Between the Covers

"Dragon Tattoo" director loves Larsson's books as much as the rest of us

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I'm obsessed with the novels of Stieg Larsson. And I'm not the only one.

 
Like just about everyone else who has read and marveled over Stieg Larsson's dark, violent international bestseller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, director Niels Arden Oplev is mesmerized by Lisbeth Salander, the novel's pierced, fierce computer-hacker heroine.

``The book is part Agatha Christie with punk squalor infused,'' says Oplev, 49, whose brooding Swedish-language version of Dragon Tattoo opens Friday in South Florida. ``There's the isolated island, the dark secrets, the missing woman, the filthy rich family, the freezing cold, a classic investigator. . . . But the genius of it is Lisbeth's character. She's totally unusual. When she comes in, that's when the book takes off. My joke is that she is the scariest thing coming out of Scandinavia since ABBA.'' 

Click here to read my story on Oplev, who did an amazing job bringing this book to the screen. If the American production is half this good, I'll be happy.

"The Last Song" written just for Miley?

Alert reader and Connect Savannah columnist Robin Wright Gunn alerted me to an interview Connect Savannah did with Nicholas Sparks on The Last Song, which indicates Mr. Sparks wrote the screenplay before the novel - at the request of Miley Cyrus, a fan of his A Walk to Remember, as a star vehicle for her.

From the article:

Connect Savannah: OK, it’s the chicken or the egg question: Which came first, the novel or the screenplay?

Nicholas Sparks: I was coming off The Lucky One, and always after finishing a novel, my thoughts turn to what I’m going to write next. And part of that decision is based on what I haven’t done recently. Recently, I’d covered pretty much every age range from 20 to 50, including Nights in Rodanthe, which wasn’t a book, it was a film.

I always try to write original novels. So I said well, I can either go younger than 20 or older than 50. And The Notebook was such a big hit, so I was a little bit hesitant to do another story about the elderly. My mind was kind of wandering toward doing another teenage story. I hadn’t done one since A Walk to Remember.

It was at that time that Jennifer Gibgot from Offspring Entertainment called and said Miley loved A Walk to Remember, and she would like to do something like that. Jennifer asked if I had anything laying around? I said no, but funny you should say that …

I said OK, I’ll try to think of something. Because I had to have a novel anyway. I put all my thoughts into that, trying to make the story as different from A Walk to Remember as I can, but try to capture the same feelings. A lot of people who read that novel loved it, and they loved the film, so I really wanted to capture that same kind of thing.

By the end of July 2008 I had the story, I went out and met wit the Cyruses and Disney and told them the story I was going to write in the novel, and they said OK, that sounds good; go ahead and write the screenplay.

Because they were on a time limit – they wanted to film the next summer – I went ahead and did the screenplay first, and followed it with the novel. But they were, at least in my versions, very close. It was the same arcs and the same situations with the characters and everything like that.

Read the whole interview here. But trust me - you really don't want to see this movie.

"The Yellow Handkerchief" - a review

The only positive thing about the aimless film The Yellow Handkerchief is the idea that William Hurt may be ready for a Jeff Bridges moment. The actor, who earned a Best Supporting Actor nod for 2005's A History of Violence, was nominated for an Oscar three times in the 1980s (Kiss of the Spider Woman, Children of a Lesser God and Broadcast News) and won for Spider Woman. But now he's got the crinkle and wisdom of middle age. Somebody write him a decent role, OK? Because the burden of carrying The Yellow Handkerchief will only evoke sympathy, not praise or awards, and the guy deserves a break.

The film, made in 2008, uses the awkward, ancient road-trip set-up to throw together haunted, laconic ex-con Brett (Hurt); Gordy, an odd young man who likes to take photos with expired film (Eddie Redmayne), and petulant teenager Martine (Kristen Stewart, whose Twilight popularity has got to be the impetus behind the film's release after all this time). Martine, Brett says, has "no judgment.'' Clearly true, as no 15-year-old in her right mind would ever get into a car with these two without pepper spray in her pocket.

