I wish I had time to write about these at greater length but I don’t.  All the same, I do want to mention them to you.

Last week I watched the Criterion blu-ray of The Red Shoes.  Often cited as the best film ever made about dance (or at least ballet), it’s a film that I could have sworn I saw back in film school and yet, watching it now, it was completely new to me.  Except in how I realized how this film is the source of dozens of shots, scenes and situations that subsequently appeared in hundreds of other films.  The recent restoration is remarkable as is the film itself.  Read Roger Ebert’s essay on the film in his The Great Movies series here.

But I have to confess that tonight I watched the blu-ray of Powell and Pressburger’s The Black Narcissus, the film they made a year earlier, and I think it’s an even greater film.  Jack Cardiff won his Oscar for cinematography for this film and it is a far more astonishing film – a group of nuns are sent to northern India to start a school and hospital in a “palace” that formerly housed a harem, 8.000 feet up in the Himalayas.  The isolation, the temptations that are around them, the interior changes they go through, much of it falls into a “read between the lines” or perhaps “listen to the silences between the words.”   This film is really unique in British cinema and will stay with me longer I think.  It is very ambitious on multiple levels and succeeds completely.

We also watched the Millennium trilogy over the weekend – The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.  Yes, all three of Stieg Larsson’s books have been made into films in Sweden – with the same cast across all three.

It’s really impossible to discuss much of the plot here beyond telling you that it involves a massive conspiracy.  Larsson’s title for Dragon Tattoo actually translates as Men Who Hate Women and that title fits the story better even if it’s not as catchy.  It’s called the Millennium trilogy because it initially revolves around editor Mikael Blomqvist and his muckraking magazine Millennium.   But the main character is Lisbeth Salander and the performance by Noomi Rapace across all three films is breathtaking.  She deserves international stardom for this.  The crimes depicted in the films are shown very graphically, perhaps too graphically, and Rapace gives a bold and fearless performance of a complex character.  I’ll also mention that the first film can be seen on its own, while film #3 picks up immediately after #2 ends – #s 2 & 3, which share a director, can basically be watched as a single film.

An American remake is set for the first film and Daniel Craig has been signed to play Blomqvist and he’ll probably do a decent job of it but he’s actually too big of a star for this role which makes me fear that too much will be rewritten for the American screen.  I don’t know who else could play Salander the way Rapace does.  The film will be directed by David Fincher and actually I think he can improve upon the original, which is quite okay but more workmanlike than artistic.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has just been announced as the first book to sell a million copies in electronic form and that speaks to its widespread appeal.  Larsson had planned six books in this series but died after completing the third.  There are rumors that he may have been murdered.  And given that he was a reporter, is there a question that the conspiracies he writes of could be based on fact and that someone was afraid that books 4-6 might have gone too far?  Or is that just hype?

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