I don’t know whether movie time has been short or time to think about them and set finger to keyboard even shorter. A couple of two week trips, without movies, cut into the current crop, though summer itself doesn’t help. The market as imagined in the moguley minds in the movie making nether world I am not part of. We’ve been hitting the trove at Netflix regularly though, and a few of those are worth commenting on, after these three on the big screen.

I saw The Girl With Dragon Tattoo a couple of months ago, and before reading the book by Stieg Larsson, which I’d heard about from my wife and her reading group. ‘Great! Good read! The gloomy Scandinavians! Even women in Sweden are abused!” were some of the wisps I heard. But there were some violent scenes, my informant said.  She wasn’t sure she wanted to see them acted out. I went on my own, a student of the culture I told myself, and was impressed.

The acting was well fitted to the characters, and they to each other.  There was no confusion of too similar faces, or too many minor characters coming and going.   The plot unfolded well, some scenes seeming to be sketches where we suspect more had to have happened in the novel, but carrying the necessary hints through which we follow the narrator’s lead.   The multiple mysteries of corporate malfeasance, disappeared child and sadistic murders wrap around each other in ways we could follow, while still being puzzled. The winter scenery in Sweden is well filmed, though perhaps not as ominous as it might have been. And yes, there were two brutal scenes. Tough to watch. The good guys win but Larssen ‘s theme of violence against women stays in our minds.  [The original title of the novel in Swedish is “Men Who Hate Women.”] This is not simply entertainment.

Normally I’d groan at the trope of a younger woman seduced by an older man but it worked here.  Lizbeth Salander, played by Noomi Rapace, earlier shown en flagrante delicto with a young woman,  decides she’ll have him;  seduction is perhaps too “romantic” a word for the event.   She is a young woman in charge of herself,  got there — as we partially learn in the film– by a built-in, crazed, willfulness reacting against a horrific past.  Larsson writes her with a moral question increasingly popular in films of crime and social dislocation, though not usually raised by the actions of a woman: Are there crimes so horrific that they must be answered — regardless of the established moral/legal codes? It’s the Dirty Harry question, the Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood question: does righteous vengeance write its own moral code?  And not only is it an American revenge obsession.  The interesting Danish film, Flame and Citron about WW II Danish resistance fighters raises similar questions.  Lizbeth’s actions, and the moral judgment she is making in order to act,  will raise the question for you.

Michael Blomkvist, played by Michael Nyqvist,  is the perfect worn out, beat down, still stubborn journalist/investigator.  Ready to go to the distant north and “chill,” humor an old man reading through files of thirty years but also ready to go to jail for a conviction of libel,  blaming himself for not fact-checking a story too good to be true. He is stoic, silent, skeptical, but kind and attentive; a good man.

The film was interesting enough to propel me into reading the book.  It was as good; better.  As we’d expect there was much more detail at all levels.  Blomquist is more attractive to women than in the movie, the same quietness giving them room to show it, to which he easily reponds. Certain characters were diminished in the film, or missing entirely, reasonably, it seemed to me.  It turned out that one character, briefly appearing but crucially important to solving the lead mystery, had been dropped completely from the film, thereby giving Lizbeth a much bigger role in solving the crime than the book allowed. In fact, in the movie, Lizbeth is almost preternatural; in the book more of an Asbergery-savant.

My major complaint about the book is that it had, in my opinion, a long tail.  After the solution and resolution of the main crimes much is still said.  Much of it feels post-climactic, almost as if, “the story’s over, why are there 50 more pages?”  The film diminishes the tail, and even more than with the core of the film trims it down to bare essentials, leaving just enough to lay out the necessary story line to be picked up in what is, after all, a trilogy.  I suppose my only other slight irritation with the text was the use of Swedish place names, which the non Swedish reader will have next to no idea of.  Sweden isn’t after all, Italy, Spain or England where we know the names, relative distances and compass headings from one major city, and even smaller places, to the other.  A single-page map with the towns involved would have been welcomed.  The movie supplies a map at a couple of points, though it too could have made us feel more “in the know” with a map scene early on.  In all events, good summer hours spent on either or both.

In the case of the second book, The Girl Who Plays with Fire, I saw the movie first and read the novel after  it,  the opposite of the first.  I don’t know if this had any bearing, but I liked them both less than I did the first.  Rapace and Nyquist were good partners again. Michael Blomquist’s boss, Eric Berger (Lena Endre), at the Millennium,  the magazine they own/produce, enters the scene more, having been excised from the first movie, relative to her importance in the book. The crimes at the center of the film are again sexual, as in the first. The mystery is, who murdered the journalist/sociologist team writing a major story on the European sex-trade for Millennium and does Lizbeth figure in the murders, and that of her vicious court appointed guardian (as we learned in the first film) as the police suspect? The unwinding of the mystery as Lizbeth comes out of hiding to help Blomquist fills in the horrors hinted at of her younger years, and brings to full face the author of those horrors.

Rapace accomplishes one of the great from-the-grave scenes of any non-horror movie I have ever seen, and out does most male movie heroes in the layers of filth, blood, exhaustion and determination filled eyes as she triumphs, barely, in the final scenes — setting up by the way, the final and forthcoming third book/movie of the trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest.

If you are enthralled with Larsson’s books, or Rapace’s acting you’ll read or go to all of these.  If you’re caught up with the new cultural ideal of female avenger, Dirty Lizbeth as it were, these are genre setting films, in the non fantasty realm.  If your movie time is tight, I’d recommend Tattoo for the big screen and sliding Fire in for a weekend DVD at home — on a large screen, of course!

