Joe's View

Although a blond-haired, green-eyed American suburbanite named Colleen LaRose was arrested in 2010 as part of an alleged international terrorist plot — she called herself “JihadJane” on social networking sites — we live in an age when we have been conditioned to think of terrorists as Middle Easterners with a homicidal grudge.

(LaRose was reportedly recruited precisely because she would not be picked out of a crowd that was being racially profiled for jihadists.)

The German film, “The Baader Meinhof Complex,” takes us back to an era when middle-class kids all over the globe started to have the same violent, revolutionary thoughts as Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers.

The movie is a gripping/disturbing look back at a group of political activists who went over the edge in response to the Vietnam War and the other upheavals of the late 1960s.

The Uli Edel-directed film is an expensive-looking, grand-scale affair that treats the counterculture uprising of the 1960s in the style of a traditional war movie. The approach fits the material because what was going on in cities and college campuses around the world ran parallel to the military action in Southeast Asia (started by the French and inherited by the U.S.)

“Baader Meinhof” shows how a group of college professors and students in Germany became so incensed by the war — and the U.S. military presence in their country — that they tipped over into terrorism.

Opposition to the war became just one of a number of anti-Establishment causes that made a violent push-back seem justified — the authorities made matters worse through the use of indiscriminate police actions against large groups of demonstrators.

Just as the police riot at the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968 mobilized many appalled American young people, German youth came together in the aftermath of a demonstration against a visit of the Shah of Iran — a gathering that ended with leftist young people being beaten and killed in the streets.

Martina Gedeck — who you might remember as the female lead in “The Lives of Others” — plays Ulrike Meinhof, the academic who went from criticizing the government and the war in Vietnam as a TV talking-head to joining younger radicals willing to kill to make their point.

Moritz Bleibtreu — one of the stars of “Run, Lola, Run” — plays Andreas Baader who is ready for violent resistance before most of his friends.

Watching “The Baader Meinhof Complex” it is impossible not to see the similarities with the Symbionese Liberation Army in this country — both groups robbed banks to raise funds and attracted unlikely recruits from college campuses and the streets.

On the surface level, the politics and lifestyles on view in the film look as archaic as a story set during World War II.

But, a viewer is left wondering if the current financial chaos and the Occupy Wall Street movement might ignite such rebellion from middle-class college students today.

If “My Week with Marilyn” wasn’t such a slight film, Michelle Williams would probably have a lock on an Oscar for her performance as Marilyn Monroe making the long-forgotten 1957 British film “The Prince and the Showgirl.”

The film debuted at the New York Film Festival to a torrent of deserved praise for Williams, but there has been a growing backlash against “My Week With Marilyn” since then.

What makes the performance so astonishing is that the actress doesn’t try to do an impression of the 1950s icon — she doesn’t really look or sound much like Monroe — but she delivers an interpretation that is moving and funny in the way that it seems to capture the essence of the star.

On one level, Williams is overqualified for the role — in movies as diverse as “Brokeback Mountain” and “Blue Valentine,” she has proven herself to be a much more skilled and versatile screen actress than Monroe ever was. The 1950s sexpot was a great camera subject and a gifted comedienne, but it’s painful to watch her struggling to act up to the level of her co-stars in pictures like “The Misfits.”

Williams is devilishly clever in “My Week with Marilyn,” showing us both the tormented woman who wanted to be a better actress and the charismatic star who didn’t need to act to dazzle movie audiences in everything from “Niagara” to “How to Marry a Millionaire.”

Before it begins to focus on the friendship between Marilyn and a young assistant director (Eddie Redmayne), the movie is a fascinating study in styles of screen acting as Monroe clashes with her director/co-star Laurence Olivier (beautifully played by Kenneth Branagh).

Monroe and her producer partner put “The Prince and the Showgirl” together, so she was actually Olivier’s boss, but Olivier’s fame as a stage and screen great scared her to death. Olivier didn’t help matters by failing to recognize Marilyn’s limitations right from the start — when he told her flatly to “act sexy” that was probably the kiss of death on the performance by an actress who had fallen under the spell of “the Method” at The Actors Studio.

As long as the movie focuses on the culture clash between Olivier and Monroe — and the tense people around them including Marilyn’s sycophantic coach Paula Strasberg (played with real comic brio by Zoe Wanamaker) — it’s amusing and insightful on the behind-the-scenes stress of actors trying to get on the same page.

“My Week with Marilyn” starts to drift away when it deals with the assistant director’s crush on the star and their quasi-romantic adventures away from the studio. A rather tough-minded movie turns into romantic fluff and Williams gets fewer opportunities to show us her acute understanding of the woman she is playing.

