DVD REVIEW

Youth in Revolt *****

Directed by: Miguel Arteta
Starring: Michael Cera, Portia Doubleday, Zach Galifianakis, Justin Long, Ray Liotta

The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo ****

Directed by: Niels Arden Oplev
Starring: Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Sven-Bertil Taube

It’s rare for a film not to disappoint. Given how trailers have become, at the their best, media for focussing our appetites for a film to a needle point of desperation and anticipation, it’s a wonder that any cinematic release, even the cream of the crop, leave us anything more than bemused and let down.
How can a 90-minute flick live up to the promises made by 180 seconds of the best bits cunningly edited and tied together with inspirational music or a cool voiceover?
Well Youth in Revolt has managed it. Miguel Arteta’s adaptation of CD Payne’s novel about Nick Twisp, a highschool loser with a taste for the finer things in life – classical literature, nouvelle vague cinema and Frank Sinatra – and an underactive lovelife.
Bounced between a mother addicted to child support with a loser boyfriend and a disinterested father with a bimbette girlfriend, Nick (Michael Cera) falls for Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday) while on holiday but finds his advances rebuffed because he isn’t “bad” enough.
Unable to shake off a lifetime of obeying rules and generally being a good boy, Nick creates a Tyler Durden-esque alter ego for himself – the dodgy moustache-having François – to help with the hell-raising that he needs to get the girl.
The results are hilarious, thoughtful and unpredictable undercut with a massive amount of charm and a genuine sense of the consequences of Nick’s rebellion.
The trailer promised a kind of Fight Club for bratty teenagers with Michael Cera as the awkward centre of a world of embarassing moments and uncomfortable silences – and that’s exactly what’s delivered. And more.
Littered with brilliant cameos from Justin Long, Steve Buscemi, Fred Willard and Adhir Kalyan, the film’s main pairing of Cera and Doubleday are a compelling couple making the increasingly ridiculous antics Nick indulges in to get the girl slightly more believable. He’s a teenager in love and she’s believable lovable – not just a cookie-cutter object of affection.
A brilliant script that, while lacking in the constant hipster referencing of Juno, is still a stylised little gem of occasional absurdity and wordplay, topped off with some ingenious stop motion animation sequences (think Fantastic Mr Fox) that add to the odd amusment of the film.
As always, Michael Cera is brilliant. There’s not much else to say about the boy/man other than to wonder what he might do with a slightly less nebbish character. Only time will tell.
Another quality literary adaptation comes in the form of Niels Arden Oplev’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Based on the wildly successful Stieg Larsson novel, it’s a dark thriller about a disgraced Swedish journalist, Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), employed by an aging industrialist to discover the fate of his niece who disappeared 40 years ago.
Blomkvist’s investigation becomes tied up with a prickly goth hacker, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), whose past hints of deep psychological and physical abuse.
As the pair criss-cross the country looking for clues about what happened to Harriet Vanger, they unearth a series of grisly murders that may be linked to the industrialist’s family.
Nyqvist and Rapace are excellent in the lead roles – particularly Rapace who makes the thoroughly dislikable Lisbeth a fascinating character, spikes, spitting and all.
Paced somewhere between the glacial, but fascinating, Zodiac and LA Confidential, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is, at times, a harrowing film to watch. Short and not so short scenes of violence pepper the story and maintain a knife-edge level of tension throughout what unfolds to be a rivetting but deeply creepy tale.
Hardcore fans of the book may be disappointed to see certain aspects of the story dramatically pared back or, in some cases, excised completely but what is left is still  expansive and absorbing.