Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander

From IFC News website:

The Girl With the Foreign Language Franchise

How “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” became the year’s surprise arthouse hit.

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLF6sAAMb4s

www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1TRfOt1WGI

Also in the mid 1950’s, Sunday night was the Disney show. For those early days of television, Walt Disney had some of the best production values. In 1954 Disney introduced us to Davy Crockett, ‘King of the Wild Frontier’. Crockett was a real historical character that few people had heard of or remembered. I seem to remember that the original was a three episode(per IMDB: ‘Davy Crockett; Indian Fighter’, ‘Davy Crockett Goes to Congress’ and ‘Davy Crockett at the Alamo’) story that followed Davy on his way to the Alamo. Disney chose a tall lanky actor called Fess Parker to play Davy. That show set off a storm of Davy Crockett mania. Before you new it many kids were wearing (fake) coonskin hats. I am proud to say that I never owned one, or even desired to have one. Disney then re-cut the TV shows and released them as a movie. Despite the fact that Crockett died at the Alamo (in fact and on the show), he was too popular to ignore, so Disney made 4 more TV movies with Davy Crockett including the popular ‘Davy Crockett and the River Pirates’. Parker also played the (mostly absent) father in the classic Disney movie ‘Old Yeller‘.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2Tu8NskR-E

I don’t remember it in color, but then when I was a kid we only had a black and white TV. Parker went on to star in a 1 season TV show ‘Mr Smith Goes to Washington’ based on the Frank Capra/Jimmy Stewart film of the same name. He then put the coonskin cap back on and starred in the ‘Daniel Boone’ TV series that ran for 6 years . After the Boone series ended, Parker left acting and started the Fess Parker Winery in the Santa Ynez region of California. His wines are well respected and like the many wineries featured in the movie ‘Sideways’, specializes in Pinot Noir. As a little trivia note for those who saw the movie ‘Sideways’, the famous spit-bucket scene that took place at a winery called ‘Frass Canyon’ was actually filmed at the Fess Parker winery. Well, I guess you could say I grew up with Fess Parker, we both went from Davy Crockett to Pinot Noir.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-piSNIIzm-8

Swedish actor Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander

The character to the left is my new favorite literary heroine, Lisbeth Salander. Well, actually, the picture is of Swedish actress Noomi Rapace as the character Lisbeth Salander from the Swedish film Män som hatar kvinnor (“Men who hate women”) or as it was published in English ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo‘. I picked up a copy of that book on a recent trip to Costco. I had heard of it, but knew little about the book. I finished reading it (all 590 pages) in 3 days. Lisbeth is an amazing character. Despite being only 4′ 10″ tall and weighing 90 pounds, she can fight off the biggest man, has a photographic memory, a chess mind to rival Bobby Fisher, sleeps with girls or boys indiscriminately and is a wizard with a computer, considered one of the 65 best ‘hackers’ in the world. Of course Lisbeth is pretty anti-social and has numerous dark secrets from her past she prefers to keep hidden. While that may sound like a bit too much, if you can suspend your disbelief this is an exciting book to read.

The author of ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ is Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson. Larsson’s story is almost as fascinating as the characters in his books. A crusading journalist and activist in Sweden, he founded and worked for the Expo magazine, not unlike his fictional Millennium magazine in the books. He started writing his novels in his spare time. In 2003, with 2 completed manuscripts and a third almost done, he found a publisher in Sweden. Before the first book was published, Larsson dropped dead from a heart attack. Conspiracy theorist have had a field day with Larsson’s death. This is not too surprising considering the books deal with the darker aspects of Swedish culture and politics and have a distinctly paranoid view of them. To read more about Larsson, there is an interesting Vanity Fair article about him. And of course you can always read his Wikipedia entry. Note, take Wikipedia entries with a grain of salt, but do check out the reference material.

The three books that Larsson completed before his death are called ‘The Millennium Trilogy’. They get their name from the fictional Swedish magazine that the primary character in the books, Mikael Blomkvist founded and where he is the publisher.  The first book, ‘ The girl with the Dragon Tattoo‘, is a stand-alone crime drama. It introduces us to Blomkvist and Salander as they work together to solve a 40 year old mystery about the missing niece of a famous industrialist. The book is well done, with a satisfying ending that leaves you wanting to know more about the primary characters. After reading the book, I had the opportunity to see the Swedish film of the novel. Here is the trailer for it:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlF-hk3IJQE

The second book in the series is ‘The Girl Who Played with Fire‘. In this novel, Larsson explains much more about Lisbeth’s background and history. this book is also a crime thriller with the primary mystery the murder of three people in one night. And, Lisbeth is the main suspect. The ending of this book is a cliff-hanger, with Lisbeth’s fate very much in doubt. It leaves you wanting to immediately read the third book, ‘The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest‘. Unfortunately, this book has not been published in the US yet! Arrgggh! Fortunately, one doesn’t need Lisbeth’s hacker skills to find a copy of the book via the internet. So, I have now read all three. The final book does bring some redemption and closure to Lisbeth’s story. But after reading it, you are left with the feeling that there is much more in store for Lisbeth and Mikael.  It left me hungry to read more about them. When Larsson died, he reportedly left outlines for a total of ten books in the series. Sadly, we will have to be content with the three he finished before his death.

