Salon.com > Stieg Larsson

“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”: A bigger, darker Swedish nightmare

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:00:00 +0000

There's no question that David Fincher and screenwriter Steven Zaillian have found a degree of depth and subtlety in "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" that I'm not sure Stieg Larsson knew was in there. As always with Fincher, you get a beautifully engineered production, where even at an unwieldy 158 minutes, every shot and every ominous sound cue are there for a reason. Among living Hollywood directors, only Martin Scorsese is Fincher's equal for meticulous brilliance. Given the sprawling procedural novel to which the filmmakers had to remain faithful (mostly), this is an ingenious and engrossing work of pop cinema. That said, when it was over I felt a wave of ennui wash over me upon reflecting that we've got two more of these to go. Do we really need an entire new series of these films? (Sure, the marketplace will provide an answer, but that might not be the only answer.) And do we really want Fincher devoting the peak years of his career, not to mention a significant portion of his mortal existence, working his way through the pulpy twists and turns of this franchise?

The mysterious case of “The Girl with Dragon Tattoo” trailer

Tue, 31 May 2011 12:01:00 +0000

Has Lisbeth Sanders begun her virtual games already? Although "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," the first third of the hot Swedish crime mystery, isn't supposed to make its American debut till late December, an apparent bootlegged/pirated trailer hit the web this weekend, allegedly taken from a European theater preview. But is even this first glimpse what it seems? Many outlets are hypothesizing that the trick of the shaky, illegal copy is most likely a hoax put out by distributor Sony in order to create some viral buzz for the film.

There's no need for me to explain the teaser trailer, as you've either read the books and recognize your favorite Stieg Larsson scenes and characters, or you don't. If you're part of the latter group, all you need to know for the sake of this trailer mystery is that Lisbeth, she of the dragon tattoo, is a pro at computer hacking and deception. Here's the trailer of the David Fincher adaptation, in all its shaky-cam glory:

Why we love bad writing

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 01:20:00 +0000

Forget peace on earth -- there won't even be peace among the bookshelves after the salvo against popular fiction launched in the pages of the Guardian newspaper this week by the British novelist Edward Docx. Docx, dismayed to find himself on a train full of passengers with their noses stuck in Stieg Larsson thrillers, announced "we need urgently to remind ourselves of -- for want of better terminology -- the difference between literary and genre fiction." This, all too predictably, ignited multiple charges of outrage across the Internet.

Guardian readers have already ably dismantled the straw men in Docx's essay. I don't agree with most of what he says, but he has a point when he suggests that the other side often resorts to arguments as trumped up as his own. In fact, ferocious defenders of genre fiction seem far more numerous to me than its (public) detractors, and Docx may have even done them a favor; they seem to enjoy their indignation an awful lot. The not-so-secret reason why pissing matches are so common, after all, is that some people just really love taking it out.

“Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest”: A dark, rousing final chapter

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 20:01:00 +0000

By about halfway through "The Girl Who Played With Fire," the second installment of the Swedish adaptation of late novelist-journalist Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, I was concerned that the entire enterprise was out of gas. That movie, directed by Daniel Alfredson (whose brother Tomas made "Let the Right One In"), was a major letdown from the series' riveting first film, Niels Arden Oplev's "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." By contrast, "The Girl Who Played With Fire" felt like an increasingly perfunctory mishmash of American-style plotting and European atmosphere, more concerned with hitting the right notes in the right order -- Lisbeth on a motorbike! Lisbeth's evil ex-KGB dad, plotting more evil! Lisbeth's freakish, fearsome half-brother, killing people! -- than with telling a good story.

U.S. version of “Dragon Tattoo” casts Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 21:05:00 +0000

Lisbeth Salander is one of the most vividly drawn characters to emerge from fiction over the last decade, as the pivotal figure in author Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. Beginning with "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and ending with the recent U.S. release of "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest," the diminutive bisexual punk hacker with the extremely tortured past is deeply embedded in the minds of the people who have read the books. And Sweden has already produced the trilogy on film, to great acclaim and success.

The U.S. likes to do things its own way, though, and director David Fincher has been attached to the American interpretations of Larsson's books. Daniel Craig has signed on to the lead role, with Robin Wright as his colleague and lover, Erika Berger. But the search for Lisbeth has been fraught with difficulty -- big-name actresses such as Natalie Portman, Ellen Page and Scarlett Johansson were reportedly desperate for the part, but fans were unsettled by the rumors and the search continued.

“The Girl Who Played With Fire”: Out of the past

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 00:20:00 +0000

Ordinarily, a film that was made in Sweden and is being released in the United States by a tiny indie distributor would barely merit a footnote on the overcrowded summer movie calendar. But "The Girl Who Played With Fire," the second film in director Daniel Alfredson and screenwriter Jonas Frykberg's Millennium trilogy (adapted, of course, from Stieg Larsson's best-selling thrillers), is a peculiar exception. Like its predecessor, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," this is likely to be one of 2010's top-grossing foreign-language films -- and that's without reaching anywhere near the total audience of Larsson's novels.

As anyone who pays attention to Hollywood gossip knows, an English-language adaptation of the Larsson trilogy is purportedly in the works, with David Fincher directing and Daniel Craig playing crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Carey Mulligan of "An Education" may play pint-size feminist avenger Lisbeth Salander -- not a great choice, if you ask me -- and then again she may not. (Kristen Stewart, who would be terrific, says she definitely, maybe, sort of isn't interested.) But that project has development-hell problems that go well beyond casting.

The girl who conquered the world

Sun, 16 May 2010 23:01:00 +0000

Can anyone be seriously contemplating reading "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" who hasn't already read the two previous novels in Stieg Larsson's bestselling Millennium Trilogy, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and "The Girl Who Played With Fire"? And can there be a reader of those first two books who hopes to resist the third? Anyone who has succumbed to Larsson fever knows what it is to lavish the waking hours of entire weekends on his weirdly matter-of-fact and even more weirdly addictive fiction, surfacing at the end of the binge, bleary-eyed and underfed, wondering what just happened.

“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”: Older guy, hot babe (feminist version)

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:50:00 +0000

I suppose the original title of the late Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson's international bestseller, and of the new film adaptation from Danish director Niels Arden Oplev, lacks both the mysterious panache and the commercial potential of the better-known English title, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." In Swedish, both the book and movie are called "Men Who Hate Women" -- a dramatic shift in focus that goes straight at the central conundrum of this international publishing (and now cinematic) phenomenon.

I should say up front that I haven't read Larsson's novel, which by some critical standards might disqualify me from reviewing the movie. On the other hand, that's likely to be the position of most viewers; even when you're talking about a foreign-language movie and a bestseller in translation, the audience for movies is many times larger than the readership for books. And to drag out the hoariest cliché regarding novel-into-film adaptations, the movie's always got to stand on its own feet. (For what it's worth, my colleague Laura Miller likes Oplev's movie better than the book. "It's an extremely faithful adaptation that focuses on the central story and characters and loses a lot of extraneous material," she tells me.)