The Girl Who Played With Fire

'The Girl Who Played with Fire', is the second instalment in the Millennium trilogy and the sequel to 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo', which was released earlier this year.

One year on from the conclusion of the first story, Mikael Blomkvist is back at work at Millennium magazine when a young journalist and his researcher girlfriend approach the magazine with a meticulously researched exposé of Eastern European sex traffickers which implicates several people in high office.

Meanwhile Lisbeth Salander is drifting around the globe, eventually returning to Sweden with a bang. When the journalist and his girlfriend working on the trafficking story are killed, Salander’s prints are on the gun. Then Lisbeth's hated guardian Nils Bjurman is shot dead as well. It’s not looking good for the dragon girl.



She is accused of murder and Blomkvist embarks on a quest to exonerate her but she’s not totally helpful at clearing her own name. No one can even find Salander, who hides out in her plush new apartment that no one, especially not the authorities know about.

Shadowy characters linked to Salander’s past go to her registered address but Salander has sublet the place to her friend and occasional lover the kickboxing Miriam Wu. They kidnap Wu and leave her in the hands of Ronald Niedermann, a thug with a bizarre medical condition called ‘congenital analgesia’ that means he feels no pain, oh and he’s built like a brick shithouse as well. He beats her up in the quest for information she does not have. It falls to a friend of Salander’s, a real life boxer called Paolo Roberto, played by the man himself, to rescue her in a bare knuckle fist fight with Niedermann.



Now, stop right there and just hang on a minute or two. All this excitement happens pretty quickly in the film, whereas it took weeks of perseverance with the book for me to get this far. I feel cheated already. Lots of background and character development have already been skipped. It’s also like Salander has immediately been presumed innocent, that’s not how it was. Out go the dynamics within the police force, and most of the murder investigation. Even the sex trafficking angle is only touched upon very lightly.

Ok, so it’s always difficult when converting a book to film to decide how much to leave out and what to focus on but I think they got this one wrong. The first film was a genuine whodunit, whereas this time they’ve removed the ‘who’ because it’s clear who ‘dunit’ almost from the start. This causes the film to lack substance and become far less interesting, even the mysterious ‘Zala’ suddenly does not seem that mysterious.

There’s no sustained tension. There can’t be when the film sped along at such a frightening brisk pace. So much so that Salander‘s escape from being buried alive was treated so flippantly it was almost comedic. It’s probably my own fault that I’m un-enthralled by the story because I’ve broken my golden rule of seeing the film of a book I’ve read.



That said, it is faithful to the book, but only as far as it goes and that's a synopsis of the main events from the book. There are so many elements that are hinted at but not explored. Everything else has been jettisoned to cram what’s left into two hours. In fact the film looks like it’s been cut. Why not take another half an hour and flesh it out.



Oddly the first film choose to discard Blomkvist’s relationship with Erika Berger, whereas this second film includes it but with little explanation. A change of director clearly brought a change of approach.

On the plus side, the action is riveting and it still a good film, highly entertaining with Noomi Rapace brilliant again as Salander.

Perhaps I should just read less.

The Killer Inside Me

‘The Killer Inside Me’ is an arty film noir set in 1950's Texas. Casey Affleck seems to reprise parts of his role as the coward Robert Ford from ‘The Assassination of Jesse James...’ even down to having the same surname. His character, Deputy Lou Ford, seems a polite well mannered sort of chap but oh, how appearances can be deceptive. When the son of one of the town's top business men is discovered in the arms of a prostitute (Jessica Alba), Ford is given the simple task of running her out of town.



When she won’t go easily and has the audacity to strike out at him, this arouses more than anger in him and his reaction, to return the blows with interest, certainly does plenty for her too. After they exchange increasingly forceful blows, they fall into bed.



Then despite Ford having the delectable Amy (Kate Hudson) as his girlfriend, they embark on an affair, a sadomasochistic affair at that. One where the Alba rear end gets a regular tanning and some more, as they switch from sex to violence and back at a moment’s notice, redefining ‘liking it rough’, as she unearths his inner psychopath.



