Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

       Hollywood has a long tradition of making films based on books. When Stieg Larsson's novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo became a best-seller and then a successful Swedish film, there was no doubt that Hollywood would take a crack at a film adaptation. The biggest difference between telling a story in text versus telling a story in film is imagery. While a book can spend paragraphs describing the intricacy of a piece of clothing or a hand carved desk, a movie can just show it to you. Because of a busy work schedule, I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo slowly over the course of a few weeks. Seeing the events of the book take place over the course of a couple hours was a little shocking. “He's on Hedeby already?” I thought to myself, but looking back the brisk pacing was just the director's choice to expedite the story to get the good stuff at the end of the story.

Review: Girl, Interrupted

      What's worse, a remake or a rip-off? In the right hands, both can be better than the original work on which they are based, but more often then not they fail to do so. Is it worse to tarnish a film's legacy, or to steal from it and try to hide the theft under a new title. Personally, I think that remakes are worse. If you want to see that movie, go see it, it already exists. Rip-offs provide opportunity not only for new interpretations of material but also new plot developments that differ wildly from the original work. Girl, Interrupted, while based on the memoirs of a real life psychiatric patient, the film itself is clearly a 90's feminist rip-off of the classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. While it doesn't live up to the originator, it's not a complete waste of celluloid.