Mini Book Review: The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, Translated by Reg Keeland
Well, first order of business:
I haven't died since my last post.
In August.
Of last year.
Nor was I raptured in October. Harold Camping was wrong again.
I have, however, been a victim of a busy schedule and probably some degree of overall burnout.
Anyway, new year - new goals, which include more writing, less me (and possibly a new bike...), and a few other things that are long overdue.
Let's start with the first.
For Christmas, I found myself the owner of a new Kindle Fire. I fully accept that the Fire is, out of the box, basically an Amazon Vending Machine. I'm good with that. It's got potential, and I like the form factor better than the iPad.
I'd gotten my mom the DVDs of the Swedish versions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire, and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. I'd watched them last year, and Mom had been reading the books, so we ended up more or less swapping. (NB - I haven't seen the new American version of the first film, so any comparisons I make between the books and the films will refer to the Swedish productions.)
What I'd like to do here is capture some of my thoughts on the series without spoiling too many important plot points. Thus this won't be a full-on review but rather some loosely connected thoughts and observations. Bear with me while I try to re-engage the writing cogs.
I suspect that most people are familiar with the basic outline of the books - Swedish investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist finds himself drawn into an increasingly complex web of conspiracies when he's asked to help investigate a decades-old mystery and makes the acquaintance of hacker Lisbeth Salander and her aforementioned tattoo.
The first thing to note is that the original Swedish title of the book - Män som hatar kvinno - translates as Men Who Hate Women. That proves to be the thread that ties the entire series together, and indeed the thread that has defined most of Salander's life.
(Larsson witnessed a rape when he was young, and never forgave himself for failing to help the victim. The theme of the trilogy is derived from that event.)
In telling Salander's story of victimization - initially at the hands of her father and later at the hands of nearly every authority figure she encounters - Larsson also addresses issues of gender inequality in the workplace, in government, and in the perceptions of the population as a whole.
Lisbeth's brilliant intellect and single-minded thirst for revenge is set against her tiny, doll-like physique. Her refusal to conform to social norms is used in the second and third books to attack her in the press and in the courtroom.1
Annika, Blomkvist's sister (later Salander's lawyer) draws on similarities between her youthful behavior and Lisbeth's to point out the double standards at work. Erika Berger, Blomkvist's married lover (and a very shrewd businesswoman) finds herself under attack because of her sexual habits. Female police inspectors in the story are looked down on by their male counterparts.
An interesting thing to notice is that Blomkvist (in the books - they leave out most of this in the movies) is portrayed as quite the player. During the course of the books, Blomkvist carries on extended affairs with:
- Erika Berger - his married lover who he has been with off and on for 20 year or so.
- Cecilia Vanger - a woman who he investigates in connection with a decades-old possible murder.
- Lisbeth Salander - who seduces him during the investigation of the Vanger case, and with whom he has a fairly lengthy relationship.
- Harriet Vanger - Cecilia's long-lost cousin.
- Monica Figuerola - a special police investigator helping to work out the conspiracy surrounding Salander's father.
I'm not sure if Blomkvist is written this way in order to serve as an example within the story of a man who can relate to women as equals, or if he's written as a typical Swedish male and I'm simply trying to view Swedish attitudes about sex through an American lens, or if there's something else going on. The end result is that Blomkvist is clearly not a white-hat good guy, but is instead somewhat ethically suspect. Ordinarily, I tend to like characters with some moral ambiguity, since it makes them more interesting, but I've got an issue with this sort of thing.2
There are a few other interesting characters spread across the books. One of the most interesting, in my opinion, is Alexander Zalachenko. Zalachenko, a Russian assassin who defects to Sweden in the 1970's, is Lisbeth's father. The Swedish authorities recognize the value of the information Zalachenko can provide, and consequently give him a long leash, turning a blind eye to his violent habits and criminal endeavors. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Zalachenko's value diminishes, but it's far too late to rein him in. His activities form the nucleus of the conspiracies against Salander, but it's clear that the Swedish authorities who cleaned up after him and failed to control him are at least as culpable as he is. What makes him interesting is that he's not just evil for the sake of being evil. His actions seem consistent within the limits of his own self-interest. He's aware enough to manipulate others into doing what he needs to be done, he thinks through the consequences of his actions, and he needs a motivation to do things beyond simply causing problems for a hero to solve.3
Overall, I enjoyed the books. Having already seen the movies, I knew generally what to expect, but there was enough new and expanded material to keep me interested, especially the more detailed insight into Lisbeth's character. The nuggets of Swedish political history that are sprinkled through the books give them some grounding in actual events, which is a nice touch. Parts can be difficult to read - the assault on Salander in the first book, and some of the graphic descriptions of crimes throughout leave little to the imagination - but such scenes are important to advancing the plot.
