After being held in abeyance for a few months, my movie blog is back with a review of this exciting new movie! Man som hatar kvinnor (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) is a Swedish film released last year that is based on the best-selling novel of the same name; it is now in limited release in the U.S. and worth seeing if playing in your neighborhood. A good rule of thumb about foreign films: they generally have to be pretty good in order to be playing in theaters here in the U.S. As for the Swedes, they first caught my attention with the slick teenage vampire film Lat den ratte komma in (Let The Right One In) which made the Twilight movies look like Care Bears: Naptime. Note that I never actually saw the Twilight movies, but I bet they never featured severed limbs in a swimming pool or a lady getting mauled by housecats!
And so it seems the Swedes have a penchant for the dark and ultraviolent. In this film, we follow the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, as he investigates the unsolved disappearance of a young girl 40 years ago. Enter Lisbeth Salander, the world's only Swedish skinny goth bisexual psychopath computer genius, who in turn is investigating Blomkvist, and becomes intertwined in the mystery. The closer they come to solving the puzzle, the more dangerous the search becomes, with the "why don't you let sleeping dogs lie?" and the "better turn back now before it's too late..."
Overall the movie is pretty thrilling and Salander is totally captivating, with her tattoos, piercings, spikes and briefly bare breasts :) Seriously though, her character is interesting in that she is both fierce and vulnerable, corrupted and innocent, clever and foolish, never one-dimensional. So be sure to check it out before Hollywood does a shitty remake of it and erases it from memory, just like The Departed did to Infernal Affairs or the new Death at a Funeral is doing to the original Death at a Funeral grumble grumble grumble....
DVD shoutout: If you're looking for a good laugh, I highly recommend In the Loop, a British political comedy in they style of Doctor Strangelove.
http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/intheloop/
