Fincher's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

The Karen O trailer gives the edge the book deserves but sorely missing in the American movie.  Fincher slogs through the material with a James Bond like opening sequence which is going to challenge the deep black in all LCD television sets across the nation when the blu-Ray, DVD and VOD come out some time later.  After the James Bondish, part MTV, part WTF opening sequence, things kind of go downhill.  There is really nothing to write home about, the intense coffee drinking scenes are missing and how I miss them.  The movie is by and large a faithful adaptation of the original novel so much so that I think if I haven't read the book I sure won't be able to follow the plot.  The movie is kind of sexist, something the book criticizes and despises.  Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) is seen giving it all for the movie here while Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) stingily flashes only his butt crack in his man-whore like speedo underwear.  Where is the equality in on-screen nudity?  In terms of brutality, I am not impressed.  And Fincher certainly doesn't give the audience something new or good:  the same old tired obligatory shower scene after the rape.  Oh my goodness.  Spare me already.  Rooney Mara gives a credible performance and she looks the part.  But that's about it, her character is just as interesting as her changing hair styles along the movie, which is somewhat interesting but not interesting enough to propel the plot forward and save the movie from being mundane and tedious.

SPOILER ALERT:
Despite the fact that it's a SONY movie, Apple is still featured faithfully* and prominently in the movie.  VAIO and NEX play minor supporting roles only.  EPSON,surprisingly, has a minor supporting role as well.  *Blomkvist is supposed to use an iBook in the book, cheap journalist ...

Space Oddity

From The New Yorker:  Mark Kelly quoted Bowie's Space Oddity "Tell my wife I love her very much."

The Feel Bad Movie Of Christmas

Rooney Mara Is Lisbeth Salender

With a body like this, who needs clothes?

The zero body fat Rooney Mara is The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Photograph by Jean-Baptiste Mondino for WMagazine.com.  Image belongs to its rightful owners.  Wow, that's hot and cold.  More Millennium Trilogy from yours truly.



You think only Lisbeth Salender can survive a gun shot in the head?  Think again.  Arizona House Representative Gabrielle Giffords is apparently recovering from a through and through gun shot wound from a Glock 19.  Get well soon.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

The is the last installment of Larsson's enormously popular so called Millennium Trilogy.  It was so popular that in my lunch break at Bryant's Park yesterday I saw two other people reading his first and second book within a radius of fifteen feet.  Being in the US and not ready to buy any imported paperback at grossly inflated price, I got my brand spanking new hardcover from eBay, which is a few dollars cheaper than Amazon but just as good if not better.  It arrived at lightning speed with tracking so there is no complaint but praise.  The book is more than 500 pages thick and if anything I think my biceps just got better toned after holding it on the train for a week or so.

The first "Dragon Tattoo" is about serial killings, the second "Played with Fire" is about revenge and this third one  "The Hornet's Nest" is about government conspiracy so big and so horrendous that you just can't believe it, especially of all places, in Sweden where people are just nice and beautiful.  Anyway, the three books all carry a common theme: excessive coffee consumption.  Before reading this trilogy, my feeble mind thought only Americans would be so crude as to drink coffee all the time.  Well I know we have company now.

"The Hornet's Nest," being the last installment brings closure and certain sadness to the trilogy knowing full well that if there is any more sequel or spin-off it won't be from Larsson himself because he passed away before the books were published.  However, there are talks or rumors that there does exist an almost finished novel in his laptop or something to that extent according to an article I read in The New York Times magazine not too long ago--that is if I remember it correctly.  This final installment does tie all the loose ends and gives a very traditional and satisfying ending: the protagonists live while the bad guys either got killed or busted.  Justice is served.  The End.  The only loose end, if there is one, is though there are mentions of Lisbeth's twin sister starting in the second book but she is even more elusive than Lisbeth as a character, till the very end, she is only mentioned but not present.  Perhaps she is meant to appear in subsequent Millennium stories.  Alas, that would never happen, not from the original creator anyway.

The Girl who Played With Fire

This is the second installment of the late Stieg Larsson's widely successful Millennium Trilogy. 

This time the story gets very personal.  We got to know more, way more, of our female protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, which is of course a welcome diversion from the middle aged journalist Blomkvist who always got lucky with the ladies and is the main focus of the first installment.  We found out her past and her family and hence why she is what she is--such a certifiable and justifiable nutcase.  Salander might be strange with a capital S but at the same time she is just like every other girl we know.  When she got tons of money, what does she do?  She goes on a year-long vacation, buys an exquisite apartment and yes gets a boob job done by the best surgeon available in Genoa, Italy.  I am sure the girls can relate.  Larsson does most of the narratives in his own voice and there aren't that many dialogs, especially of Salander's because you know she is such an antisocial weirdo.  But sometimes we got lucky, didn't we?  On page 584 of the mass market paperback, we got to hear undistilled and unfiltered words pouring from her mouth, which are rare and at the same time exemplary of what she is.

"I've had a fucking miserable week and I'm in a fucking bad mood,"  she said.  "You know what the worst thing is?  Every time I turn around there's some fucking pile of shit with a beer belly in my way acting tough.  Now I'd like to leave.  So move your ass."

If there were ever a subtitle it could have been called "The Girl Who Hate Men Who Hate Women."

The book is more than 700 pages thick and Larsson, a master of story telling and suspense, just keeps his readers guessing and wanting for more.  It certainly is on par with the first one and it bests the first one especially if you are a bit tired of the whole serial killer genre and more into something like sex trafficking.  The book has an abrupt ending which only makes one want to read the third installment even more.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the first of a three part so called Millennium series by the late Stieg Larsson who died shortly after he submitted the manuscript of what has now become an international bestseller.

The story is mostly about a middle-aged journalist, Blomkvist who has plenty of luck with women and a grown woman Salander who is stuck in a body of a thirteen-year-old and seems to have misguided sartorial taste on Goth, body piercings and tattoos. Together they discover dark family secrets, find missing persons, catch serial killers, expose financial gangsters and what have you. They share a passion for Apple products, hers a Powerbook (she likes it so much so that she gives a blowjob in exchange for money to buy one) and his an iBook (no blowjob mentioned), in between all these activities, they have sex and drink a lot of coffee.

The paperback is almost 600-page thick and the story is well paced, organized and plotted. Every little thing is explained (Remember the TV series Lost? Anybody? Where nothing is really explained and people have so low an expectation that they actually don't expect the finale answers every stupid convoluted clues left before. Ha?). Overall I like the story except I always have some prejudice against translated works. I keep thinking what's missing in the translated English version. Too bad, I don't read Sweden. Salander is supposed to be a world class hacker yet I don't really see her do any actual hacking. I expect the book to print verbatim what commands and source codes she uses to hack. Alas, there is none and I just have to take Larsson's word for it.