That was an excellent one.

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

It is not only a funny movie, but it allows a great amount of joy for anyone who watches it.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Oh, that cold old new movie THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. All excited about it, people flock to see. What for? What's so great about it? It's dark and stark and Rooney Mara had to cut off her hair for the part. An ugly, unattractive part. So, it brought her success. But it's a crappy movie. Well, to each their own, if it lights up your life, I'll try to be happy for you.But I prefer my birds to be bright and chirpy and flying about fluttering like cute little angels. Which is not exactly the character Rooney portrays, but you get my drift. I mean, just look at lovely, lovely Rooney in the opening sequence as she gets driven to school by her mother, chewing a piece of gum, much to Mom's chagrin. She looks like a cuter version of Elisha Dushku. She has a cheekbone structure to die for. Has got to be one of the prettiest actresses on film. Hell, people, if I looked like that, and they offered me like gazillion bucks to appear in a hit movie, I'd think about what I'd miss every time I passed a mirror. And, on top of that, the even better part that would have come her way anyway, so scrooo your dragon tattoo offer...! That scene with Rooney with the guy and the car amidst the autumn leaves, makes me think of an ad campaign with the slogan 'it doesn't get any better than this.' This is a small movie, with a bad girl that really isn't well-defined, as the Georgia King portrayal turns out to be ultimately toothless. The more well-defined bad girl, the naughty one, the Brie Larson portrayal, as Kate, is more the one that does something awful. She gets banished from the script, unsatisfactorily so. Roller-skating in place, an untimely dismissal...There are some laughable performances. Amy Sidaris and her weakling hubby should have been recast. What were they thinking, those two were a wrecking crew. Georgia King was a storm-in-a-teacup kind of adversary. She should have upped her game play at least tenfold. Brie Larson was excellent. Anybody who could come to class (barely-)dressed up for the plum female part of A Midsummer Night's Dream looking like that, wow! But apart from her obvious beauty, she was also entirely convincing.Plot has its weak points, but for a dedicated girl-watcher, lots to cheer about. Loads more fun than TGWTDT.The decaying, crumbling castle was an excellent choice of location. Does it really exist? No such place found on Google.I forgot the actress's name, but the woman who played the mean mom, at the time of watching, I thought she'd have made a perfect Alexis Carrington had they done a DYNASTY remake.

Fern (Rooney Mara) returns to the all-girls boarding school Tanner Hall in New England for the new school year. She is still haunted by a childhood incident when Victoria let her grandmother's bird free. Victoria (Georgia King) comes to school after years without seeing Fern. She is a lying troublemaker causing havoc for Fern and her friends. Kate (Brie Larson) is a flirt. Lucasta (Amy Ferguson) likes to draw and is reserved. The Middlewoods (Chris Kattan, Amy Sedaris) run the school and teach. Gio (Tom Everett Scott) is Fern's mother's friend's husband who takes Fern out on day trips.There is an OK dark mean-girls Lolita film somewhere here. The 4 girls do a reasonable job but the movie goes wrong real quick. The moment that Chris Kattan starts knocking down doors in the girls' shower is when the movie goes wrong. It's stupid. Quite frankly, Chris Kattan is a bad actor. He and Amy Sedaris seem intend on making a broad slapstick comedy which is completely different than what the 4 girls are doing. These two directions do not mix.Then I don't get Gio signing out Fern. What exactly does her mother or his wife think is going on? It's not like they can hide the sign outs. As for the key, wouldn't Mrs. Middlewoods figure out that Victoria made a copy? The movie seems to insist that the Middlewoods are foolish cartoon characters. Also wouldn't Fern talk to Peter after she figured out Victoria's lies? That's a much needed missing scene. Chris Kattan sunk this movie and all the later problems don't help.

As a young lad, I often fantasized about attending an all-girl boarding school in New England, or maybe someplace in Europe. However, there was always one obvious obstacle to my dream. One minor character in this movie has overcome this obstacle--he gets to attend the titular all-female institution because he is the head-mistress' son. The MAIN characters in the film though are four girls--three long-time school chums and a childhood friend of one of them, who transfers to the school and serves as kind of a catalyst for all the melodrama that follows.There IS a goodly amount of melodrama--two of the girls get involved with older men. One (Brie Larson) flirts with her English teacher (Chris Kattan) mostly just for her own amusement, but ends up inadvertently causing great problems between him and his sexually frustrated fellow teacher/wife (Amy Sidaris). The other girl, the main protagonist (Rooney Mara) embarks on a much more serious affair with an expectant father (Tom Everett Scott), who happens to be married to her mother's best friend. A third girl has questions about her sexual identity. But perhaps the most troubled girl is the newcomer (Georgia King) whose obsession with cutting herself and history of suicide attempts are the result of childhood trauma that is alluded to early on, but not revealed until the end.Let me say first off that if the very many high-school age girls looked like Rooney Mara and Brie Larson, pretty much all adult heterosexual men would be in jail right now. But this movie was directed by two women, so it never really veers too much into exploitation territory. This would not necessarily be a liability if it worked better as a straight drama, but all the characters remain undeveloped as individuals and never really gel as a group. The movie also really tries to cover too much in 90 minutes, going into the lives of all four girls AND several of the adults (particularly the two teachers played Kattan and Sedaris). It's hard to fault any of the actors here though. Rooney Mara, for instance, would go on to play another sexy schoolgirl in "Youth in Revolt" before hitting the big-time with the US version of "Girl with a Dragon Tattoo". She's achingly lovely in this movie, but--like everyone else--not a fully developed character you can care much about. Her character is kind of indicative of the whole movie--very pretty, but somehow not very substantial.

I had never heard of this film before, so I gave it a go. The opening scene hooked me. It is very relatable. To see how Rooney looked before her major transformation was perhaps the most shocking thing about the film for me. She looked beautiful! My favorite characters turned out to be the minor characters. Her friends, Kate, played by Brie Larson, and Lucasta, played by Amy Ferguson, were the standouts. I was surprised to see Chris Kattan in a film like this, but his performance was outstanding. Same goes for Tom Everett Scott.This is called a coming-of-age tale, but really it's not that epic. It's small, quiet, and frankly chilling at parts, but it is worth an honest watch.