Yet she gets into Gordy's car, and Brett gets in, too, after a sudden storm makes a roof seem like a good idea. Martine has no real itinerary other than to make some boy back home jealous, and Gordy has a vague plan to follow the river. They drive around Louisiana with no real purpose - a road trip as plot helps pad out the running time, you see, what with all the driving footage and on-the-road-again music - until Brett finally reveals his back story, which involves Maria Bello, a Boston Whaler and why he spent the last six years in prison.

His tale of redemption and loss isn't a bad one, and once it's out the movie becomes vaguely interesting, but the story takes too long to spin out. At times the dialogue is laughable; not even Hurt's solid, honest performance can improve the scenes with Gordy and Martine. They're so annoying that you end up wishing Brett were the serial killer he would be if this film had a bigger budget.

All due respect to Pete Hamill, who wrote the story on which The Yellow Handkerchief is based, but this movie should have just stayed in the can.

"The Last Song" - a review (one star)

In case you wondered: Little girls still scream for Miley Cyrus. You too may experience the need to scream, albeit for different reasons, should you take one (or more) of them to see The Last Song, yet another maudlin remake of a Nicholas Sparks bestseller.

Like most of the other films adapted from Sparks' books -- say A Walk to Remember, The Notebook or Dear John -- The Last Song is, as you may have gathered from the title, a weeper. Remain alert for the words ``doctor'' and ``medicine,'' and you'll figure out pretty quickly where things are headed. Sparks, also author of Message in a Bottle and Nights in Rodanthe, is clearly not happy unless his audience is sobbing.

The Last Song focuses on the sullen, childish Veronica ``Ronnie'' Miller (Cyrus), a nasty-tempered high-school graduate who has arrived on the Georgia coast with her annoying little brother (Bobby Coleman of Martian Child, whose tics and mugging have not aged well) to spend the summer with their divorced dad (Greg Kinnear). Ronnie is a bad girl, only not really, aside from her unpleasant demeanor. She's really just mad that her dad and mom (Kelly Preston) split, so she acts 13, not 18, and generally makes life miserable for everyone else. But she doesn't drink or smoke or sleep around. She's just so obnoxious you'll start hoping early on that she's the one who's doomed.

Ronnie is a musical prodigy who earned a scholarship to Juilliard but says she's not going. Why? Because that's what the script wants her to say; there's no real rhyme or reason for her decision. The screenplay, co-written by Sparks, also requires that she reveal her heart to the audience by saving baby sea turtles and reading Tolstoy. Once Anna Karenina makes an appearance, you'll want to throw yourself under a train, too.

Romance blossoms when Ronnie meets a cute guy (Aussie Liam Hemsworth, Cyrus' real-life boyfriend of the moment), constantly maligns him and yet somehow manages to win his love. Naturally, she must find her way back to the piano, but first there must be falling-in-love scenes (underwater at an aquarium), a boys' beach-volleyball game (eye candy for the young female audience) and -- God help me -- one of the worst shopping montages ever put on film. Though at least the dress that Ronnie gets out of it is pretty. Enjoy it, because nothing else about The Last Song -- not Cyrus' stiff, unconvincing acting, the sentimental dialogue or the falsely upbeat ending -- is pretty at all.

HMH to publish Julia Child letters

The love keeps on comin' for Julia Child.

Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has announced it will publish more than 200 letters written between Child and her agent Avis DeVoto. The letters were written between 1952 and 1966, the period during which the American chef lived in Paris and eventually rose to prominence after writing Mastering the Art of French Cooking. 

Child fans most likely have Meryl Streep to thank. The actress played Child in Julie & Julia and was nominated for an Oscar for the role (and quite frankly, she should have won). Since the movie came out, Child's books have sold millions, according to the Associated Press.

