“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.

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