Maybe it just isn’t a story I needed to be told three times.

Or, perhaps I expected a lot more from the visionary director of “The Social Network” and “Zodiac” and “Fight Club.”

Whatever the reason, I spent a lot of time squirming in my seat the other night during David Fincher’s version of the Stieg Larsson blockbuster thriller, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

I enjoyed the novel as a whodunit/serial killer tale with a fresh setting — Sweden — and a new take on Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, in the former of a disgraced journalist and the punk/computer genius/autistic girl of the title.

Larsson filled the novel with enough interesting background material on the modern magazine world and Swedish support of the Nazis during World War II to help us forget about the many implausibilities in the plot and an almost sadistic atttention to detail in the scenes of rape and kinky sex.

A Swedish movie version of the novel was released here two years ago to considerable success on the arthouse circuit — it was a good straightforward adaptation clearly made on a low-budget but with a memorable performance by Noomi Rapace in the title role. The Swedish production company filmed the other two novels in Larsson “Girl” trilogy in quick succession in 2009 and they were released here too, with diminishing box office returns.

Why Fincher chose to do what is in effect a Hollywood remake of a very recent Swedish film is the real mystery of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

It’s a very sleek piece of work, with the sort of visual craftsmanship and pulsating soundtrack that we’ve come to expect from this great director, but the pedophile serial killer mystery at the heart of the movie is the same sort of genre material Fincher has already tackled with much more punch in “Seven” and “Zodiac.”

The Lisbeth Salander computer genius character is very well played by Rooney Mara in the new movie, but her behavior becomes less plausible the third time around. Here is a woman with the physical prowess to bring down a man who has killed many women and the technical savvy to move millions in and out of Swiss bank accounts, but who still submits to the horrendous sexual abuse of her parole officer/social worker in order to get government checks to pay her rent.

Experiencing this subplot a third time I was left with the queasy feeling that Larsson included the two rape scenes for sleazy narrative jolts (and to give us a feeling of triumphant pseudo-feminist revenge when Lisbeth finally turns the tables on her tormentor).

The major villain of the piece — a Nazi pedophile serial killer — looks more and more like a cheaply melodramatic concoction each time we meet him. And, the vast and well-equipped subterranean torture chamber he is given in the Fincher version seems preposterous on the claustrophobic island retreat occupied by all of his nasty, back-biting family members (no one caught on to this depravity — and the slew of missing girls — for more than 40 years?)

It’s no wonder this slick rehash isn’t doing well at the box office — there is really no compelling reason to see it in a theater.

If you enjoyed the recent Wall Street drama “Margin Call” you mught want to check out Chris Smith’s riveting 2009 documentary, “Collapse” (MPI Home Video), even though it’s the sort of unalloyed feel-bad movie that leaves a viewer wondering what to do with the information it contains.

For 80 minutes, Smith gives the floor to former LAPD cop and investigative journalist Michael Ruppert, who takes us through his step-by-step doomsday scenario to be caused by what is known as “peak oil” — that fast-approaching moment in time when we have consumed more than half of all known oil supplies.

Prices will spike and panic will mount, Ruppert tells us, as it dawns on the “civilized” world that the foundation of our whole mechanized way of life is beginning to collapse.

Smith and Ruppert point out that “oil” is not just the stuff that runs our cars but the ingredient that is bound into a staggering array of products and devices (four gallons for each tire on your car).

With the rise of China and India as consumers of oil — for much of the 20th century individual car travel was a largely American luxury — the reserves of crude will be tapped out even faster.

While Ruppert is a lucid and seemingly sane figure, Smith doesn’t make it clear why the man and his philosophy warrant feature length examination.

The filmmaker seems to have been inspired by Errol Morris’s stylish Oscar-winning, feature-length interview with former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara — “The Fog of War,” or McNamara’s mea culpa — but that was a movie about U.S. history with a major American political figure.

Ruppert has a slight air of me-against-the-world self righteousness that left this viewer wishing there was more sourcing for his dire pronouncements.

And, if the man is right, there is virtually nothing any individual can do to counteract the global forces that are inexorably leading us to the end.

Produced on the scale of a superior James Bond movie and packed with the sly, sexy humor of a 1960s caper picture, “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol” is one of the rare Hollywood “tentpole” franchise pictures that deserves its huge success.

“MI4″ delivers the sort of fast and furious, but also surprisingly sophisticated, entertainment that the manufacturers of action movies rarely produce anymore.

Tom Cruise is in peak movie star form and he was smart enough (as one of the producers of the movie) to make himself part of a great team that includes Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner, and the sensational Paula Patton, who could be the sexiest and most believable woman of action to come along since Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel.

