The Greatest Movie for the Past Two Weeks

I can’t stop watching this movie. It has consumed my life. Consumed I tell you!!! In fact, I am researching a type of AA meeting for this part.

I love….

I am not however putting in my Thursday Movie review.

I rather want to tell you about it and you make your own decision.

True I have seen some more disturbing movies…. like the Human Centipede (shudders) but this movie is quite different.

Its excellent. In my opinion.

It’s dark, gritty, and very good. Every actor in here is superb.

The only thing I have heard from the people is that there is rape scene.  That’s why people closed the doors to this movie.

I totally understand. I can’t handle movies with rape scenes.

Have you ever seen Irreversible?

This a french film with the popular and hot Monica Bellucci.  The story is told in an interesting way. It’s told back wards and the camera angles assist in this really dark movie that takes place in the dirty alleys of France.

The whole movie centers around this one huge elaborate rape scene. I mean, it was brutal. So brutal my stomach turned. So brutal I had to look away.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo isn’t as severe but rape is rape.

In this movie, she is the anti-hero. She battles against crimes against women but she doesn’t project herself  as that. She just wants to kick some ass.

I read up on the writer Stieg Larsson. Stieg is a Swedish journalist and writer.  He is known for his struggle against racism and right-wing extremism. He would hold lectures about it, writing publications about right-wing extremism, and was the main force behind the founding of the Expo-foundation, a group intended on exposing neo-Nazi activity in Sweden.

As a hobby, Stieg wrote three detective novels in his trilogy known as the  The Millennium-series which were published posthumously;The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.

He never published them. They were only found after his death. He had written them for his own pleasure, making no attempt to get them published.

The main character in his story, Lisbeth Salander,  is fashioned on a grown-up Pippi Longstocking as he chose to sketch her.  Pippi was a popular children’s  story of a girl who was unconventional, assertive, and has superhuman strength.

But probably Larsson’s most major influence was an event that he witnessed himself. When Larsson was 15 years old, he witnessed the gang rape of a girl, which led to his lifelong abhorrence of violence and abuse against women. His longtime partner writes that this incident “marked him for life” . The author never forgave himself for failing to help the girl, and this inspired the themes of sexual violence against women in his books.According to his partner, the Millennium trilogy allowed Larsson to express a worldview he was never able to shed light on as a journalist. She described, with a great deal of specificity, how the fundamental narratives of his three books were essentially fictionalized portraits of the Sweden few people knew, a place where latent white supremacy found expression in all aspects of contemporary life, and anti-extremists lived in persistent fear of attack.

“Everything of this nature described in the Millennium trilogy has happened at one time or another to a Swedish citizen, journalist, politician, public prosecutor, unionist or policeman,” she writes. “Nothing was made up.”

I think that is why I appreciated the movie so much. Because the situation in the movie was really a detail in the character’s life. It wasn’t for shock value either. It was intricate for the movie but the movie wasn’t about it either.  It didn’t make the character feel like a victim but it did define her. It defined her actions and her feelings from thereafter.

I think too that with movies heroes are always men: Bourne Identity, Iron Man, Spiderman,  etc etc.

What’s so great about this movie is that the character of Lisbeth Salander shows her as a regular human being who has a certain type of special skills.  Her super power is that she is brave, intelligent, and she is very independent.  She also controls her own sexuality which I think is very powerful.

So I am not telling you to see this movie…. (See it! See it!). I wouldn’t recommend this movie to my mom…

But… it’s certainly a movie to take a closer look at.