The Kids are All Right actually has less buzz than I would have thought, having seen just seen it after not very much word of mouth.  It’s a rather ordinary film about marital infidelity, crisis, the trauma, the kids involved, the decisions that must be made and eventual resolution into, if not a glowing recommittment to love, a modern facing-reality kind of forgiveness and going forward.

What pops it out of the ordinary is that the couple at the center of the story and storm is lesbian.  Anette Benning plays Nic, the butch partner, and Julianne Moore is Jules, the softer, bordering on smarmy, fem.  They play  off of each other very nicely, in their quiet and their emotional moments.  Both hurt by what they hear and imagine they hear from the other, they are  pretty damn similar to every other couple I’ve known, mostly heterosexual — which I suppose is a major point of the movie.  Long term, committed relationships, regardless of the exact ratio of testosterone to estrogen look very similar. There are one or two behaviors  new to me, never having been part of a lesbian couple;   I’ll leave you to go and discover for yourself.

It’s a satisfying if not totally feel-good movie, sometimes funny, sometimes awkward, a few times revelatory. And, oh yes, there are kids in it, one going off to college the other a few years behind who are at the center of the big discovery that sets the changes in motion. If you have such size kids they’re likely to be all right with seeing it,  the just-shy-of-graphic sex scenes included.  Would be fine to wait for the DVD as well.

NetFlix

Our Netflix list is over 100 long and is heavily weighted to American classics from the 30s and 40s, French New Wave, Japanese golden era in the late 50s, Germany and Russia in later years.  We’ve just gone through a minor Jane Austen phase.  Film noir of all nations salt and pepper the whole salad.

A Model for Matisse by Barbara Freed is a charming documentary of Matisse’s relationship with a young model who becomes Sister Jacques-Marie of the Dominican order.  With a major Matisse show coming to MOMA in NYC and me with a chance to see it, I thought this would be a perfect piece to understand him better.  The film is weighted to the later years when Sister Jacque-Marie and Matisse essentially conspired to build a chapel, with his design and artwork, against the Mother Superior’s wishes.  This is as plain vanilla as a documentary can get: no dramatic tension, sweet interviews with the elderly nun, pictures of Matisse working over ideas, and of the final product.  Very nice for a quiet evening and a bit of unexpected information about one of the West’s great artists.

Bonhoeffer is a 90 minute documentary about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who raised his voice against Adolf Hitler as he rose to power, and paid for his actions by hanging –with a thin wire to make it more cruel–  just months before the defeat of Germany.   Interestingly for many, his two years in the United States (1930-31) particularly in Harlem’s black churches were very formative in his developing pacifism and courage to resist.  In turn, he became a seminal influence on the young Martin Luther King while still in divinity school, and later on the thinking of Desmond Tutu.  More recently Andrew Bacevich finds Bonhoeffer to be a reliable moral compass in his Limits to Power. This documentary is a quick and moving introduction to Bonhoeffer which you might want to  follow with his seminal work about America — The Irony of American History, which Bacevich has just persuaded University of Chicago to re-release with his own introduction.

Never So Few is a 1959 paen to American fighting men in the jungles of Burma during the early days of WW II when Japan was still rolling up victories all over the Pacific.  I tripped over it as I was shaking the sifter for good movies about war-as-it-is and saw the cast:  Sinatra, Lollobrigida, Lawford, McQueen, Bronson.  It isn’t really worth mentioning as a film you might want to see, except for two remarkable arguments, following actions, made by Sinatra as the leading man, Capt Tom Reynolds.

After an unexpected Japanese attack on their camp, shared with Kachin anti-Japanese Burmese natives, it is discovered that one of their own betrayed them.  Off screen he is tortured, until he gives up his information.  His end is briefly described and Peter Lawford, the doctor and “idealist,” is appalled.  Sinatra asks the same question supporters of torture under the Bush administration asked — the doomsday scenario:  if your wife and family was at risk wouldn’t you torture to save them?

Following one attack, Sinatra’s Kachin aide has been shot in the stomach.  There is no morphine and the doctor says he will die by morning.  Sinatra sends everyone away and shoots the man.

This is in a movie half filled with Sinatra and Lollobrigida cavorting and falling in love in exotic locales in India and other parts of the east.  I had to fast forward, the juxtaposition was so great.

Later in the film, Sinatra makes an unauthorized foray across the border into China, then under the nominal control of Chiang Kai-shek. He is in pursuit of a warlord’s army which had come down into Burma, dressed as American soldiers and massacred a convoy without losing a man.  Sinatra’s men round up the sleeping Chinese soldiers, and after a quick fire-fight kill the leaders.  He finds the dog-tags and other personal memorabilia of the dead Americans and about to lose it completely, he gets orders from the American high-command, that he has completely exceeded his authority and is to return at once, returning all weapons to the Chinese.

Sinatra turns to McQueen and Bronson and other tough guys and says:  Stand them up and shoot them.  We hear the firing of many rifles.  This of course is a war crime.  It is now.  It was then.  Prisoners are prisoners and American fighting men have known about and are bound by the Geneva conventions and codes of military conduct from decades before the wars in Asia. They are pressed to understand and follow them (I certainly was) for their own safety and good as well as any humanitarian impulses that might escape them.

Victor Sturgis directed many well regarded films, including The Magnificent Seven the year following this one. I don’t know if his tough guy leading men are prone to decide for themselves what constitutes justice, and frost it with neat arguments for the audience, or whether the superman code comes from Tom Chamales, the author of the book by the same name from which the movie was confected.  Chamales in fact led a Kachin group of irregulars in Burma, as an OSS officer, during the war.  Perhaps that code was born then and passed on to its successor the CIA, to rear its ugly head again in Bush/Cheney Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Afghanistan.

At any event, you could skip the movie unless you want to see it to believe it: a little torture, a little dancing with La Lollo…