Written the 28th- Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Poor little banana- left all alone to rot in a corner. Well I’LL eat you, even if those other meanies won’t.

Dude, this is like the perfect banana! I thought it’d be all gushy and brown, but it isn’t at all!

Went to see “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” yesterday (that was all my day consisted of, get up, go see movie, come home, eat two slices of pizza, a little game boy, then sleep). I originally had no intention of going to see it, I’m too much of a snob, and if EVERYONE is reading this book, then clearly I don’t want anything to do with it in novel or movie format, however a buddy invited me to go see it, and I certainly am not popular enough that I get to turn down offers to do stuff.

How was the movie? Overall I liked it, it’s good to get in touch with my Swedish roots (when people said “sköll” I knew what it meant! Not sure if I spelled that right!). An awful lot of rapists and Nazis in Sweden it seems- yeah, yeah, it’s just a movie.

There’s an opening theme to the film that was very James Bond. All inky CGI people moving to the Trent Reznor tunskies. Kinda weirded me out.

I’m afraid I was never drawn in enough to inhabit the world I was watching. Everything was very clearly a story someone made up. A cat shows up… oh no cat! Don’t you know you’re only there to get scarily killed later on? Olp there it is. (I wonder how they made that dead cat. Hopefully not the easy way.)

Sorry investigator, those phone numbers in that diary were checked out years ago, and they don’t seem to have any bearing on the case. Gee willikers, you think it’ll turn out those weren’t phone numbers at all?!?

Probably the thing that killed me the most (is this the end of my list? Not sure, I’m kinda figuring this out as I go) was the way Daniel Craig’s character Mikaal Blom-something (I have no idea how it’s supposed to be spelled- I didn’t read the book!) would hang his glasses under his chin, just barely resting on the one ear when he was lost in thought. That’s such a writerly tic to add in. Yup, what a well developed character. Except there is no one in the history of ever that would have their glasses hang like that. It’s likely I will now, but only because someone is imitating the movie. Art becoming artifice.

The eponymous Girl of the movie (are you sick of reading that line from reviewers yet? “the eponymous girl with the dragon tattoo” what an easy way to shove in four syllables) has so many tics to her that it’s hard to get a bead on her. Wait, maybe I’m lying. She seems like an easy character to write (though I can’t really remember it now, I know in the three hours I slept I dreamed of some violent scenario being carried about by that Lisabeth Salander, and I was like “yup, there’s that character”) but the hard part would be in actually going back over her history to justify why she is the way she is. What events could’ve come together to make Salander Salander? The mystery will almost certainly be better than what’s given to the reading/viewing audience. Unless it’s never touched on… I haven’t read this trilogy!

I’m making it sound like I didn’t like the film, well; I had a good time trying to figure out the mystery. Until it turned out there wasn’t any mystery, that definitely sucked. Okay, spoilers:

So Daniel Craig gets hired to find out who killed this girl, because there was no way she could have disappeared off the family’s island. Great, so let’s not check out that idea ANYWAYS since, yeah, she’s alive and just got off the island! And the old man that starts things off by hiring Craig thinks that the killer has been taunting him all these years by sending him the exact same present that the girl always gave her at Christmas time. Oh, what’s that? It was just more presents from the girl, but because there was no note she was unknowingly tormenting the guy? In the forty years since she disappeared, she couldn’t have written the guy a note saying “yeah, stop freaking out?” or the accomplice that helped her escape all those years ago, why didn’t SHE tell the old man it was cool?

Bah. THAT part sucked.

Lisabeth busting up the coincidental killer (there was a killer around, and being scared of him was the reason that the missing girl ran away, but he didn’t know what happened to the girl either) with a golf club, saving Daniel Craig in the nick of time, that rocked. To quote Casey Jones from the first Ninja Turtles movie “I’ll never call golf a dull game again.”

And FYI, if you’re watching it, and thinking that one guy is way too helpful, he’s got to be the killer? Yeah, go with that instinct.

Oh, but right near the very end, when Craig tells Lisabeth she looks nice and you get to see this generally non-emotional girl simply beam with happiness (she doesn’t grin or anything, she never smiles, but there’s a definite warmth in her look just then) well, it was a super sweet moment.

And for anyone mad that Craig and Lisabeth didn’t end up together at the end (of this book/movie at least) - dude, I’m pretty sure she ended up with a billion dollars. She got off pretty well here.