Posts filed under 'Millennium Trilogy'

i did not watch the oscars

This will be somewhat disorganized.

First of all, Alexis, over at Bunny Ears & Bat Wings has put up two very interesting posts:

  1. "Killing my internal perfectionist," which is about that but also a whole lot more.
  2. "Takin’ back the unicorn," because, yes, if there were really unicorns, they would not be all cute and cuddly.


So, yes, I did not watch the Oscars. Which is not a big statement – and certainly not a comment on the Oscars as a whole – but most of the films I was rooting for didn't get nominated or were sure not to win. I'm glad that Hathaway and Tarantino won.

I saw Les Miserables again a few days ago, and my feelings about it were pretty much the same (I might even see it again). I did appreciate Hugh Jackman even more this time around, and I do wonder if the song "Suddenly" was added just so that it could get a "Best Original Song" nomination. There's no other reason for is to be there (Jackman does fine singing it, but it adds nothing to the story). As I was watching it, I was imagining Alice in Resident Evil Retribution singing it to her newly-acquired daughter, Becky, and that was kind of amusing ("Trusting me the way you do, I’m so afraid of failing you. Just a child who cannot know, that danger follows where I go. There are shadows everywhere, and memories I cannot share"). But still, the movie would have been better without it.

Before the Oscars, I discovered the Slate Spoiler Special podcasts. They're designed to be listened to after you've seen the film, and I've listened to a few of them. All for movies that I've actually seen, of course (well, except for one...).

The one about Les Miserables posed an interesting idea, that Jean Valjean is a superhero. He has superhuman strength (the strength of four men, according to Victor Hugo), he has a secret identity, he helps others even when it puts his own life at risk, and he has an archenemy. His ultimate victory over his adversary comes about not because of his strength but because he is right (I love Jackman's delivery of the line, "You are wrong, and you always have been wrong").

The part about his strength made me think of Pippi Longstocking. Steig Larsson said that Lisbeth Salander was based on Pippi Longstocking, but I had forgotten (until Wikipedia reminded me) that Pippi was extraordinarily strong. Now that I'm reminded, I do recall the part about her carrying her horse around when he got old. So, I wonder is she was an influence on Vicki, who is also very strong. Maybe, though I think Vicki is more based on Popeye, as I've said before.

It occurred to me that when writers describe characters, they often describe them pretty much entirely from the neck up. I'm reading one book where the protagonist's hair (in all of its aspects), eyes, complexion etc. are described (rather awkwardly) in the first couple of paragraphs, but the rest of her is never described at all. Is she short or tall, thin or muscular, strong or weak, slow or fast? We have no idea.

I don't often think about eye color, for example, probably because I seldom notice it in life (though I can't resist commenting that if you do watch Resident Evil Retribution, keep track of Alice's eye color...). But I think things like body size and type have a much stronger effect on how your personality develops, because they can have a big effect on how you're treated growing up.

I imagine it was a factor in how Jan Sleet's personality developed that she was abnormally tall and abnormally skinny, and that her strength and coordination were (to put it diplomatically) unexceptional. It certainly had more of an effect than her hair (brown, rather limp, shoulder-length) and her eye color (no idea).

Well, I did say this would be disorganized. Coming Friday: another Jan Sleet mystery story. Or maybe two...

3 comments February 25th, 2013

no timidity, please

I was interested to read the New York Review of Books' piece on the Millennium Trilogy. It was pretty good, including that I was amused to see they started with the Bible clue solution (the sudden and otherwise pointless appearance of Blomkvist's daughter with the key information he needs) which I mentioned as well.

I thought the final point in the piece was facile and wrong, but it was generally a good analysis. They don't give Larsson enough credit for his strengths (as I talked about in the piece linked to above), but they're also less annoyed by his consumer fetishism than I was (as I talked about here) and more forgiving of his pacing (which I talked about here).

However, the review did make one point that had not occurred to me, and I think it's a very important point.

Then Laura Stanfill wrote an excellent post about writers not being timid (titled, of course, "The Parsnip"). This was my comment:

This has been on my mind, in a way, since I just read a review in the New York Review of Books of the Millennium Trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.) and the reviewer points out that Lisbeth Salander never actually kills anybody. She tortures, she humiliates, she allows people to die when she could save them, and she arranges for people to be killed by others, but she never actually pulls the trigger herself.

Salander is so involved with violence and vengeance that it never even occurred to me that she doesn't kill anybody. The reviewer says that this is clearly manipulated by the author in order to keep the readers on her side, and I think this is a correct analysis. There is no evidence in the text that Salander has any moral compunctions against killing (quite the opposite), so it's the author stacking the deck.

There is no moral advantage to having Salander be non-lethal (nailing somebody's foot to the floor with a nail gun and then calling his other enemies to come kill him while he's immobilized is about the same as killing him, really), so it's just to placate the readers, to stack the deck.

I say, go for it, don't fudge. I have a character who has killed a lot of people. She's better now, though still armed and capable of violence, but I never downplay the fact that she's done what she's done. I think she is a sympathetic character in some ways, but in any case she is what she is, not a watered-down PG version.

