the girl with the dragon tattoo

a friend of mine read the book, "the girl with the dragon tattoo" and told me we had to see the movie. he is currently waiting for the second in the "millennium trilogy" and now i want to start reading it was well.

swedish writing meteor stieg larsson, wrote 3 books about a young tiny hacker girl who can handle herself. they are world wide best sellers. he died in 2004 before the third was published in 2007. american producer scott rudin just signed a deal for a 2012 hollywood version. rudin was hampered by the fact that larsson died without a will and his live in girlfriend who has no rights to his posessions, was hoarding larsson's laptop. meanwhile, the swede's were able to produce "Män som hatar kvinnor" and honestly no one needs to do it again. it's been done.

lisbeth salander is a punk hacker who befriends a convicted journalist and the two go after a 40 year old murder mystery. but there is so much more. the film is subtitled and i found the swedish language a little taxing at first but soon felt the rythym of it and forgot i was reading the film all together. now that's the mark of a good film! part of why this movie works is that we have never seen these actors before. lisbeth, played by noomi rapace, comes to us as a complete mystery with no preconceived notions as we have not experienced her in any other story. when i first saw the leading man i thought, gee movie stars aren't very pretty in sweden, mikal nyqvist is chubby with bad skin, but soon i realized that he is perfect for the role as the character shone through. and that's pretty much what it's supposed to be like.

see this movie in the swedish version. i am afraid hollywood will water it down just as they did "la femme nikita" by giving us the white bread "point of no return". and the two actresses rumored to be up for the role of lisbeth, kristen stewart ("twilight" and "the runaways") and ellan paige ("juno") are both very good, come to us with too much history. i just can't see them doing what lisbeth has to do. nor do i really want to.

the ghost writer

roman polanski, thanks to movie magic, filmed a movie that takes place mostly on martha's vineyard while banished from american soil- gotta love second units!!

"the ghost writer" is a beautiful film, suspenseful murder mystery and political thriller. ewan macgregor is hired to replace a recently deceased by mysterious "accidental" means ghost writer working with a former english prime minister on his memoirs. pearce brosnan plays the thinly vieled tony blair character who's living in the borrowed martha's vineyard home of an mega-giant american contractor "friend." olivia williams is again great ("an education") as his long suffering wife suspicous of her husband's affair with his robotically efficient yet sexy personal assistance, kim cattrall. the cast is full of familiar faces from a bald blustering jim belushi as ewan's publisher, to the underused timothy hutton, tom wilkerson as the bad guy or is he?, and did anyone know he was still alive eli wallach.

this is the second movie in two weeks i saw that shined a spotlight on bush's administration. brosnan's character is brought up on charges by an international tribunal for possible war crimes for handing over political prisoners to the cia for torture- in short for being the president's beck and call boy. pretty much the same as blair is currently being investigated for being in bush's back pocket. the immediacy of this issue drives the mystery of this story. god fobid this hired writer should just write! no, he has to find out what happened to the first ghost and he ends up running around telling everything to anyone who'll listen so that the audience is just as confused as he is. and a confused audience is just what you want in order to sustain a good suspense movie.

i am a polanski fan- always have been. this movie proves that he still has the juice of his earlier days, "rosemary's baby" and "chinatown". but i even like his most recent, " the 9th gate" although it ends rather abruptly as though they just walked away from it one day. even then it's better than most pablum presented these days. i'm not going to discuss his crimes, just his art. i'll leave the first to the courts and the second to me. if you miss this movie in the theaters, rent it.

the green zone

matt damon continues to prove he deserved his "sexiest man alive" title in "the green zone". he convincingly plays an army chief warrant officer charged with hunting and finding wmd in 2007 iraq. "the green zone" is an action thriller war film written by brian helgeland and directed by paul greengrass. the film is "credited as having been 'inspired' by" the non-fiction 2006 book "imperial life in the emerald city" by journalist rajiv chandrasekaran, which documented life in the green zone, baghdad. the green zone being the common name for the international zone of iraq— a 10-square-kilometer (3.8-square-mile) area in central baghdad, iraq, that was the center of the coalition provisional authority and remains the center of the international presence in the city.

this is a story about fictional people portraying a real occurrence in which real people searched for fictional weapons. matt does a great job as the disillusioned leader of wmd hunting squad, who cares more about the truth than his orders. he bucks the system, snakily played by greg kinnear, and teams up with cia operator brendon gleason (yes the cia is the good guy in this story) to find out who made deals with whom in order to get the u.s. into iraq. right wingers will say this movie is yet another example of liberal hollywood spinning it's conspiracy agenda. people who think for themselves will call it a history lesson.

kinnear and damon play off each other very well. at one point after watching damon throw kinnear around, i thought, next movie kinnear needs to add a line in his contract that'll allow him to throw damon around. but then my friend reminded me that the last time we saw these two on the screen together, they were literally glued to one another in "stuck on you" in which they played siamese twins! no wonder they have this great rhythm!

all though i am a peacenik, i love to see all the big toys our military has to play with. i love the big guns, helicopters, rockets, tanks- the works! and yes i am very glad if anyone has to have them that it is us!! i just wish they never used them...

also, my friend and i loved the scarf damon wore- very yasser arafat printed. i always felt guilty admiring arafat's scarf because he was the bad guy. but now that damon in the personage of this american maverick (a real maverick mr. mccain) wears one, that it is ok for me to openly like it! and maybe even buy one.

anyway, back to the movie: tight, suspenseful, and entertaining. if you miss it in the theaters, rent it.

avatar 3d

"avatar" is a wonderful ride, very entertaining and a great way to get across an important message- we are one with the earth and the universe. "avatar" is the story of a military man who goes native and helps his new family nation win against his old, evil empire. it is "dances with wolves"- if you liked that story then you'll like james cameron's version. cameron took jim harrison's story and updated it with all the bells and whistles necessary to keep the attention of this attention deficient next generation.

and what could be wrong with that?