Unfortunately some manner of the plot and particularly the occasionally mumbled dialogue makes it hard to follow at times. We gets flashbacks about what happened to him as a child but was he abused, or was he the abuser?



The pair of them team up to blackmail the business man, threatening to expose his son. Ford however double crosses her, which brings us to the real talking point of the film, when the violence turns nasty.



The scene where Alba gets beaten to pulp is probably not going to be everyone's cup of tea. Shocking? Yes. Gratuitous? Maybe. Necessary? Probably. I don’t think a Disney version would have worked.

Then there’s the way he does it, with his fists, while telling her how much he loves her. I love you, thump, I love you, thump thump. Nice. Not.

Then he shoots the business man's son and presses the gun into her hand, hoping to make the deaths appear to be a lovers' tiff or perhaps a prostitution transaction gone wrong. Yet quite how she got to land a prefect shot on him with a broken neck and only one eye... I’m not sure.

The murder pricks the attention of the District Attorney, who seems to have spotted the same glaring holes in the staged double murder. Yet he doesn’t seem to do anything about it. Meanwhile inside Ford’s twisted mind he doesn't seem to believe he`s a bad guy at all. He tries to build an alibi and to frame other people for the murders. However, when his plans don’t go quite as well as he hoped, he’s forced to commit more crimes to cover his trail, including using his boxing skills again, this time fatally on his girlfriend.



Director Michael Winterbottom tries to paint a picture of a seriously disturbed human being. Maybe, he doesn't go far enough because I don’t think he quite succeeds. It’s a fascinating but slightly meandering film that’s not helped by Affleck’s deliberately vague portrayal of Ford and the ending’s a bit weird too.

Still, I thoroughly enjoyed it but needed a stiff drink to get over it.

Four Lions

The film ‘Four Lions’ is about suicide bombers, which is hardly the most jolly of subject matters unless of course the terrorists are totally inept in achieving their aims and the whole thing descends into farce.

This film will be different things to different people. You could view this as an incredibly funny film and roll around the cinema in torrents of laughter, and a few people did, but anyone seeing this as a comedy is missing the point really. I don’t think that's what’s it’s about at all.

Yes, there are plenty of opportunities to laugh out loud such as when this little group of ‘terrorists’ are forced to transport their bomb making equipment by hand when their car breaks down, probably due to its dodgy ‘Jewish spark plugs’, but tellingly the majority of the cinema audience choose not to.

The humour gradually gets darker and you get a warning when a ‘suicide crow’ becomes a martyr for the cause but it still comes as a bit of shock when a member of the group trips over a sheep and blows himself up. Yes that’s funny, well kind of, but at that point you realise what it is that you would be laughing at and probably don’t. Although perhaps the odd guilty smile is allowed.



In this film Chris Morris has taken an interesting approach and has actually refused to have a go at terrorists through their race or religion and has instead shown us the type of people who could quite easily be lured into terrorism, whatever their race or religion. That they are predominately Asian doesn’t really matter and in fact one of them, Barry, is a white Englishman who has converted to Islam but possibly only because he quite fancies playing at being a terrorist. He turns out to be much more of zealot than the others.

The rest of the terrorist cell are hardly feared assassins. There’s the weak minded one, who would be easily lead by anyone; the stupid one, who hasn’t a clue what he is doing but is looking forward to the afterlife which he imagines is like a ride at Alton Towers and the brave one, who is actually all talk and bravado but clearly out of this depth.

Then there’s their leader, Omar, who we see at home with his loving wife and young son, both of whom support him in his aims. There are some quite bizarre scenes of the family unit. Like where he reads his son a bedtime story about 'Simba's Jihad' and where his wife talks him back in to martyrdom after he threatens to walk away from it all. She tells him he how ‘much more fun he was when he was trying to blow himself up’. That is if he can get the rest of the group to talk to him again, they’re all ignoring him on their chosen form of communication which is through their avatars on the Puffin Party website.

The film takes us through their many blunders as they prepare for and decide on a mission. They build bombs and even go to a training camp in Pakistan, from which they are sent home in disgrace.

It becomes clear early on that their mission is doomed to fail and this, in a way, makes you feel pity for them and concern, as to how much damage they are going to do to themselves and to other people in the act of failing. Despite the horror of what is probably going to happen, the film makers have blurred the edges between good and evil. They have encouraged you to form an emotional attachment with these guys because they are actually not monsters but just naive, misguided, and perhaps even likable people.



Their plan is to attack the London Marathon for which they will all don fancy dress costumes and of course there is a sad inevitability about it all. Where oddly, despite their supposed opposition to the ‘Church of McDonald's’ and western consumerism in general, it all in the end comes down to those very western inventions, mobile phones.



I thought it was an excellent film, entertaining, well written, thought provoking, very well performed and yes, funny.

Eva's Eye (1999)

‘Eva's Eye’ is in Norwegian, and is a real rarity. It’s based on a book by Karin Fossum, which is the only book she’s written that hasn’t been translated into English but it was made into a film back in 1999, not in English though naturally and it’s rarely screened.

Eva Magnus and her daughter are walking along the river’s edge when they discover a body floating in the water. Eva is urged by her Daughter to call the police and they rush to nearest phone box. Where Eva rings her father for a chat instead...

When the body is eventually discovered, Inspector Konrad Sejer takes up the case. He quickly links it to another unsolved murder, that of a woman killed in her bed, a woman who was doing a bit of freelancing prostitution and who was also a friend of Eva Magnus...

Things spiral on from there as Eva lies to cover up her story and we get lots of my favourite flashbacks. Sejer himself doesn’t exactly seem to do much, occasionally nonchalantly pointing out an inconsistency in her story but generally most of the clues seem to fall into his lap without him seemingly having to even lift an eyebrow. Nice work if you can get it.

The real star is obviously Kollberg, his dog, off whom he bounces ideas. It’s probably Kollberg who solved it, he was just too modest to mention it.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

This film is showing as part of Broadway’s Nordic Noir season which in turn is part of the ScreenLit festival.

There’s something immediately odd about the film version of ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ and that’s the translation of the title, which in Swedish is ‘Män som hatar kvinnor’ or ‘Men Who Hate Women’. This actually gives a bit of the story away, whereas the Anglicised version doesn’t.

The story itself is the first part of Stieg Larsson’s ‘Millennium Trilogy’. Larsson was unlucky enough to die of a heart attack before the publication of any of the books in his trilogy, so he never got to see how popular they would become nor see the films they would spawn.

The film is two and a half hours long, so it should be more concise and to the point than the rather long book. It opens with the delivery of a package from Hong Kong, a pressed flower in a frame. The recipient, Henrik Vanger, receives one every year and one thing I’ve never quite understood in the book or now in the film is why he assumes it is from his missing niece’s killer, and not from the niece herself, which would of course suggest she wasn’t dead after all. Anyhow, swiftly steeping over that plot hole.

Vanger has been trying to solve the mystery of the niece, Harriet, for forty years. That is how long she has been missing. Now he decides to employ an investigative reporter called Mikael Blomkvist to have one final crack at solving the mystery before the ageing Vanger’s life comes to a close. It has become an obsession with him and over the years he has gathered a lot of information relating to the case but this hasn’t taken him any closer to finding out what actually happened to her. The disappearance happened during a family reunion on their isolated island and at the same time the only bridge linking the island with the mainland was closed due to a road accident, so Vanger is convinced that a member of his own family is responsible.



Blomkvist is sort of at a loose end after recently losing a libel case over an article he wrote for ‘Millennium’ magazine, a magazine in which he is involved with. He has had to resign his post there, as well as being required to serve a three month jail term, so he takes up Vanger’s case. He quickly discovers that the Vanger family are a weird bunch and also one with Nazi connections.



