Cinema Nova, 29/03/2010
Status: Behind (but by less films than I was at the start of the week…)
I hate to sound like the snob that I am, but I don’t really read mainstream fiction (although, I’m not sure how snobby it is that I read comics instead). I am proud to say that I have never read a Dan Brown novel. Life’s just too short. I did, however, along with the rest of the plebs, read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the stupidly titled first book in the massively, stupendously, absurdly popular Swedish trilogy. I didn’t like it very much at the time, but paid the cover charge to see it on the big screen for two reasons: one) I’m fascinated by the art of adaptation and two) hey, it’s a movie, and I’ll pretty much see anything.
At the other end of the Spectrum of Adaptation from Alice in Wonderland is The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo which is pretty much as straight a retelling of the source material as you can get. One or two liberties taken with the plot, but you have to do that when you’re condensing a 500-odd page novel into a 150 minute movie.
The film focuses on the private investigations into a 40-year-old-murder by a disgraced financial journalist and a professional computer hacker. And it doesn’t shy away from the grumesomeness of the books. The investigation exposition has been done better elsewhere (in, say, any weeknight police procedural on the small screen) and the research montages were poxy to the max, but I was drawn in by the original story, interesting characters and strong performances. NOOMI RAPACE is particularly good as the severely damaged, but highly interesting, titular Girl. I couldn’t bring myself to read the rest of the books in the trilogy, but I’ll happily pay the cover charge to see the adaptations.