"Green Zone" - a review

Green Zone isn't an Iraq war movie in the same sense that the Oscar winner The Hurt Locker is. It doesn't delve into the psychological makeup of soldiers or examine why they do the things they're called upon to do. Instead, it's an action thriller set in Iraq, because that's the best place to string together a contemporary story about government conspiracy, soulless bureaucrats, brave military men bold enough to buck the system, reporters who need to check their sources once in a while and chases through burned-out rubble.

The film was inspired by the nonfiction bestseller Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside the Green Zone by former Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who chronicled the mistakes made during the first year of the U.S. occupation and condemned Bush administration bureaucrats for isolating themselves from the Iraqi people. Green Zone focuses less on life in the actual Green Zone than on the hunt for weapons of mass destruction. If you have been keeping up with not-so current events, you know how that turned out, so nothing that happens in the movie comes as much of a surprise.

Nonetheless, U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon in stoic action-hero mode) is puzzled when his unit can't turn up any WMDs. When he tries to tell his superiors the intelligence is bad, they ignore him, mostly at the behest of the Paul Bremer-ish Chief Foreign Officer Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), who has reasons for needing the WMD search to continue.

Also popping up in the mix are a skeptical CIA agent (Brendan Gleeson); a Judith Miller-ish reporter (Amy Ryan) who prints, without questioning, everything the administration feeds, and an Iraqi citizen (Khalid Abdalla) who helps Miller and keeps declaring how much he loves his country. (The Americans, on the other hand, are more prone to saying such things as ``Democracy is messy.'') Prepare to hear derisive laughter when the Green Zoners watch the news footage of George Bush declaring ``Mission accomplished.'' If nothing else, the film allows everyone to participate in the joys of 20/20 hindsight.

But really, Green Zone is just an excuse for director Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Ultimatum, The Bourne Supremacy, United 93) to haul out his jittery hand-held camera as Miller and Co. sprint through the streets and buildings of Baghdad in pursuit of one villain or another. Not all chases are created equal: The film opens with a chaotic flourish as Miller and his unit prepare to burst into a warehouse allegedly hiding weapons, but the dimly lit final action setpiece goes on so long you feel exhausted when it's finally over, ending in precisely the way you knew it would. Iraq can provide thought-provoking material for filmmakers. In this case, it's just a good place to run.

"The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" - a movie review

Herald film critic Rene Rodriguez, who reviewed approximately 8,000 films for the paper's Weekend section, was lucky and intrepid enough to get a screener of the Swedish TV movie version of Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. He hasn't read the book, and yet he gave the film - which plays at 7 p.m. Saturday night at the Miami International Film Festival - three and a half stars. (It's at Gusman.)

Don't fret if you can't make Saturday's screening. Rene also reports that all three Millennium trilogy films may be released later this year.

 Here's his review:

"The biggest compliment you can pay the much-anticipated film adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is that you can't imagine Stieg Larsson's corker of a story ever having existed in book form.

Director Niels Arden Oplev has taken a dense mystery overstuffed with suspects and miscreants and brought it to resplendent cinematic life. So much critical information is conveyed via images -- a crucial series of photographs taken at a parade, for example, or the unusually stern gazes of people posing for a family portrait -- that whatever details and subplots the novel loses on the way to the screen are made up by the film's atmosphere of simmering, brooding evil.

Like David Fincher's Zodiac, this is a hypnotically visual movie about research into an unsolved crime. The disgraced journalist Mikael (Michael Nyqvist) and the moody computer hacker Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace) team up to investigate the disappearance of Harriet Vanger, a teenager who vanished in 1966 while visiting the island estate of her immensely wealthy and powerful family.

Harriet's disappearance continues to haunt her uncle (Sven-Bertil Taube), who believes her killer is still at large -- and possibly may have been related to her. He hires Mikael, for whom Harriet used to babysit, to see if he can find any new cracks in the ice-cold case.

Mikael's detective work eventually brings him into contact with Lisbeth, she of the eponymous tattoo, a vulnerable-yet-defiant beauty and one of the most striking and original movie heroines in recent memory. Played by Rapace in a star-making performance, Lisbeth is unlike any troubled bad girl you've encountered: A distinct vulnerability and emotional damage lurk beneath her tough exterior, and the combination makes her utterly fascinating, whether she's tapping away at a computer keyboard or taking sweet, horrible revenge against a perverted probation officer.

