That unsubtle backhand slap you just heard was the sound of Steven Spielberg being whacked off his awards-season pedestal by the Directors Guild of America, which just announced Woody Allen, David Fincher, Michel Hazanavicius, Alexander Payne and Martin Scorsese as its 2012 Best Director nominees. This one has to hurt.
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The first Oscar Index entry of 2012 finds Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics a little hungover from the holidays and lot bored from the protracted inertia of awards season. Not even this week's Producers Guild Award nominations could do much to shake up a contest that appears to be both wide open and solidifying into place at the same time. Let's investigate...
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Well, this should go pretty fast: The holiday week has offered a dearth of new narratives to trace and pulses to take, with only one film demonstrating any significant mobility in the studies coming out Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics. Let's get to it!
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If Rooney Mara's fearless turn as Stieg Larsson's goth-punk hacker heroine Lisbeth Salander teaches us anything, it's that you should never, ever cross a woman with fire in her heart and vengeance on her mind. But the titular Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is just the latest in a long history of utterly human movie heroines who remind us how ferocious and unrelenting a woman wronged can be. Celebrate the fictional ladies who have helped teach society not to fuck with the so-called "fairer" sex, and let their righteous fury be a lesson to us all during this warm and fuzzy holiday season.
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Screw Christmas. Forget Hanukkah. To hell with New Year's. There is only one holiday we celebrate in the dank, windowless labs of Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics, and that is Oscar Night. Thus the latest edition of Oscar Index, offering all the festive year-end joy you can possibly stand. Let's get to it!
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The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Tumblr Mouth Taped Shut recently unearthed a startling artifact: A vintage segment of the investigative news program Hard Copy exploring the case of one Harriet Vanger, a teenager who went missing decades ago from her family estate in Hedeby Island, Sweden. Watch the unsettling VHS-era report after the jump, complete with your favorite commercials from '80s primetime television.
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Film bloggers and pundits and awards season watchers have pecked this David Denby-Scott Rudin exchange to death with no clear consensus or solution, but one player in the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo kerfuffle has a solution. "If it were up to me, I wouldn't show movies to anybody before they were released," director David Fincher told the Miami Herald. "...If I had my way, the New York Film Critics Circle would not have seen this movie and then we would not be in this situation." More wishful thinking from Fincher after the jump!
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The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has already established itself as the perfect forum for Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's haunting, crunchy musical stylings, but the full breadth of its soundtrack is a bit of a disappointment: It's only three full-length CDs! Damn it. That's barely enough music to occupy me during a four-hour flight from Los Angeles to Chicago. Underachievers. Find out where you can get the soundtrack's Karen O.-led cover of "Immigrant Song," as well as a few clips from the new package, after the jump.
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Forget all that love for The Artist and Spielberg's Oscar-readyWar Horse; sometimes you need a jolt of pure Fincherian grime and menace to snap you out of the awards season doldrums. Enter these 30+ images from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, here to remind us that the Rooney Mara-Daniel Craig starrer is the feel-bad movie of the year. Shudder and shiver your way through Movieline's gallery and count down the days to December 21.
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Over at Entertainment Weekly, David Fincher plays coy joking about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's Oscar chances. [Some spoilers follow, though they'll come as no surprise to those familiar with Stieg Larsson's book or Niels Arden Oplev's 2009 film adaptation.] How likely is is that the Academy will be so turned off by the extremes seen in Fincher's film that they'd pass it over come nomination day?
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David Fincher on his search for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's Lisbeth Salander: "Scarlett Johansson was great. It was a great audition, I'm telling you. But the thing with Scarlett is, you can't wait for her to take her clothes off... Salander should be like E.T. If you put E.T. dolls out before anyone had seen the movie, they would say, 'What is this little squishy thing?' Well, you know what? When he hides under the table and he grabs the Reese's Pieces, you love him! It has to be like that." He eventually cast the "great weirdo" Rooney Mara for his "pervy" Americanized adaptation; read the full profile here. [Vogue]
It's week three of the 2011-12 Oscar Index, and the latest measurements, readings and conclusions are in from Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics. And aside from a few startling exceptions, they don't look that different than the ones disseminated here last week. But make no mistake: Like it or not, stuff is happening! Read on for the latest developments.
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With two and a half months until David Fincher's adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo hits theaters, another eerie behind-the-scenes video has appeared on the mysterious Tumblr account Mouth Taped Shut. This latest installment in the film's viral marketing campaign offers audience members a sneak peak into the making of that scandalous Dragon poster -- this one shaped like a razor blade and printed on sheets of metal -- set against Trent Reznor's soundtrack.
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New images and behind the scenes peeks are steadily emerging over at The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's Tumblr Mouth Taped Shut, including a new piece of maybe-poster art for the December 21 thriller. But there's something familiar in the way Daniel Craig's face is split by Rooney Mara's shadowy profile. Was someone over at Sony marketing borrowing from the Apple playbook?
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