Playing Star-Tag with Year-End Movies

I’m probably not the only one who's been spending a bit more time than usual this week, in part because it’s time to get geared up for awards season, in part because there are a larger than usual number of good movies out there. Or at least, movies I want to see.

But I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon, a kind of “bleed” from one picture to the next that sometimes has me wondering what movie I’m seeing. Start with the fact that for the first time in recent memory (no short-term-memory loss jokes, please) an A-list director has two movies released on the same day – Steven Spielberg.

One is “War Horse,” a sweeping historical drama of a horse during WWI. It features live actors and animals, cavalry battle scenes, tear-jerking plot (man gets horse, man looses horse and man gets horse back, who then dies). Recognizable star names include Emily Watson, David Thewlis and Benedict Cumberbatch. Really.

The other is “The Adventures of Tintin,” a live-action animation derived from a popular European comic book (or graphic novel) series that began in 1929. While no stars are recognizable in this film, thanks to their animatronic performances, the cast (of voices) includes Jaime Bell as the diminutive, perpetual adolescent with a cowlick Tintin, plus Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and the age’s premier shape-shifter, Andy Serkis.

Serkis squirmed to fame as Golem in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy from Peter Jackson (who is a co-producer and second-unit director for “Tintin”). Some of his other roles include Kong in “King Kong” and the lead ape in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” so if you don’t recognize him as the booze-addled curse-spouting sea captain in this movie you’re excused.

But back to our theme, the Year-End Movie Shuffle. Also in Tintin are Simon Pegg and Daniel Craig – and we find Craig starring in another holiday movie, the heart-warming “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” a remake of the original Swedish version from last year. Playing with Craig is Rooney Mara in the title role – you may remember her as the girlfriend who got away in “Social Network.” Or you may not.

In the Swedish version of the film, reporter Mikael Bloomqvist was played by Michael Nyqvist, who appears this week as the villain in the latest “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.” Also in that film is Simon Pegg (one of the Thompson detectives in Tintin) who absolutely cannot be anything but scene-stealingly funny in anything he’s in (“Shaun of the Dead” and “Star Trek” for instance). He carries “Ghost Protocol,” although I’m told Tom Cruise is in it as well.

Back to the Dragon Tattoo film: the pierced girl in the Swedish original was Noomi Rapace, who miraculously re-appears in our seasonal cinematic circus as the femme fatale in “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.”

In this dizzying game of star-tag, what loops us back to Spielberg’s holiday double-play? Well, Tintin is in 3D – as is my own holiday favorite, “Hugo.” Thankfully, there’s an appearance by Jude Law in Hugo as well – he plays Watson in the aforementioned Sherlock Holmes movie. So our circus, or "serkis," is almost complete.

I guess the big question is, “Where is Kevin Bacon in all this?”