The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – in the garden of Sweden
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010
Prior to his untimely death in 2004, Swedish author and journalist Stieg Larsson wrote a trio of novels collectively known as the Millennium Trilogy. Written in his native Swedish tongue, the stories have proved a critical and commercial success, and all three have already been turned into Swedish language movies.
This month sees the DVD rental release of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, originally titled Män Som Hatar Kvinnor or Men Who Hate Women. The film, much like its source material, has enjoyed mass acclaim from pretty much everyone, and deservedly so.
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo introduces the trilogy’s two main protagonists; firstly Mikael Blomkvist, a middle-aged investigative journalist writing for the magazine Millennium. His attempts to uncover the corrupt nature of Swedish billionaire and industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström have gone awry and resulted in a libel case against him. He will have to serve three months in prison, but has a few months before he must face his sentence.
The title character and movie heroine is Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-something with prior issues relating to behaviour and mental stability, but a brilliant researcher. She has been hired by ultra-rich Henrik Vanger of the Vanger Group in order to check the legitimacy and authenticity of Mikael Blomkvist’s reputation as a skilled investigator.
Satisfied with Mikael’s credentials, Vanger meets with Blomkvist and requests that he investigate the disappearance of his foster child Harriet, who has been missing for 40 years and presumed dead. The circumstances surrounding the disappearance are more than suspicious, and Henrik suspects foul play from none other than a member of his own twisted, money-hungry family.


Modern cinematic heavyweights Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio team up for the fourth time in this eerie and brooding mystery thriller, based on a novel by Dennis Lehane.
In 2002, relatively unknown author Alice Sebold saw her first fiction novel, The Lovely Bones, become a bestseller, garnering almost universal critical acclaim from the literary world, and owing many of its sales to word of mouth.
1963 saw the release of a controversial children’s picture book called Where The Wild Things Are. It was written and illustrated by American Maurice Sendak, and contained little more than ten sentences. It was, arguably, an allegorical piece, cleverly portraying the difficulties and strains on parent and child. It was a huge hit with children, and has gained legendary status as a groundbreaking piece of children’s literature.
Cormac McCarthy is one of the finest writers in modern literature; he has produced instant classics with Blood Meridian and All The Pretty Horses, not to mention a certain novel titled No Country For Old Men.
A man sporting a horrible disfigurement turns up at your door with an offer. He tells you that your money worries could be over; you can have one million dollars in cash, but you have to press a button that will initiate the death of someone that you do not know. What would you do?
Based on the epic novel by Jacques Chardonne, Les Destinées Sentimentales charts thirty years of French history through the eyes of two star-crossed lovers.
Adapted from Bernhard Schlink’s bestseller and starring Kate Winslet as a former SS officer and David Kross as her schoolboy lover, The Reader throws up difficult questions about the nature of culpability in the Holocaust.
In this tale of domestic strife, Sam Mendes returns to a familiar theme: the tarnished American Dream. However, the scathing satire of his directorial debut, American Beauty, takes on a far bleaker tone in Revolutionary Road. Based on Richard Yates’ 60s novel, the film reunites Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet for the first time since James Cameron’s smash hit Titanic in 1997.
Ron Howard’s adaptation of Dan Brown’s religious thriller The Da Vinci Code was one of the highest-grossing films of the decade, earning over US$230 million worldwide in its opening weekend. Yet you’d be hard pushed to find a critic who gave its contrived storyline and turgid script the thumbs up. Angels and Demons, which comes before The Da Vinci Code in Dan Brown’s canon but has been adapted for the big screen as a sequel, is slicker and pacier than its predecessor. Howard, along with adapters Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp, stick less rigidly to Dan Brown’s clunky prose this time round, resulting in a more confident, dazzling production. Unfortunately, despite the film’s glossy exterior, it tells a story that is both convoluted and, at time, utterly ludicrous.