Movies have been made from all three of the books in Sweden. I have not seen either of the second or third in the series, but their trailers are on Youtube. Here is the trailer for ‘The Girl Who Played with Fire’, and a teaser for the final movie, ‘The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest’. They are in Swedish, but you’ll get the idea.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7XQHnSlhSE

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8LTr51C-j0

Ahhh, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Steppenwolf, what could be more reminiscent of the end of the 60’s? To tell the truth, Easy Rider is not one of my favorite films. I find it overlong and self-indulgent. But 40 years after its release, it seems to be finding new respectability.  A good chunk of the movie was filmed and took place in New Mexico. The town of Taos had a 40 year anniversary celebration for the film this year. Kind of odd when you consider that Taos wasn’t very happy about the film in 1969, and the New Buffalo commune, near Taos where some of the action was supposed to take place, wouldn’t let them film there. But these days Taos is no longer an artist colony or hippie magnet but a tourist destination. And anything that might draw a few free-spending tourists is considered good business.

That opening credit sequence, where we watch Billy and Wyatt (Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda) ride out of Death Valley,  across the Colorado river through Needles and Kingman on their way to Flagstaff  with the Steppenwolf song ‘Born to be Wild‘ playing is pretty powerful. Even though the song and sequence has become an ironic cliche (see Albert Brooks’ Lost in America) it still is a great piece of film. The credit for the beauty and power of that sequence belongs to cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs. I still get a little shiver when I watch that sequence. Forty years on, I still don’t think I’ll add Easy Rider to my favorites list, but this sour, downbeat road film is worth watching and has aged better than a lot of the films of its generation..

When you watched the opening credits did you notice the third name of the ’starring’ actors? Of course Fonda and Hopper got ‘above the title’ billing, but then the other principal actors were listed in alphabetical order. They included Karen Black and Jack Nicholson in his ‘breakout’ role. But that third name is Toni Basil. You remember her don’t you?? If you don’t, watch this!

There is an interesting article on Salon.com by Keith Phipps, who recreated the road trip of Easy Rider this year. It has a lot of trivia about the film. You might also be interested in checking out Peter Biskind’s book Easy Riders Raging Bulls. There was also a documentary film made from the book that screened on some cable channel recently. I thought it was on IFC, but couldn’t find it there.

Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

I loved the first, original, Star Wars. Now the fans are going to remake it… 15 seconds at a time. On this site, fans get to sign up for up to 3 fifteen second scenes. Then they film the scene, upload it to the site, and the scenes are stitched together to make the fan version of Star Wars. Visit the site, Star Wars Uncut, if you would like to participate, or if you are just curious about the outcome, like me.

Here is the trailer for “Let the Right One In”:

The most disturbing thing I’ve heard lately is that an American remake of this film is in the works. I am not looking forward to it. As one poster on IMDB said ‘there should be a special place in hell for American directors who remake foreign films, that I like’.

Then a couple of years ago, I was in the checkout at Barnes & Noble when I saw a little book by an Author named Charlaine Harris called ‘Dead Until Dark’. I picked it up and bought it and found it an interesting take on the vampire legend. The primary character was a small town waitress named Sookie Stackhouse from a fictional Louisiana town. In this book, the vampires (some of them) were  the good guys. Well I read several more in the series, and like most vampire series, the later books became harder to read as she had to invent new circumstances and improve on the ‘lore’ of the vampire. Then I heard that HBO was filming a series based on Harris’ novels. So, I watched ‘True Blood’ last year. It followed the first novel pretty closely and best of all maintained the irreverent tongue-in-cheek tone of the novel.

On the HBO series, Sookie is played by Canadian/New Zealand actress Anna Paquin. Here is an interview with her from Jimmy Fallon’s TV show last week. About two thirds of the way through, she explains the difference between ‘True Blood’ and the “Twilight’ series…

Update: Well, apparently NBC made Youtube pull down the clip from Jimmy Fallon’s show. I hate this whole Intellectual Property-DRM bull… but that’s another post. If you want to see the clip here’s a link to it on NBC’s site: Anna Paquin on Jimmy Fallon. The reason I posted it was because Anna made a great comment comparing True Blood to the Twilight movies. She said “Well, they’re all about not having sex, and our show is all about (pause) having sex.” Pretty cute. To replace the Jimmy Fallon clip, here is HBO’s trailer for True Blood:

After ‘The Sting’, Newman continued to make interesting, memorable films such as ; ‘The Drowning Pool’, ‘Slap Shot’, ‘Fort Apache the Bronx’, and ‘The Verdict’. Finally, in 1987, in a classic case of giving a Best-Actor Oscar for a body of work, Newman won for ‘The Color of Money’. This over-directed Martin Scorsese film wouldn’t make my 10-Best list of Paul Newman films. In 1994, Paul made one of my favorite movies ‘Nobody’s Fool’. This Robert Benton film (based on a Richard Russo novel), also starred Jessica Tandy, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith and a very young Philip Seymour Hoffman. Sully (Newman’s character) is older and has made a lot of mistakes in life. Despite all of his shortcomings, he is still the most likable and admirable character. After watching it, I wanted to be him.

It’s hard to say how Newman would fare today. The world has changed so much, and the gossip media is at a frenzy these days. There is a nasty side to the gossip craze that never existed in the 50’s and 60’s. These current gossip mavens revel in every mis-step a celebrity may make. And there is a desire to see people fail. Could Paul have led the exemplary life he did lead in today’s media spotlight? Hard to say. But, for my generation, there is not a more admirable, loved and genuinely good actor than Paul Newman.

So, here is a clip from `1961’s ‘Hud’. Directed by Martin Ritt, based on a Larry McMurtry novel, the film starred Newman, Melvyn Douglas, Patricia Neal (who won an academy award for her role) and Brandon De Wilde. The film is a morality tale, with Melvyn Douglas as the moral center. But, Hud’s the guy you’re rooting for. Here’s a scene between Paul Newman and Patricia Neal…