Salon.com > The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Femininjas: Women in fiction fight back

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 15:30:00 +0000

In Stieg Larsson’s best-selling Millennium series—The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.—a disaffected teenaged rape survivor, Lisbeth Salander, kicks ass and takes names. Readers and critics hailed Larsson’s creation as groundbreaking. To pick just one representative case, Michiko Kakutani, in her review of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, calls Salander “one of the most original characters in a thriller to come along in a while: . . . the vulnerable victim turned vigilante; a willfully antisocial girl.” One would think the critics had never seen a woman in pants before, let alone one who can hold her own against the patriarchy.

“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:

“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 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.)