Six months ago, few movie people would have predicted that a Christmas season that included two Steven Spielberg pictures, a Cameron Crowe/Matt Damon movie, and “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” would end up being dominated by a Tom Cruise star vehicle.

After the horrendous publicity he received a few years back — the Oprah couch jumping, the on-air tiff with Matt Lauer — Cruise was written by a lot of people as a hopelessly tarnished star.

Female movieogers were through with him, it was said, after the star criticized Brooke Shields for resorting to post-partum meds and when it seemed that he was acting as a Scientologist Svengali to his third wife Katie Holmes.

It became so popular to bash Cruise that the Viacom mogul Sumner Redstone pointlessly “fired” the independent producer/star in a shameless bid for positive press in the middle of one of Redstone’s own PR crises.

The bad vibes surrounding Cruise hurt his very entertaining summer of 2010 comic thriller — “Knight and Day” — which was not as well-reviewed or as well-attended as it deserved.

The star’s wonderful performance in “MI4” and the picture’s spectacular box office success puts Cruise back where he belongs — at the top of the Hollywood heap — and I can’t wait to see what he does in next summer’s musical comedy “Rock of Ages” and then as the Lee Child action hero Jack Reacher.

Roberta Isleib launches a new mystery series next Tuesday with “An Appetite for Murder” (Obsidian) about the adventures of a crime-solving restaurant critic in Key West.

The book is such a departure from Isleib’s two earlier series — one about a woman on the professional golf circuit and the other following a New Haven psychologist — that she has taken on a new pen name: Lucy Burdette.

Isleib’s appealing heroine — Hayley Snow — is a twentysomething New Jersey native who makes the mistake of falling head over heels with a handsome rogue who convinces her to pick up stakes and move to the Florida Keys.

Hayley soon finds out that her divorce lawyer beau is Mr. Wrong — she catches him with another woman and is given the heave ho. The rat puts her belongings outside and she is left to her own devices.

Fortunately, our plucky heroine has two friends in Key West — a gay analyst who offers plenty of moral support and an old college pal who allows Hayley to crash on her houseboat until she figures out where she’s going.

Since the book is labeled “A Key West Food Critic Mystery” there is no surprise in Hayley’s decision to apply for a restaurant reviewer position on a new lifestyle magazine — Key Zest — and there is little suspense waiting for the decision on her job application.

The central challenge in any “cozy” mystery is to place an amateur sleuth in a position where it is believable that he or she would feel the need to solve a murder (with the police relegated to a back-up position).

Hayley doesn’t blunder her way in to amateur sleuthing — she’s forced into the job when her ex’s new girlfriend is poisoned and the Key West cops make Hayley suspect number one.

The setting is always one of the key elements in this sort of mystery and Isleib makes full use of Key West’s funky mixture of the rich and old hippies who heard the siren call of Jimmy Buffett 35 years ago and have been living the beach resort lifestyle ever since.

Florida has long been one of the best backdrops for crime novels — from John MacDonald to Carl Hiassen — and Isleib’s sense of place and her ability to empathize with a wide strata of Key West locals and visitors bodes well for this new series.

The great Italian actor Toni Servillo — who played the title role in “Il Divo” and was featured prominently in “Gomorra” — delivers another commanding performance in “The Girl By the Lake,” as a police detective investigating a murder in a small village.

IFC Films has just released the 2007 Italian production on DVD and it is also available on cable via IFC’s movies on demand service.

The crime is especially puzzling because the beautiful dead girl was seemingly liked by everyone in the town, and yet it is clear right from the start that she was killed by someone who knew her.

The tightly written police procedural is adapted from a novel by Norwegian crime writer Karin Fossum who has done a series of novels about the brilliant, introspective detective who is coping with the illness of his wife as well as the baffling crime.

“The Girl by the Lake” takes us into the life of the village and its various characters in a manner reminiscent of a classic Agatha Christie novel.

Detective Sanzio is not as dour as he looks at first glance — the detective knows how to get people to talk and we very quickly learn a lot about the way this small rather enclosed society works.

The movie features some remarkable supporting performances — Valeria Golina as the mother of a child the dead girl babysat for and Omero Antonutti (the father in the Taviana brothers’ classic 1977  film “Padre Padrone”) as a wheelchair-bound senior citizen totally dependent on his son, a prime suspect.

But the movie is really Servillo’s show. He is in nearly every scene and has a mysteriously mesmerizing screen presence — the man never appears to be “acting” in any of the movies I’ve seen him in and yet you can’t take your eyes off him.