The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

I think I should just get a job as a movie critic/game critic. My only problem would be, I can't be bought. If I hate a movie, I hate a movie. If a game sucks, a game sucks. I'm not going to write a glowing review for something that I couldn't stand. I'm just not that good a liar. Also, it stops me from being a salesman, a politician, a lawyer, a doctor, or a customer service agent. All jobs where lying is just required to make any money at it.

SO being a critic is probably out too, since the big commercial game/movie producers would shitcan me because I don't like any of their crap products. Ah, well. I can still do it as a hobby! :-D

So I watched "the girl with the dragon tattoo" via netflix. This isn't the americanized version, but the original. I'm not sure if it was from sweden or germany or where the hell it came from (honestly, I didn't really think of looking through the 5-minute long credits to find out), but if it's the same place that made "let the Right one in" and "Dead Snow," then hollywood is just assured of good movies for the next ten or 20 years or so because they're RIPPING OFF EVERY MOVIE THAT COMES OUT OF THAT PLACE. Yea, I know, why bother finding good american movies or coming up with your own scripts when you have a perfectly good foreign film, complete with script, that you can just rip off and know will do fairly well because it did so well in it's native country? Because you aren't a spineless jellyfish with no creative talent, that's why. But, american movie producers apparently ARE spineless jellyfish with no creative talent, so we're left with a cheap knockoff of an excellent foreign film. Sigh.

No, don't even give me that "but you haven't even SEEN the american version yet" crap. I don't know who they got to play the girl in the american version that just hit the theaters, but the guy is played by daniel craig. Daniel Craig, the same guy who continues to destroy the james bond series.

Let me just take a moment here to explain something. Either Daniel craig played james bond as a gay man, and subsequently is the best actor currently working in the world (because I believe wholeheartedly that daniel craig is gay), or he really IS gay and can't act for shit, which is my informed opinion. You only need watch the emo-driven remake of "Casino Royale" to understand what I mean. Now I don't have a THING against gay men and I am not homophobic in the least (in fact I am quite happy they recently made same-sex marriages legal in my state, yay!), but the only line he delivered in casino royale that I believed AT ALL was when he said he "didn't care in the least" about the woman who he had slept with that died. Now, as we all know, the standard james bond plot line is, james woos some chick away from the evil boss that he's going after so he can get inside info from her, she ends up getting killed over it, and that makes james bond all killy-kill-kill, which ends up going badly for the bad guys. This is just standard fare, it's what we're all looking for, it's what we know. So to have one of the signature plot devices in the entire james bond series to be wholly undone is either the performance of an acting genius, OR a gay guy just futzing up the acting. Now which do you think is more likely in Daniel Craig's case? Keep in mind, he was spotted several months after the release of the second james bond movie he did, in a seedy nightclub (I think it was in paris?), kissing another man. And again, if you want to kiss another man on your own time, fine, but don't fuck up your acting because of it. Having seen Daniel Craig act, Keanu Reeves' most wooden performance is oscar-winning by comparison.

Now, that having been said, back to the foreign version of Girl with a Dragon Tattoo. This movie is your basic "who-done-it" murder mystery. Essentially, there's a rich guy who believes a girl was killed some 40 years back, and it's just bugging the crap out of him since he really liked the girl, and he finally breaks down and hires a reporter who can't be bought (hey, another man of integrity, like myself! :-D) to investigate because he knows the reporter will (1) stick with it until he finds out what happened, and (2) will be honest with him about the results. So the reporter gets down to business and eventually meets "the girl with the dragon tattoo" about an hour into the movie. Now, it's not that they haven't shown her at all til this point, and in fact, they went so into detail about her that it was almost two separate movies. I would have had NO idea the two stories were going to intersect at some point if it hadn't been for the movie's title. So in any case, the girl assists him with the investigation and then things begin to get hairy, as they say in werewolf school. Not that this movie has anything to do with werewolves, I'm just saying.

Now I read one of the reviews on netflix saying they'd figured it out who-done-it when the family had gathered all in one place to meet the reporter about an hour and a half in, but if you're smart like me, that's WAY farther in the movie than you need to go. I figured out who-done-it about two seconds after the reporter meets the guy who is hiring him to look into the murder, BUT, what can I say. I am a genius, completely unlike daniel craig.

The movie itself was beautifully done. Two and a half hours long, and they could have done without some subplots that delved into some perverse territory, but then I suppose that wouldn't have shown off how smart the girl herself was, even though they really weren't germane to the plot. The actress who played her was ... well, hell, if I was the reporter, I'd have fallen in love with her myself. She was young, hot, a bit strange, but I like that in a girl. None of her actions seemed the least bit unusual to me (though I am sure they did to the other people in this tale), but then again, I've known girls like her, so maybe I have some insight. In any case, both she and the mostly-male cast did excellent work in this film. It probably helps that I didn't have a clue who any of these people were, so I can only associate them with the roles they played in this particular movie, but I believed every bit of the acting. Honestly, if they'd pulled this story out of the newspapers and just redid it on film, it wouldn't surprise me, that's how realistic it seemed. All that and nudity, too! :-D

I wouldn't waste 5 minutes watching daniel craig in the american version, but the 2 and a half hours was well spent on this one, and didn't seem to drag in the least. I only stopped it once because it was either pause the film or wet myself, and i haven't done that since last wee- errrr, a long, long time ago. yea. So. Um. Good movie, then. yea. Enough about that.

Happy New Year! I hope me and everyone else I like does well in the new year, and all the cheap lying no good sacks of monkey shit do badly for a change. I don't want to get off on a rant here but it seems like, the better a liar you are in this country, the more money you make. Wtf is up with that? And now they are trying to pass a law that says they can jail you (you being, the average american citizen) indefinitely without trail for no particular reason just because they feel like it (or just suspect you of "terrorism"), so telling the truth is about to become pretty goddamn rare in this country, since you can apparently now get jailed for it. Without trial. Indefinitely. Fuckin wonderful. Did I mention they are classifying the Occupy Wall Street protesters as terrorists now? Yep. Peacefully disagreeing with someone (someone having money or power, that is) is now terrorism. Why don't they just tear up the Constitution and write their own, for all that the politicians are actually following it now? Jesus H. Christ on a popsicle stick.

They say all evil has to do to win, is for good people to do nothing, and I guess that's really true. I'm just hoping the good people actually do outnumber the evil ones in this country, because we're going to need the numbers to win this one.

Maybe I should just hope all the truly good people have a safe and prosperous new year and leave it at that! :-)