In one what must count as one of the great tragedies of the 21st century literary fiction world, Swedish writer Stieg Larsson never lived to enjoy the fruits of success from his wildly popular crime novels.
Since most of ye schmucks read so little, some education is in order before we proceed to the movie review.
Larsson is the author of the Millennium trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest).
Serious readers of the SI blog will, of course, recollect the Larsson name since we’ve reviewed two of his books on these pages: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl who Played with Fire. We just got the third volume – The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – a few days back and will read and review that as well.
Alas, Larsson died of a massive heart attack at 50 just before the first book The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was published.
Such then are the vagaries of life.
Lovely Swedish Film
Today we celebrate Larsson’s life with the review of the film version of Män Som Hatar Kvinnor (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).
The movie debuted this morning at the Ritz 5 theater on Walnut St in Philadelphia and, folks, the 125-mile drive was most certainly worth it. Every single mile of it.
Directed by Niels Arden Oplev, faithful to the novel and featuring Michael Nyqvist as the journalist Mikael Blomkvist and Noomi Rapace as the oddball hacker Lisbeth Salander, the Swedish language film with English subtitles is as wonderful and as gripping as the book.
Agreed, some of the thrill of the whodunit is lost since readers of the book know the ending and the identity of the rotten apple in the Vanger family. But that’s more than amply compensated by the excitement and anticipation of encountering in color on the big screen the characters you’ve read about in small black print on the pages of a book.
Like the book, the movie focuses on the search for the killer/killers of 16-year-old Harriet Vanger, who disappeared 40 years back from Hedeby island to the great anguish of her dear grandfather Henrik Vanger, the head of the Vanger conglomerate.
In four decades, his missing grand-niece has become the idée fixe of Henrik Vanger’s life and the old man has left no stone unturned to get at the root of her disappearance. But in vain. Continue reading »
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