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.