Eventually Blomkvist forms an unlikely alliance with the much younger Lisbeth Salander. Salander is an intriguing individual, a multi-tattooed, multi-pierced, leather clad biker chick type with a troubled past, who hacked her way into Blomkvist’s computer. She’s a former psychiatric patient who now has her financial affairs managed by a guardian. Her guardian is a nasty piece of work and we get to know Salander through some horrendous scenes with him.



Once together, the investigation starts to make progress and they follow a complex set of clues that reveal a string of sadistic murders of women going back decades. They realise they are tracking at least one serial killer, if not, due to the time span of the crimes, two. Things then get more serious when someone takes a pot shot at Blomkvist whilst he is out running and then when he makes a visit to one of Mr. Vanger's brothers who he thinks is involved, he ends up with the old man pointing a rifle at him. However Martin, Harriet's brother, saves him but when Blomkvist spills the beans about what he’s discovered in his investigation, he ends up drugged and about to find out who really is behind it all.

Salander has to rush to his aid, saves him, chases the murderer and then for an encore supplies the vital information that solves the mystery of Harriet.



It’s a grisly tale of murder, set amongst the cold Swedish winter, lightened somewhat by an upbeat ending. I thought it was quite a good effort at getting the marathon text of the book down to just a few hours. Though there are several things that have been changed or airbrushed completely out of the story.

The other two films in the trilogy have already been released in Scandanavia and the first of which should be out here later this year. Needless to say, just like 'Let The Right One In', a Hollywood version is already in the pipeline. I wonder who’ll play Salander?

Hurt Locker

‘Hurt Locker’ opens with a failed bomb disposal attempt in Baghdad, during which the team’s leader and disposal expert gets killed. The story concerns his replacement, Sergeant Will James who at best can be described as a maverick. When James arrives, Bravo Company have thirty-nine days left to serve. It will be a long thirty-nine days for James’s team of Sanborn and Eldridge, who are simply happy just to keep their heads down and stay alive. Consequently they are shocked by James’s unnecessary risk tasking and rightly so.

I didn’t understand the opening scene. The bomb that kills his predecessor is triggered by a mobile phone but rather than shooting the guy with the phone, the other soldiers rather tamely shout him to ‘put down the phone’. This kind of sets the tone for the rest of the film. It’s all good exciting gritty stuff with a good dollop of suspense thrown in but it's also probably totally unrealistic.

Hurt Locker is not my usual sort of film but I felt I had to see it when it won lots of awards. It’s a decent film, well acted and well made but, as you watch it, it certainly doesn’t strike you as anything that would be likely to win any awards. It’s entertaining but at the time it didn’t really occur to me just how unbelievable it all was until I started writing a review of it.



For a start the bomb disposal team hardly seemed professional even before James arrives to disrupt them. They seem to wander around Iraq a bit like we used to around Nottingham as students in between lessons at Uni.

Then James arrives and things get even more reckless. He clearly gets an adrenaline rush from disarming IEDs (improvised explosive devices), regardless of the risk to his safety or that of others. Preferably he’d like to be peppered with sniper fire whist he’s doing it. Which may be fair enough, maybe, but would the army really let him get away with being so reckless? His attitude puts others at risk. Anyone behaving in that way would either be severely disciplined or severely dead.



He refuses to use the bomb disposal ‘robot’ and annoys his colleagues by removing his radio headset. At one stage when he encounters a car bomb he removes his protective suit as he looks for the trigger wire. Brave or just plain stupid?

Then when he encounters the dead body of what he thinks is a young Iraqi boy he had befriended, that has been turned into a body bomb, he goes off on one and attempts to find out who is responsible. In Baghdad, on his own, at night. Then he simply wanders back through the streets to the compound. A bit far fetched I would have thought. Then he enlists his team to help him pursue his personal quest and gets one of them shot in the leg.



