I don’t know whether movie time has been short or time to think about them and set finger to keyboard even shorter. A couple of two week trips, without movies, cut into the current crop, though summer itself doesn’t help. The market as imagined in the moguley minds in the movie making nether world I am not part of. We’ve been hitting the trove at Netflix regularly though, and a few of those are worth commenting on, after these three on the big screen.
I saw The Girl With Dragon Tattoo a couple of months ago, and before reading the book by Stieg Larsson, which I’d heard about from my wife and her reading group. ‘Great! Good read! The gloomy Scandinavians! Even women in Sweden are abused!” were some of the wisps I heard. But there were some violent scenes, my informant said. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see them acted out. I went on my own, a student of the culture I told myself, and was impressed.
The acting was well fitted to the characters, and they to each other. There was no confusion of too similar faces, or too many minor characters coming and going. The plot unfolded well, some scenes seeming to be sketches where we suspect more had to have happened in the novel, but carrying the necessary hints through which we follow the narrator’s lead. The multiple mysteries of corporate malfeasance, disappeared child and sadistic murders wrap around each other in ways we could follow, while still being puzzled. The winter scenery in Sweden is well filmed, though perhaps not as ominous as it might have been. And yes, there were two brutal scenes. Tough to watch. The good guys win but Larssen ‘s theme of violence against women stays in our minds. [The original title of the novel in Swedish is "Men Who Hate Women."] This is not simply entertainment.
Normally I’d groan at the trope of a younger woman seduced by an older man but it worked here. Lizbeth Salander, played by Noomi Rapace, earlier shown en flagrante delicto with a young woman, decides she’ll have him; (more…)
