Skip to main content

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: Nothing Funny Here


The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a Swedish thriller/mystery film. I've got some serious mixed feelings about it.

The movie kicks off with Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative reporter, being sued by someone for slander after writing an article accusing him of committing some crimes. He loses the suit because of all his sources disappear, and evidence is presented which shows all of his evidence as fraudulent.

Shortly after he's offered a job from a very wealthy retired businessman, Henrik Vanger. Henrik wants Mikael to investigate what happened to his niece who disappeared nearly 40 years prior without a trace. Every year on her birthday, Henrik receives a pressed flower from somewhere in the world, and he is convinced that this is her murderer taunting him.

The second Protagonist is Lisbeth Salanger, a hacker/investigator working for a private firm who is originally hired by Vanger to investigate Mikael to see if he was guilty of the libel he was charged with. A little background is that in some European countries, if you are ruled mentally or emotionally incapable of caring for yourself, you may get a court appointed "Guardian" this guardian is responsible for all of the details of your estate, meaning that they can lock down your bank account and funds, and make it so that they have to approve all of your expenditures, among other things I'm sure. It's not immediately clear why Lisbeth required a guardian, but the important fact is that her previous guardian dies, and she's assigned a new guardian, which locks down her accounts, and then forces her to perform sexual favors in exchange for access to her money. An alternate title for this movie is apparently "Men Who Hate Women", which I really didn't know going into it.

This leads into the main thing that made me not enjoy this movie. I've always felt that rape is particularly monsterous, and any depiction of it greatly disturbs me. I won't go into any details, but even the next day, I still feel... disgusted.

The title of this post is a little misleading, there is some humor to be had in this movie, Lisbeth is a surprisingly well adjusted person, all things considered, but that still leaves her with quite a few quirks, and it's amusing to see the bafflement on Mikael's face after some of his interactions with her.

So, it's a pretty good whodunit, with an appropriately monstrous villain, and I found myself riveted to the film even though there were quite a few things I didn't want to see.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Return To My Brainstorming Days Of Old

Way back when, say, ten years ago, I had a dream of making a game. At first I wanted to make it a videogame like a JRPG (Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, etc.). Then it was going to be a pen and paper RPG (Dungeons and Dragons). And for many years, it kept bouncing around, back and forth between the two, I thought I was so very creative and clever. Eventually I started to realize that I was never going to be able to do anything like this on my own, and that neither I, nor any of my friends, had the time or energy to put into learning the necessary technical skills for a videogame, or simply the desire for a tabletop game. Still, I really liked brainstorming ways that different elements of a setting would interact with each other, whether it be a game system, a fantasy world, a system of government, or a military force. Sometimes I'd write this stuff down, but more often than not, I just day dreamed about it. I think it was kind of like therapy. I still wanted to do something wit

Lemme Tell You About The Transformer, Astrotrain, And Why He's My Favorite

       I am, quite obviously, a massive fan of Transformers, but I grew up in kind of a weird time for being a fan. Really, I'm just a LITTLE too young. I remember seeing my brother, who was six years older than I, get all of the coolest Transformers, and then by the time that I started being able to ask for Transformers for myself, the nature of Transformers had greatly changed. I have a great anecdotal story about him clipping Soundwave (arguably one of the coolest Transformers toys ever, which turned into a microcassette player) to his shorts and climbing a tree. He then proceeded to fall 30 feet out of that tree, and land on Soundwave, which poked him right in the kidney, and he peed blood for a week.        While I still have a great deal of fondness for them, Powermaster Optimus Prime is just not as cool of a toy as the original Optimus Prime. Notably, if you landed on Powermaster Optimus Prime, he probably wouldn't puncture your kidney, but the original Optimus Prime mig

The Worst Contact Allergic Reaction I've Ever Had

I'm started to feel like a bit of a freak show. I've of course been injured by shrapnel from a pipe bomb, and I've got impressive scars to prove it (side note: One of my friends said that I need to come up with a really awesome story to go along with my scar, and I sad "Someone throwing a pipe bomb at me isn't awesome enough?") I've mentioned that I took a first aid/CPR class in my first quarter of college, taught by Ron Hussman at Edmonds Community College. He was a great instructor, with a lot of great stories being a navy medic for 24 years, I think that's what he said. I'm proud to say that the pictures of my leg injury are now part of his curriculum, but I got tired of raising my hand every time he asked if someone had done something in particular. Called 911? Check Used an epipen? Check Been in shock? Check Ridden in an ambulance? Check Had burns in your throat? Check (seriously, don't let your kids hold roman candles while they fire) Lat