Friday, July 09, 2010

Small Film, Big Impact

Salon critic Andrew O’Hehir today reviews The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second Swedish film made from Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and starring Noomi Rapace as “feminist avenger Lisbeth Salander.” “[A]t its best,” he concludes, the movie “captures both the beautiful but lugubrious Swedish landscape and the existential mood of contemporary northern Europe, trapped between the info-capitalist future and the ideological prisons of the past.”

4 comments:

Maxine Clarke said...

How can a landscape be "lugubrious"?! Do you think this reviewer understands English?

Reg / Steve said...

'Info-capitalist'? A loquacious reviewer, verily, given to a pompous potpourri of perseverating pertinaciousness. OMG, my 16th-century English Lit class is taking me over, aarrrgh. Where's my Euphues?... ah, here we go:

'It is virtue, yea virtue, gentlemen, that maketh gentlemen; that maketh the poor rich, the base-born noble, the subject a sovereign, the deformed beautiful, the sick whole, the weak strong, the most miserable most happy. There are two principal and peculiar gifts in the nature of man, knowledge and reason; the one commandeth, and the other obeyeth: these things neither the whirling wheel of fortune can change, neither the deceitful cavillings of worldlings separate, neither sickness abate, neither age abolish.'

Hi Maxine!

Maxine Clarke said...

Hi Reg/Steve! Great comment! What a review, eh?

Reg / Steve said...

Maxine, that review doesn't sound like the movie I saw in Copenhagen at all. But as for Stieg giving away the plot in the title, his original title was THE GIRL WHO FANTASIZED ABOUT A GASOLINE CAN AND A MATCH. And I was gobsmacked to learn that Sweden is "existentialist" -- yeah, maybe in 1958...