Referring to starling, of course.

This is related to what I wrote about in my last post. It's a mark of authorial confidence to allow your "good" characters to do bad things and feel you can still keep the reader on their side. Confidence which Hitchcock had (in spades) and which Stieg Larsson (not surprisingly – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was his first novel) did not.

It is a real shame that he died, since the things he lacked as a novelist are the things you can learn pretty easily.


Later addition
: This post also applies to these modern vampires who don't actually kill anybody. Vampires should kill people and drink their blood to survive. That's pretty much part of the definition. Otherwise, if you're going to wuss out on that part, please call them something else.

4 comments May 27th, 2011

k. i. s. s.

I've watched The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and it was interesting to see the differences between the book and the movie. Many things were handled better in the movie (as I thought they would be), but I do wonder how many of them were changed because the screenwriter and director realized that there was room for improvement, and how many were simply because there wasn't enough time to follow what was in the book.

Of course, there will be spoilers. Press "show" to go further.

show

In tech geek news, I was dissatisfied with the "Recent Posts" links over there on the right, since I wanted it to show only the real posts, and not the ones which are merely plugs for new stuff over at utownwriting.com. So, I poked around, and found some PHP code that would do the job, placed in a "widget."

I've ignored widgets until now, but it turns out they're ways to customize the blocks of links over there on the right. Until now, I've done that manually, like adding the list of characters. And the new widget worked fine, but it turns out that once you enable widgets, all the stuff you coded manually gets wiped out. So, I had to scramble to recreate the "Characters" listing as a widget.

But now I can't remember if there was anything else over there. Characters, recent posts, categories, meta. I think that was everything...

Add comment August 9th, 2010

sweden, i’m in sweden

The good news today is that you can now buy the excellent film Let the Right One In with the correct subtitles. Amazon has had a blurb for a while saying that if you ordered the DVD, you might get the regular subtitles (booo!), or you might get the theatrical subtitles (yay!). (Google "Let the Right One In subtitles" to find out the scoop.)

Now they will send you the correct version. Yes, I bought it again, and watched it, and enjoyed it even more than before. The box quotes the Washington Examiner saying, "Best. Vampire Movie. Ever." Not sure I'd be so definitive, but I can't think of one that's better.

(Not to be confused with the upcoming crappy Hollywood remake.)

In other Swedish news, I finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Well, I confess I skimmed the last 100 pages or so. The villain is revealed on page 438, the villain is dispatched on page 459, and the final mystery is solved on page 487. And then the book goes on for another 103 pages. Many of which consist of emails the characters write to each other.

I may write more about the book at some point, but I will mention that it is on the cover of Entertainment Weekly this week, and there's an interesting sidebar called "Did Larsson Have a Problem with Women?" by Missy Schwartz. It doesn't seem to be online for some reason – but if it's posted later I will add a link here (link). I think the piece makes some good points. (By the way, I do think Ms. Schwartz may be wrong about Salander getting breast implants – I read that scene as saying that she was wearing falsies as part of a disguise. As I say, though, I was skimming, so maybe I missed the implants. If I'm wrong, that just shows how far things went off the tracks at the end.)

I am still looking forward to the movie (out soon on DVD, not to be confused with the upcoming Hollywood remake).

In news with no direct connection with Sweden, there is more of "The Sister Mystery" posted. The new parts begin here.

Add comment June 21st, 2010

questions about men who hate women

I've been reading Men Who Hate Women (aka The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and I have a few questions.

Why do I need to know the manufacturer of every consumer device in the book?

Why do I need to know so many technical details about Salander's computers? (This part is particularly funny because the only real effect is to make the book seem completely out-of-date, since the "top of the line" has moved a lot in the last five years.)

Why is so much being told and so little being shown? (At times it reminds me of Wonder Boys; I expect any minute to come to the dental records and the genealogies of the horses.)

Why is Salander described in so much detail (including her "slender bones" and her "childlike breasts") but Blomkvist isn't described at all?

Why am I getting so much information about characters I've not been given any reason to care about?

Why is so much geographical detail being given when it would be so much easier to have a map? (Actually, a family tree would be a good idea, too.)

I was very surprised and pleased when a very traditional Agatha Christie-style mystery suddenly manifested in the middle of the book (a crime happens in an area which is completely cut off from the rest of the world – so there is, apparently, a finite set of suspects). Will this mystery actually be solved? I hope so, and I even have a few ideas, but it's early yet.

Will Salander and Blomkvist ever meet? I expect they will (though it will be interesting if they don't). I even have a premonition they they will become lovers, which will be unfortunate and (duh!) predictable.

In a related question, is Blomkvist going to sleep with every women he meets?

Was the name changed from Men Who Hate Women to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo because the latter was considered more commercial or because the former gives away too much?

I look forward to the movie, which comes out on DVD on July 6, since at least some of these problems will have been solved there.

Add comment June 11th, 2010


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