As a set of interconnected mysteries, the books work very well, and I highly recommend them on the strength of that alone. If you happen to find topics of social justice and the treatment of women in different layers of society are more your thing, you'll find a good helping of those in here, too.
-Jay
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1In some ways reminiscent of the way women like Monica Lewinsky and Casey Anthony have been portrayed in the media. Guilt or innocence often seems secondary to digging up lurid personal details.
2I suppose it's worth mentioning that all of Blomkvist's liasons are consensual, and none of his partners have an expectation of long-term monogamy. Nevertheless, his characterization reminds me a bit too much of people who I know who think with their penises.
3Writing convincing villains is hard. Too often you end up with a 2-dimensional character that exists solely for the purpose of doing bad things. Like Darth Vader. He was nothing but a glorified errand boy. When George Lucas tried to give Vader some depth in the prequel trilogy, all he really succeeded in doing was establishing that Vader was a whiny, arrogant errand boy. Or consider the typical characterization of the devil, who seems to turn up for no reason other than to function as an agent of evil. That's a topic for another day.
Movie Review – Speed Racer (2008)
When I started elementary school in the mid-1970s, my TV diet consisted of PBS standards like Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.
It didn't take long for my classmates to suggest alternatives. One of those was Speed Racer, the American dub of the Japanese series Mahha GoGoGo.
My mom objected to shows like this and the old Spider-Man cartoon most vocally on the grounds of the excessive violence, which served only to increase my desire to see them. Forbidden fruit and all that.
Speed Racer, to my young eyes, was all about the car - the Mach 5.
This was gonna be my first car...
Speed Racer and the Mach 5 might be claimed as a source of inspiration for many vehicle-themed shows that later followed - Knight Rider, for example.
So, a few years back when the Wachowski Brothers, still riding the cachet they'd built with The Matrix1 and its sequels, got attached to a live-action version of Speed Racer, I was intrigued.
The film tanked at the box office when it was released in 2008, and drew generally negative reviews. I picked up the DVD about a year ago at Target for the princely sum of $5, but it gathered dust on the shelf until last night, when a combination of insomnia and lack of anything better to do led me to pop open a beer and throw Speed Racer into the player.
I'll say up front that not even reviewing films like Mega Shark Vs. Crocosaurus could have prepared me for the Wachowski Brothers' take on Speed Racer.
Let's begin.
We meet a young Speed Racer in school, unable to concentrate on his work. Constantly caught up in daydreams about racing, he's considered an outsider by his classmates and a poor student by his teacher. We come to learn that his father builds race cars, and his brother Rex drives them. These aren't just any race cars, either. They're impossibly high-performance machines that race on tracks that look more like fancy Hot-Wheels setups:
Not your father's race track
In Speed Racer's world, physics doesn't seem to have much use. Cars spin, flip, drift around turns, spring over other cars, and travel at speeds approaching 500 MPH.
Speed's brother, Rex, is a very talented racer, but has a fallout with their father, Pops (a horribly under-utilized John Goodman), and leaves home on a dark and stormy night.
