Run Away! It’s THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE No, Really! Run Away!
Friday, July 16th, 2010© A.J. Malouin 2010
(Rating: 11 by A.J. Malouin.)
(See our side-bar page “How We Rate Movies”)
(2009/Sweden/Denmark/Germany. Directed by Daniel Alfredson.)
We’ve had technical problems lately on the blog, and so have not been able to warn you away from “Flickan some lekte med elden” [“The Girl Who Played With Fire.”]
Hopefully you have not inflicted This Thing upon yourself in the meantime!
Here is part of an e-mail this writer recently sent to several members of “A.J Malouin’s Movies @ Gayle’s Chocolates”…
“Hello, Everyone!
“Saw ‘Flickan some lekte med elden’ [‘The Girl Who Played With Fire’] in-theatre yesterday [09 July 2010.]
“I found it even less-satisfying than the first movie in this morass. This series seems (to this reviewer, anyway) to be a tawdry sequence of sensationalism with no real merit to it. That audiences around the world would flock to content of this type is (to me, anyway) vaguely alarming. There is nothing redeeming and no net take away from these first two movies. Both seem to be lingering on the Very Outer-Most Edges of both Sadism, and Soft Porn. The stories in both movies bump along in jumps and starts, as if trying to take we the audience from one sensationalistic set piece to another. They-the-stories take us there on the kind of ramshackle trolley upon which Pogo and his swamp-critter friends would ride. One hopes for an entertainment value, at least, from these two mass hysterias of popular culture. I found this NOT to be the case — although, turning my eyes from the screen to the audience (a bad sign, indeed!) I found the audience-with-me to be one which enjoyed this adventure quite a bit.
“I am obviously in the vast minority in thinking that this series is without any filmic merit, hardly!
“Daniel Craig cast in the ‘American’ version? Probably a good choice…although tooooo smooth in the face for the material. Craig wuz awfully miscast as Bond: tooooo muscular, and not sophisticated at all.
“He seemed perfect, however, in ‘Layer Cake,’ a film Malouin highly recommends.
“Wouldn’t Uma Therman have been a better choice for The Girl? or Charlize Theron? Carey Mulligan seems too “slight” and even Pretty to carry off this role. ¡Veremos!
“(It *might* be a good meeting for our club to re-view the original on DVD and then see the “American” version in-theatre upon its release…and discuss the two of them at Gayle’s. No pesky sub-titles in the re-make!!)” (more…)