to exasperated soon-to-be ex-girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) over mugs of beer at the Thirsty Scholar Pub. Erica returns Mark’s insensitive insults with interest, and the dazzling duet – which reportedly required nearly one hundred takes to complete – establishes Zuckerberg’s mania for bluntness and his overwhelming desire to belong to something exclusive. Even though she only appears in a few scenes, Erica becomes emblematic of the young woman in the white dress described by Mr. Bernstein in “Citizen Kane.” She may even be Zuckerberg’s “Rosebud.”

Fincher also adopts a “Citizen Kane”-like jigsaw structure to divide the action between legal proceedings in two different lawsuits filed against Zuckerberg and the flashbacks to events described in testimony. Without any significant chronologic disorientation, Fincher and his terrific editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall mirror the sense of speed with which Facebook’s popularity exploded into a worldwide phenomenon, mapping out several dichotomies that define the film’s thematic agenda. Of these, the central struggle between unfettered artistic invention and the capitalistic urge to monetize manifests in the friendship between Zuckerberg and his business-focused, Jedediah Leland-esque best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield).

The most troubling single dimension of “The Social Network” is not the veracity of its claims of documentary honesty but the unfortunate way in which it portrays women. With the exception of Mara’s Erica, the majority of the female characters in the movie apparently exist to provide sexual favors to the male Facebook team once their efforts make them famous (and often with the added abuse of racial stereotype). Yes, Rashida Jones’s lawyer is briefly featured, but her appearance is the exception to a rule that literally shows attractive co-eds being bussed in to entertain Harvard men at a party. Surely Sorkin and Fincher are capable of exploring a point of view that includes female voices, even if the Facebook story is predominantly visualized through male eyes.