Shortly after, a racing accident kills Rex, who was living under accusations of cheating. The Racer family is crushed. Mom (played by Susan Sarandon, who spends most of her scenes looking like she's trying to find an escape from the set) takes Rex's death particularly hard, but provides the emotional glue that holds the family together. (Ms. Sarandon was given possibly the most well-written dialog in the entire film. Nevertheless, one must wonder just what sort of leverage the Wachowski's had on her to get her into this thing.)
Speed grows up (portrayed by Emile Hirsch) to become a fine racer in his own right, and after dramatically winning a local race, is approached by Royalton (Roger Allam) to join his stable of racers. The Racer family, long an independent racing team, is suspicious of Royalton's offer, but goes with him to visit his headquarters, accompanied by Speed's long-time girlfriend, Trixie2 (Christina Ricci).
After the initial visit, Speed and Trixie discuss Royalton's offer and Speed's future.
Trixie and Speed
The Wachowski's aren't subtle. Anyone who can't figure out that Royalton isn't one of the good guys is either dead or asleep (which, by this point in the film wouldn't be out of the question.) We can tell because his eyebrows have a sort of villainous arch to them.
All he's missing is a waxed mustache...
Really, they could have made it a little less obvious. Anyhow, when Speed declines Royalton's offer of indentured servitude employment, Royalton tells Speed that the Racer family name won't even have any cache on a late night infomercial, let alone in the racing world. (Apparently the sport of auto racing in the reality of Speed Racer is little more than a front for corporate manipulation of stock prices, and the winners of every major race are negotiated beforehand.)
Sure enough, before you know it, things have gone bad for the family.
Enter the mysterious RacEr X and (in what has to be one of the most ridiculous names ever) Inspector Detector of the CIB (or something - it's a group that investigates corruption in the racing business).
Racer X (left, duh.) and Inspector Detector
They have a proposal for Speed - team up with RacEr X and some other driver who we were introduced to a few minutes ago that I didn't bother to mention to win a big road race that will lead the third driver to give up a file he has on corrupt drivers and team owners and put people like Royalton with funky eyebrows out of business. (You'll note that Inspector Detector is clearly a good guy - nary an arched eyebrow in sight.)
Speed and Trixie decide to accept the offer against the wishes of Speed's parents, and head to the race under cover of a skiing trip.
The bad guys put a bounty on Speed's team, and automotive hijinks ensue as the various drivers deploy whatever dirty tricks they have at their disposal to win.
Some dramatic tension unfolds as the race goes through the same cave that Speed's brother, Rex was killed in - a stretch of road that RacEr X seems unusually familiar with.
Speed and company ultimately prevail and win the race, only to discover that the third driver really didn't have a file on all the corrupt players, and was simply using Speed and RacEr X to win the race and boost his father's stock price.
Disillusioned, Speed heads home, but has finally used his keen senses of observation and logic to almost figure out that RacEr X showed up shortly after Rex's death, and that Rex's body was unrecognizably burned, and that RacEr X drives like Rex and knows Speed's moves! OMG! RacEr X must BE Rex!
Speed soon confronts the mysterious masked man about it, who removes his hood to prove to Speed that he isn't his brother, but knows that his brother would be proud of the man Speed has become. (Speed, demonstrating that he's not the sharpest tool in the garage, appears never to have heard of plastic surgery...)
The third driver's sister shows up with an invitation for Speed to participate in the Grand Prix, which is his life's dream. The family has less than two days to rebuild Speed's car and get to the race, which we know they'll do for no other reason than that this would be a very bizarre way to end the movie.
The Grand Prix race, as presented by the Wachowski's is an eye-scorching, ear-splitting eruption of garish color and noise:
Really, the whole movie looks like this...
Basically, if you've ever played a Mario Kart game, the Grand Prix is Rainbow Road with the volume turned full-up on the TV. The long and the short of it is that Speed wins, the Racer family regains its lost honor, and the corrupt businessmen like Royalton are exposed for the wretched villainous scum they truly are.
