More cinema diary: 4/24/19 -- Little Woods and Stockholm

Some weeks, the number of movies challenges even those of us who tend to review as much as possible. This is one of those weeks. As a result, I'm trying something a bit different; i.e., I'm going to write about as much as possible in the most efficient way. If it works, you may see this approach again. I'm calling it a "diary" even though it reflects nothing about my life -- other than the fact that much of it has been measured in movies. Make what you will of that.

Little Woods

With Tessa Thompson in a starring role, Little Woods takes a grim but clear-eyed look at the difficulties of surviving in a small North Dakota town where the oil workers use opioids to stave off pain and just about everyone struggles to make ends meet. Thompson's Ollie is just finishing a stint on probation after being jailed for transporting drugs across the Canadian border. She's committed to building a new life and hopes to move to surroundings that are less conducive to the kind of dead-end living that trapped her in the first place. But Ollie's efforts are thwarted by her half-sister (Lily James), a young mother with a talent for trouble. Threated with losing the house where her late mother lived and worried about her sister's second pregnancy, Ollie does the one thing she pledged to avoid: Sell drugs. Little Woods hardly qualifies as a festival of joy: James's Deb barely scrapes by. She lives in a trailer in a parking lot; we know it's only a matter of time until that situation goes bad. The best reason to see Little Woods stems from Thompson's performance, which finds her branching out from previous work in movies such as Thor: Ragnarok and Sorry to Bother You. Little Woods adds tension to the proceedings by giving Ollie a week to raise enough money to save her mother's house from foreclosure. Some stretches of director Nia DaCosta's feature debut tend to drag. Still, Little Woods stands as a serious attempt to explore lives that seldom find their way to the screen, and Thompson's performance keeps the wheels turning.

Stockholm

Regular readers of my reviews know that I think Ethan Hawke was robbed of an Oscar. The injustice began when Hawke wasn't even nominated for a 2019 Academy Award for his performance as a guilt-ridden pastor in First Reformed. Awards or no, Hawke makes interesting choices about the movies in which he appears. In Stockholm, the story of a real-life bank heist that took place in Sweden in 1973, Hawke plays Lars Nystrom, a jacked-up criminal who invades a bank where he holds a couple of employees hostage. Lars wants $1 million and insists on obtaining the release of his bank-robbing pal Gunnar Sorensson (Mark Strong). The movie is meant to illustrate something about Stockholm syndrome, the way hostages can come to sympathize with their captors. To that end, Stockholm builds a relationship between Lars and Bianca (Noomi Repace), one of his hostages, a vulnerable but savvy bank employee. Director Robert Budreau, who worked with Hawke on Born to Be Blue, treats the robbery as an example of bumbling lunacy on the part of the thieves, Stockholm's stolid chief of police (Christopher Heyerdahl) and the Swedish prime minister (Shanti Roney) who refuses to let Lars leave with the hostages. The supporting cast acquits itself well, but Stockholm belongs to Hawke, who creates a portrait of a self-dramatizing felon with a limited capacity for planning and a tendency to panic. Lars even wears a costume to his criminal outing, entering the bank in a leather suit, cowboy boots, and a cowboy hat. If you've been reading this and thinking about 1975's Dog Day Afternoon, I don't blame you. It's difficult to watch Stockholm without remembering director Sidney Lumet's look at a bank hostage situation in New York. In that movie, Al Pacino played a thief with an agenda. Here, Hawke follows suit, capturing the chaotic pathos in Lars' misguided fever dream of a heist.

'Kicking the Hornet's Nest' to a conclusion

That tattooed girl is back for a final chapter.

At first, I had difficulty becoming involved with The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest -- the final chapter in Swedish author Stieg Larsson's phenomenally popular Millennium Trilogy. Characters were coming and going at a rapid clip, and I had to (pardon the expression) kick myself to keep up with a movie that's long on talk and even longer on complicated conspiratorial thinking. * Then a funny thing happened: Either director Daniel Alfredson settled down or I did. Whichever it was, this final chapter began to draw me into its complicated and often perverse web. * Trimming away much of the novel's social commentary -- particularly Larsson's observations about the media -- Alfredson and screenwriter Jonas Fryberg maintain the kind of thickly ominous atmosphere that adds both welcome intrigue and unfortunate complexity to the proceedings. * Michael Nyqvist (as journalist Mikael Blomkvist) and Noomi Repace (as the punkish Lisbeth Salander) hold their own as the story weaves its way through a plot that begins when Lisbeth is airlifted to a hospital, having suffered a major beating at the end of the last movie. * Plagued with injuries, Lisbeth undergoes surgery and spends a good portion of the movie's 2 1/2 hours recuperating in a hospital bed. When she finally emerges, she does so with a renewed ferocity that gives the movie some much-needed kick. * Meanwhile, Blomkvist works to clear Lisbeth of murder charges stemming from the incendiary events of the last movie. As he proceeds, the story branches out to include the police, secret agents and a cadre of older spies. * Most of the plot reverberations from the second movie pertain to Lisbeth's father (Gerogi Staykov) and her half-brother (Micke Spreitz), a blond giant of a man who looks like a refugee from a '60s Bond movie. * Aksel Morissey has a nice turn as Libseth's doctor, a physician who's intrigued by her and who really has her best interests at heart. Lena Endre returns as magazine editor Erika Berger, and Annika Hallin portrays Blomkvist's sister. * Far too complex to summarize here, the plot will make no sense to those who haven't seen the first two movies or read all three books. But an awful lot of folks have, and most of them should be satisfied with this final installment, the last we'll see of Lisbeth on screen until the American version hits theaters next year.*

 *For those who don't know, the American remake of the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the first book in the series will be released in Dec. 2011; it's being directed by David Fincher (Social Network) who cast actress Rooney Mara in the pivotal role of Lisbeth.