re: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo {2011}

Wow, tell us how you really feel hot carl. Lol.

Enjoyed the film.

Loved the opening credits. Once again fincher is the master of credits.

Spoilers


Did not like how they handled Harriet being in London. I was really looking forward to them going down to Australia to pick her up.

Rooney Mara crushed the role.

Talked with my granddaughter last night - she's seen both versions of the movie and read the book. She says the US version is more true to the book, but she had to flinch from some of the violence:

Plucky Charms Reviews Holiday Movies

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Dec. 20 – That’s TODAY!)

This is a David Fincher (Fight Club, Seven) production, so if any of your bros are pussies about things like really, really graphic violence and psychological thrillerness, they can get in line for that movie about Matt Damon buying a zoo like that isn’t a terrible fricking idea and a ludicrous premise for a film that for some reason doesn’t include Kevin James being unfunny.

Seriously though, gird your loins. James Blonde and that skinny chick from The Social Network look like they’re about to one-up the Swedish original. They ain’t bullshittin’.

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I saw it with both my mom and grandma.

It was a great movie though, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought that both Daniel Craig and Mara Rooney were great in their roles. It took me a while until I realized she was the gf in The Social Network, which makes what she transformed into even crazier. The two scenes were a little tough to watch, but her revenge made me feel a little better.

Also, she was naked a ton this movie.

Yea I didnt know what to expect, but they both had read the book. I wanted to see it, and figured of I went with them I wouldn't have to pay.

the article Velvet cites raises some interesting points, but it way overstates the case and then continually contradicts itself.

I've seen the American version and have not seen the Swedish version. I've read about half the book before I got bored with it and stopped reading. I didn't like it much at all, as, like most polemics, it mistakes political and social ideas for plot and character -- or being interesting. It was a stunning act of preaching to the choir, which bores me.

But the one thing I cannot let go in the article is that the central tenet of the character of Lisabeth is that her abuse by men is not unique to her. In fact, the author clearly states, "By the time she was eighteen, Salander did not know a single girl who at some point had not been forced to perform some sort of sexual act against her will. … In her world, this was the natural order of things. As a girl she was legal prey, especially if she was dressed in a worn black leather jacket and had pierced eyebrows, tattoos, and zero social status.”

OK, we establish that she is lower than most, but she is still a representation of man's oppression of women. Now, look at the conclusion of the article:

"Yet the entire point is that Lisbeth doesn’t seem real to the regular Joe or Jane walking down the street. Even those closest to her don’t truly understand her."

BS.

The entire point of Lisabeth was, as stated earlier, that being forcibly sexualized by men is a universal thing. The name of the book was Men Who Hate Women, which the article makes a big deal out of. But as soon as it no longer suits the author's purpose, Lisabeth is no longer a universal experience for women getting oppressed by man, she is a unique, unreal, and unable to be understood by anyone. Her experience as a woman, just paragraphs before, was universal -- in fact, she was created solely because of the universality of rape the author argues exists -- and now she's impossible to understand?

That goes against the entire thesis of the article. And let's not even get into the ENTIRE SECTION the article spends on the marketing of the film, which is, as we all know, NOT THE FILM.

Finally, as big of a deal as the article makes of Craig saving the helpless Lisabeth, the film does quite the opposite. In the final scene with Harriet, Daniel Craig confesses that "he was saved too," speaking specifically of Lisabeth saving him as if he too, were one of the girl victims. This is a rather major point which the article simply fails to address, because it does not fit its empty thesis.

The revenge scene was thoroughly fulfilling for everyone in the audience.

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A few things bothered me - most notably, the way they discovered Harriet - I don't understand the point of changing the book here. Would it have been too difficult to follow Anita in London and Harriet in Australia?

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Totally agree with you here - it really annoyed me that they abbreviated and simplified Harriet's discovery in the manner they did. To me, it felt like a "dumbing down" of the plot for the average moviegoer. Ultimately, it just lessens the "wow" factor of discovering what exactly happened to Harriet IMO.

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Also - am I remembering correctly, or after Advocate Palmgren had his stroke, didn't Lisbeth believe he was dead for the rest of the book? In the movie, they were playing chess together, and as I recall it was not until the 2nd book did Salander discover that he was still alive and began visiting him?

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You are correct - in the book Lisbeth visits Palmgren in the hospital after he has suffered a massive brain trauma. She's told that he is unlikely to survive the trauma and that's the last Lisbeth sees of him in book 1. I haven't read 2 yet so the rest I can't comment on any inclusions from it - perhaps they added parts of book 2 to the film.

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I also thought the movie missed out on some opportunities - the part where we realize that Martin is the killer, and the part where we figure out that Harriet is alive are heart-stopping moments in the book with a lot of buildup. In the movie, these 2 revelations felt sort of "ho-hum", like they just revealed these things as if they were no big deal. It lacked the punch it could've had.

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Once again, totally agree with you. I think this is typically the problem in most book-to-film translations. The problem, as always, is being limited by time. The book goes through great lengths and detail to lead up to both the discovery of Harriet and the revelation that Martin is the serial murderer. The film unfortunately seems to quickly reach these conclusions but sacrifices the "oompf" that you feel when discovering these things in the novel. That, more than anything else, was probably my biggest complaint with the movie.