Meh.
This was a very difficult movie to watch for a number of reasons.
First off, the characters were uniformly uninteresting - even the leads. John Goodman, Susan Sarandon, and Christina Ricci are all talented, but they aren't really given anything to work with here. Emile Hirsch seemed to be asleep most of the time, even in the "intense" racing scenes, and it went downhill from there. Even the Mega Shark films have something to their characters that makes them less of a chore to watch.
Second, as the screenshot of the Grand Prix should illustrate, the visual style of the film seemed designed mainly to make the viewer's eyes bleed. I understand the challenges in making a live-action film from a cartoon. Trying to keep the original visual style probably won't work, but neither will going with a fully real-world approach. Nevertheless, the source material for Speed Racer would have allowed a much more realistic approach that might have made the film less exhausting to endure.
Third, the characters were all different from how they "should" have been. In the cartoon, Speed was more confident, Trixie was less aggressive, Racer X more edgy. Here, we have a Speed who can't seem to look anyone in the eye, Trixie exuding a smoldering sexuality that seems out-of-place (I think that's really more just Ricci...), and Racer X who never lives up to his potential. This wasn't Speed Racer so much as something that superficially resembled Speed Racer.
Fourth, and finally, by the end of the film, nothing had really changed. The family still thinks Rex is dead. Pops still builds his own cars without any sponsorship. Speed is still racing, and the racing world, now that its most corrupt players have been rooted out, is the honorable world that Speed and his family believed it to be at the start of the film.
They're all right back where they started, and I'm out five bucks.
-Jay
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1As visually innovative as that film was at the time, it just doesn't grab me much now for some reason . And the sequels always seemed unnecessary to me.
2In the original cartoon, it was easy to come to the conclusion that Trixie was Speed's sister, especially if you were watching the show at six or seven years old. Even when I watched most of the series a few years back, their relationship still seemed fairly low-key. Christina Ricci, however, brings a more aggressive Trixie to the screen. It's a PG-rated movie, so she doesn't go overboard with it, but still...
Star Trek as The A-Team
From Miss Cellania...
I wouldn't find this nearly as funny if I hadn't been a nearly fanatical watcher of both Star Trek and The A-Team as a kid, and recently watched the big-screen remake of The A-Team (which was much better than I personally expected...)
-Jay
Retro
I distinctly remember the afternoon of my 13th birthday.
I bolted home from the bus stop, because I knew that waiting for me at home was The Most Awesome Video Game Experience Ever!
The object of my obsession was a new offering for the Atari 2600 console, Haunted House.
Haunted House could be thought of as Resident Evil -20. The graphics, though looking a bit dated today, were pretty damn stunning at the time. Since I no longer have access to a functioning Atari 2600 console, I'm unable to get my own screenshots, but I found one that I think beautifully captures the graphic artistry that was possible in home video games circa 1982.
Sharktopus. Really. I’m Not Kidding. And A Special Treat.
Just when I got comfortable thinking that Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus set the low water mark for entertainment, SyFy comes along and produces Sharktopus. (Thanks, Miss C. Thanks SO much 
.) I knew it was coming, but some small part of me held out hope that it would never see the light of day. No such luck.
Apparently Eric Roberts hasn't had much to do lately. My best info is that Sharktopus will grace our screens in September. I know I'll be watching.
Now, as if this wasn't enough, SyFy has also seen fit to give us Mega Python vs. Gatoroid. Here's a preview:
Mega Python vs. Gatoroid, based on the preview, seems like not much more than an opportunity to get 80's singers Debbie Gibson and Tiffany onto the screen at the same time. (Gibson, if you recall, was the female lead in Mega Shark.) If they can find a way to get a cameo by Kylie Minogue, they'd have a trifecta.
I'll probably watch this, too - I'm particularly impressed by its sharply written dialogue.
It's apparently going to grace us with its presence in 2011.
So many bad movies. So little time...
-Jay
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