Now that hype for David Fincher’s American version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has reached fever pitch, a new poster for the film is spreading from blog to blog, like stomach flu. Slashfilm says the French-captioned image “appears to be a Canadian teaser poster” and cites a Hollywood Reporter piece from a few months ago that describes the poster as “black and white and beautiful, but there’s no way in hell any studio will ever let Fincher use it, as he knows. Because Mara is naked from the waist up.”

It takes more than a bit of nudity to get us riled up. In fact, we’d usually be similarly annoyed at the idea of a tasteful, well-shot movie poster being censored for showing torso and a hint of breast. But we have to admit, we think the poster is in pretty poor taste, purely because it so blatantly misrepresents the characters. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is about a survivor of rape and other abuse who has grown tough and seeks revenge. The dynamic in the poster suggests that Rooney Mara’s Lizbeth Salander is sexily vulnerable and in need of Mikael Blomkvist’s (Daniel Craig) fully clothed protection. Does anyone else find this a bit worrisome? … Read More

Over the weekend, a trailer for David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, appeared on the internet. (If you haven’t seen it already, watch it after the jump.) Judging by the skewed framing and the fact that it’s been showing in European theaters, most have assumed that the video is a pirated leak. But Slate’s Brow Beat blog points us to an interesting theory — that due to the high-quality audio (yup, that’s Trent Reznor and Karen O covering Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”) and video, and the fact that it opens with an American MPAA red band, some now suspect the clip actually came straight from the studio. Based on our memory of a bootlegged The Tree of Life trailer that popped up shortly before that preview made it to the internet, those points seem valid. Sony has, of course, denied that they’re the source of the leak, pointing out that the trailer did screen in select US theaters this week — although, as Brow Beat notes, it’s interesting that the company knows the video is out there and hasn’t asked YouTube to take it down. … Read More