Phenomenal Casting

This week the movie based on the Stieg Larsson book “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” opened and my friends Courtney and Janine invited me to go with them. We were somewhat surprised that there wasn’t more of a crowd at the theater, but it was a Tuesday night.

Both Janine and I had read all three books, however if you haven’t I would suggest that you do as my friend Courtney did, a little research prior to going so your not confused by the storyline. In the book Larsson takes his time developing the characters, however the movie starts from the point in time when Mikael Blomkvist played by Daniel Craig has lost a libel judgement and decides to take on a special investigative project.

While working on the project Craig decides her needs an experience investigator, enter Lisbeth Salander played by Rooney Mara whose performance drives the movie. Often when you read a book one is disappointed when a character does not look like what you pictured them to be in your mind. This was not the case with Lisbeth as the twenty five year old Rooney cut off a foot of her hair, dyed it black, bleached her eyebrows and got six piercings to play the part perfectly. In my humble opinion she deserves a nomination for an Oscar.

The movie was dark as was the book and the rape scene in the movie was very intense along with the scene where she pays back her perpetrator. Larsson who wrote the book witnessed a gang rape of a girl named Lisbeth when he was fifteen and he did not intervene. This experience haunted him for the rest of his life and in an effort to atone for this all of his books deal with the issue of women being abused by men.

I loved the movie, was entertained by it, would go see it again and would highly recommend it to all. Just as an aside – this was my 200th post on Webnerhouse – hard to believe.