We never quite get to the bottom of why he behaves like this. We just assume he’s a nutter. We do see him back at home with his family, visibly bored. Without the stimulation of war he is nothing. So at the finish we find him back in Iraq, ready for another year in the war zone.

So it's another gung-ho American war film then, realism suspended, but gets the best picture Oscar. Sorted.

Kick-Ass

Kick-Ass is another of those superhero spoof movies and I’ve been talked into seeing it... However, this one is funny, very knowing, it has a plot, a sharp script and ermm, even character development.

Unpromisingly it starts out like teen romcom with Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) living an existence that is mundane but typically normal. He is unnoticed by most people and particularly by girls, especially the girl of his dreams, the lovely Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca). His only chance of getting her to even talk to him is to turn gay, perhaps... or perhaps not.



Our Dave wonders why no one ever tries to be a superhero and then decides to fill that particular void himself, despite the obvious flaw in his plan, that he has no super powers. All the same it would be nice to not have to keep handing his cash and mobile phone over to the local thugs. Plus it might just get him his girl.

So he dons a dreadful green wetsuit, calls himself ‘Kick-Ass’, heads out to thwart crime and promptly gets his ass kicked. He winds up in hospital but he is undeterred. Once patched up, with metal plates holding his bones together and with severed nerve endings, he is now less susceptible to pain. Belief slightly suspended.



His modest ambition for Kick-Ass, simply to rescue a cat, ends up with him accidentally intervening in a mugging and when he gets filmed fighting off three men he becomes an overnight internet sensation. He also finally gets Katie's attentions, although for the wrong reason. Yep, she assumes he's gay, told you it works.



When he attempts to do a good deed for Katie, in dealing with some unwanted attention she is getting, he gets himself in over his head. He has stumbled into the world of gangster Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong). Luckily for him he discovers he is not the only super hero in town as 'Big Daddy' (Nicolas Cage) and his homicidal killing machine of a daughter, the twelve year old 'Hit Girl' (Chloe Moretz) come to his rescue.



On the plus side, he unmasks Kiss-Ass in front of Katie, confesses he’s not actually gay and once she gets over the initial disappointment, he gets his shag. Result.

This is perhaps ample compensation because from this point onwards it is no longer his movie. The insanely violent Hit Girl simply takes over, dominates every scene she's in and gets all the best lines to boot. She is the character even Quentin Tarantino hasn’t thought of. She whirlwinds through the movie, slaughtering anybody who gets in her way, hurling unrepeatable dialogue as she does so and boy does she look smug about it. Her enjoyment of mass murder is simply infectious and the violence... well it's never ending as she racks up the body count. It’s all very entertaining but I have no idea how the film gets away with so much under its 15 certificate.



Then there’s the great soundtrack. Good stuff from Primal Scream, The Little Ones, Sparks, The New York Dolls are all used at exactly the right moments but then any film that has the The Dickies’ ‘Banana Splits’ in it has got be on the money. Daughter will kill me if I don't mention The Prodigy. Oh and there’s also music from that woman, Ellie Goulding, too. Every silver lining has a cloud of course.

As you can perhaps tell I quite liked this one. It’s a blast. The bad guys are good, or rather bad, and believable. In fact there are very few, if any, unbelievable bits or ridiculous plot twists and when someone dies, they stay dead.

The acting is good too. Mark Strong, as ever, makes a good villain, his character getting more and more violent as things go against him. Cage is excellent as Hit Girl’s doting father and Moretz herself is simply brilliant. Oh and I nearly forgot our Dave, Aaron Johnson, yeah he's pretty good too.

If there is a criticism it is that it probably gets too carried away with itself and moves from being a clever pastiche into simply being a superhero movie itself. I also have a problem with Red Mist, who's dressed up like a drag queen and Hit Girl is uncharacteristically under-prepared for the final battle but it's kind of hard to slate.