Nerd in the 'Noke

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), R, 158 minutes - About a year and a half ago, just after I had seen the Swedish adaptation of this best selling first installment to late author Stieg Larsson's  Millennium trilogy I read the news that an American adaptation was going to be made.  My first reaction was 'why bother?'.  The novel was excellent, was equaled by the Swedish film starring Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist, and at the time was only a year old (my original review can be found  here ).  I generally adhere to the belief that film remakes aren't necessary.  Every once in a while they can be worth it if they are far enough removed from the original (i.e. the Cohen brothers'  True Grit last year).  The key to remember in this case though is that David Fincher did not set out to remake the Swedish film but to provide an English language adaptation that would be more widely distributed here in the States.  The fact that Finc...

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009), NR, 152 minutes - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is based on Swedish author Stieg Larsson's first novel in his Millenium Trilogy titled 'Men Who Hate Women' (we silly Americans found it necessary to change the title). Many good things have been said about this trilogy, but I have yet to read it myself. I found myself having to decide whether to watch the movie then go back and read the book(s), or add the book(s) to my growing list of things to read and then watch the film at a later date. Two things helped me make my decision: 1) an old college friend Kerri (check out her book blog here ) both highly recommended the book and thought I should go ahead and see the movie first (this was a good call, as I'm not the world's fastest reader). 2) the Grandin Theatre, which is about a mile down the road (and the only theater around that ever screens such foreign films) began showing it this weekend. Suffice to say, everything ...