Good Books/Bad Movie

In the past week I've completed the first two novels in Steig Larsson's "The Girl..." trilogy. Reading "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and "The Girl Who Played with Fire" back to back has made the story even more riveting than it already is. So when Brian suggested we watch the movie, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Swedish version, American remake due out December 2011), I was in for it.

UGH. I mean, the movie itself was good, but having read the book just last week with all the details and dialogue still fresh in my mind - the movie was wrong, wrong, wrong. Of course the movie version will be different from the book, the screenwriters have a lot to fit into the movie in a short amount of time - but total pieces of the story were missing and completely changed. Supporting characters in the book were minimized down to two minutes of screen-time. And the film definitely lets you know that there's going to be a sequel with all of Lisbeth Salander's flashbacks to setting a car on fire. I give the movie two different grades: without reading the book it probably would've been a B+...having read the book I give it a C. It was fast paced and I suppose you get the gist of what is going on, but it could have been better.

As for the novels,  I started reading "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" a few years ago and never got past the first 10 pages. It takes a while to get into, but then it picks up. The trilogy has two main characters, Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist. Salander is a "delinquent" hacker/private investigator and Blomkvist is a reporter. Together they take on the bad guys: men who are sexually violent to women - this theme carries throughout the trilogy. In "Tattoo" the duo tries to find the murderer of Harriet Vanger. In "Fire" the duo is trying to clear Salander's name of murder.

I liked both books. Brian who finished "Fire" around the same time I did, thinks that Larsson is really stretching it towards the end with medical conditions and familial relations. We look forward to reading the third installment, "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest".