good evening and welcome to a fistful of popcorn f'rinstance movie discussion show i'm your host tonight bob brown with me are two of our regular panelists janet sturm and marilyn campbell and tonight we're going to be discussing one film by a local filmmaker arden who recently moved to cranberry new jersey which is right around the corner apparently his wife grew up in bergen county so she they say they chose the location i understand because they like the school anyway this film has gotten a lot of buzz it's based on a novel by a now deceased swedish novelist stieg larsson who is you know this is part of a trilogy the millennium us well it's a very difficult film to summarize because there are hundreds of strands in it's a mystery it's a thriller and it's also almost a novel of revenge because the young woman who has the striking tattoo on her a pierced punk raging young woman who's been victimized all her life and she channels that into computer hacking and other kinds of  underground type investigative work that she's very very good at about an hour into the movie and about three or four hundred pages into the book which i did read she meets this journalist who has just been convicted of libel and we know that he's the good guy that's pretty clear because the libel is against this corporate industrialist character who stands for everything that the author stick larson hates by the way i will say that stichel arson was a magazine editor who crusaded against right wing nationalist fascistic groups which of care were only on the rise in europe and possibly also in sweden and also against violence against women that's what it was another of his crusades and so when he handed in those three men scripts and had a heart attack the next day or whenever a lot of people thought he had been killed by some of these right someone from these right wing groups that's been disproved i think but at any rate mikhail blum exist is hired by an old industrialist to find his missing granddaughter who took not to find but to find out what happened to her wife how she died and so forth in one thousand nine hundred sixty six its present day but it's a long time ago that this girl disappeared and his past and lisbeth salander that's the girl the dragon tattoo there pass cross well into the book and well into the movie and they start working together and they are of very odd couple and i don't think of it more because it's a mystery and i don't want to really tell much more about it so i have a question we've seen a number of swedish films so many years and all of us being of a similar writers that have been very popular over the years that write these bleak bleak mysteries taking place in the far right cold north and everyone is very depressed and drinks a lot and and bad things happen and they  home at the beginning of each part there are five or six parts in the book and each one has an epigraph and each one is the epigraph talks about a percentage like twenty seven percent of women in sweden have been brutalized and didn't right right now he i understand martian himself cited as his influence he wrote these novels as a pastime as a hobby that his models were british and american detective novelist  they're mentally ill and in this movie that may be true but it's also connected to a political witch it's i'm not sure i'm convinced bank that was weak yeah but one of the things is that that the and of course the book with more space they make this more convincing but a connection between brutality towards women and that and exists in the families of the very very wealthy in sweden is that they were collaborating with with the nazis and they are powerful then and they were powerful now and they're still they're still dealing arms and they're still polluting the atmosphere and they're still being weakened and so on so there's that political over a way that i think there's not existing in most yeah i mean people who commented on this that violence in movies scuse me has gone far enough and this is one of those films that sort of goes over the edge in terms of violence what did you think about  i i hate to keep referring to the book because i mean it's very rare that i have read a book of wood and also seen the movie version so and i hate when people do this and i shouldn't be doing this but i have to tell you bob the book is so quickly that the movie was a relief that it is describe those murders of these women are described it's it's so hard to find that i had to keep putting the book down so it when i saw the film yes i know exactly what you mean it's pretty grisly but it wasn't the sections of the book begin with the statistics where you highminded to label to be telling you that oh this is terrible many things exist and then and then she felt that kind of it kind of describes it in such a way that is that if you were a sick person you would be getting off on it yeah i think i think right and i think there was some son doing all that in the movie as well in that that in the it was having your cake and eating it too saying that violence against women is bad and yet and yet that is the backbone of the movie is is showing you that and what have you and you see her violence as a character the dragon tattoo girl character in the book is very hard to visualize she is so peculiar but it doesn't come through it comes through as a construct it doesn't really come through as a real flesh and blood person i like this actress and one of the reasons i don't know how to who she pairs up with wonders at times if she's artistic or not and there's something definitely she doesn't have any social skills i mean that's like obvious but this actress would stand back and just stare at somebody when you would expect her to react and she doesn't she just stares and i think it's very hard to do that but as a director and as the character and as and i think what she's she's she's conveying which is much more believable  for someone with her past and then autism is that she has some sort of post traumatic stress syndrome right that she has a disconnect in her emotions because her emotions are so strong that she can't she can't let them out or or she were g able to control it or she wouldn't be able to control them and that in fact she's a very sensitive to the way people think and feel that she is not the way an autistic person with an able to make connection with people in fact she connects she doesn't she doesn't betray her own feelings but she is very sensitive to other people's what other people are thinking and feeling and that's why she amiss that's just one of the things he wonders there and i mean that he wants to make a connection with her desperately and they do have a physical relationship although she's definitely in control she's on top she initiated and that's true in the book and then she goes to sleep  yes so there is a this reversal which is kind of interesting to watch i think but i thought the actors did it very well you know i had no idea who she was i mean most of the people in this film i've never seen because maybe one or two i thought i might have seen  silence that's the other thing it's it's a very slow movie yeah it's very slow getting up getting up momentum we're going once it gets momentum it really starts well how about the fact that the two main characters don't meet until seventy four minutes into the film you know but i read that and i think the director said that and i'm an individual i don't think a hollywood version could be good could restrain itself you know and also he does not make very much progress on the mystery  six was at a children's day parade which is a very big deal i guess in sweden and he is the one who pieces together that while she he i won't go into detail how but he finds photographs and he starts to find sequences from various sources and he puts them together so that he's got like a very slow moving film and he's you can see her head turning in the way he constructs this and hard expression changes from sort of bemused and at the parade to horror and he wants to she see that brought out that hard that's done much better in the film or you know what that's from this blow up yeah i almost wrote it but auditorily right no you're right you're right it is it's the same thing say that it ain't over it i know there will be he still has to resolve his love his unfair liable yeah conviction which we all know because we're on his side was unfair of course he was set up right he was set up so we need to oh but it hasn't been cast because what i understand is that johnny depp brad pitt and george clooney are all vying for the role i mean you know how do you think why you don't look down on why would we need that well you know we need that because think it is and people don't mind the subtitles or at least people like is that right you know i don't know i don't know but it is david fincher and he is a pretty good director of this kind of writing i was actually reminded a little hill diac watch yesterday although it seems so it might have been better i think though the act may have been better to but it's that it was the same thing of someone investigating something that happened a long time ago and that everyone thinks is  a waste of time or just you're not going to find anything out after all this time and he he's obsessed with it and bloomquist starts out not being obsessed with a it's just a job and he needs the money but he becomes completely obsessed with a as the the plot begins to connect in his mind to his over political right he he's and corporate levels well in the in the book bangor who hires him tells him in the beginning if you do this for me i will give you something you can use against venter strong which is the one who he had  been accused of libeling and who came out with all guns blazing against him he says i will give you something to use because he used to work for me so that's sort of why he gets in there is that connection early on in probably is swedish and speaks british english and british english is fine and i don't a problem with that but some of the words are so archaic that they stop your enjoyment in your pleasure right then and there and i'll give you an example there are so many times when lisbeth salander the girl with the dragon tattoo will say something like ah he's a creep creep i mean this is not nine hundred fifty s beach party blanket bingo  that kind of thing happens repeatedly so the movie was much better i think the subtitles were much better at kind of a well and then you know movie she can just give a look about you know how disdainful she feels about something and you don't need her to say anything right in fact she says very little yeah in the film and she's more your action or just  to very very odd characters who are filmic and she is particularly yeah but it's interesting because i mean wallander i don't know when if that was ever made were what were the while new books have been made into movies not in not they were released in the u s only they and british t v ok i don't know i mean maybe if there had been that kind of a well this may be an opening for such films to start getting you know and i had read an article that nordic detective fiction as you say is now having us surge in popularity in translation has come to an end and everywhere i was surprised to hear that larson's books were like ok you got to read them all right now you know yeah i think that's a little depressing because i don't think this is a great film you know well in fact i knew what i was saying is passing you know a few days ago is just novel itself i think is the problem what one thing i liked about the movie is that it does use the weather in wonderful wonderful ways it starts out and he has six months between the time he's been convicted to the time he needs to serve his sentence and in that time you go from early winter to the dead of you really for two and and then the end spring yeah and it follows so nicely th seasons and what they do that the weather has an impact on their investigation they have to drive somewhere in sweden and then it's leading and foggy and all the kinds of you know whether things that are going on the the net the things are frozen and you have to hit the pipes and and all of that atmosphere seeps into the story i think in wonderfully atmospheric way part of the reason that i didn't mind its being slow is that they were the kind of things more he she is given a year to do this and in the book the chapters are divided by date so that chapter instead of saying chapter one it's just november fifteenth to december seventh  december eighth to january first so he does follow that i mean i don't know if that's just to make us very much aware that blomkvist only has a year or whether he was interested in doing exactly what you're saying thinking that it might be a film well it would be if it if that the season seeps into the other things that are going on and things that they can and can find out different periods and you know times or ways that their if it's part of that part of the literary connections there are got to wrap up at this point how do we feel about this film that is in the book and i enjoyed it and the people i was with had not read the book and they enjoyed too so i have to say i enjoyed it with a kind of a queasy aftertaste of worrying about whether or not this was one of those cases where someone is pretending to be a feminist and is actually  film is it is it is about men who hate women but it does seem to it does seem to enjoy too much showing in the victimization of women and that's where the violence comes into it i don't think it's