Although the movie is the first in a trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is self-contained, and viewers who pay close attention to its intricate plot ( no bathroom breaks allowed) will be rewarded. But Rapace's haunting, enigmatic Lisbeth is the element that leaves you eager for the next two installments. She's fantastic, and so is the movie."

"One Island-One Book" chooses - no surprise - Hemingway

The Key West Library has chosen - fittingly, some would say - Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not as its first selection in its "One Island-One Book" community reading initiative. What other book could the fine folks at the library have picked that was more appropriate, what with its hard-drinking Key West boat captain Harry Morgan and its setting of great economic hardship?

Local events - book discussion groups, a screening of the film and various historical talks - kick off the first two weeks of March, but get your copy of the book now to get started. There's even a blog set up for discussion and for more information on related events.

How cool is this old paperback cover, by the way???

"Dear John" - romance and goodness and nobility, oh my!

The first thing you need to know about the latest adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel is that it won't make you cry as hard as the last one (The Notebook, which no human being has ever sat through dry-eyed, not even Dick Cheney).

Sparks' books have spawned the films A Walk to Remember, Nights in Rodanthe, Message in a Bottle and the upcoming The Last Song with Miley Cyrus, the idea of which is more than enough to make this reviewer sob openly. So your tear ducts are virtually guaranteed to get at least a brief workout during the romantic Dear John, in which a Special Forces soldier on leave (Channing Tatum, G.I. Joe) falls for big-hearted Charleston college girl Savannah (Amanda Seyfried of Mamma Mia!).

John (Tatum) isn't much of a talker, possibly because of the reclusive, reserved nature of his possibly autistic father (Richard Jenkins), with whom John shares an arm's-length relationship. Fortunately, a quick dive off the pier and the retrieval of a dropped purse capture the attention of Savannah, who is the sort of girl who doesn't drink and spends spring break building a house for a homeless family. Hers is not unusual behavior in Dear John; almost everyone behaves with a courtly decorum greatly lacking in the real world.

The couple spends the rest of John's leave together, and as long as they're romping along the lovely Carolina shore life seems rosy and full of promise. Savannah even salvages John's relationship with his dad to an extent. But soldiers have to go back to war. John and Savannah promise to write, with the plan that they'll get back together when his tour of duty is over in two years. Then 9/11 happens, and their future takes a much different turn.

Dear John is at its date-movie best in the first half; it's the sort of pretty weeper that will draw young women in droves. Later on the film gets a bit bogged down in its noble ambitions. We'd like to believe people behave in such totally unselfish ways, but such goodness and charity leave director Lasse Hallstrom (The Shipping News, Chocolat, The Cider House Rules) without many shades of gray in his melodramatic palate. Worse, he makes the colossal mistake of shortchanging the diehard romantics by wrapping up the story too suddenly; you literally feel startled when the credits roll.

Still, there's an audience for old-fashioned romance, and Dear John will please most of it, given its attractive cast, cozy beach settings and brazenly uplifting outlook on human nature. The movie looks good. It just doesn't bear much resemblance to the way most of us live.

Channing Tatum: This time he's a lover, not a fighter

Channing Tatum is best known for physically demanding roles in the dance movie Step Up and the action-packed films Fighting and G.I. Joe. But the love story Dear John - based on Nicholas Sparks' novel about a romance between a soldier and a college girl - requires something new from the former model-turned-actor: Emotion.

We talked to Tatum, 29, about his new film, which opens Friday.

Q: How did you like working on such an emotional movie?

A: It's one of those things that when you start acting, everyone wants to do. I am blessed with athleticism from my mom and dad, so the physical roles came first and rightly so. I don't know if I'd have known what to do with a movie like this in the beginning, but I really loved doing this movie.

Q: Do you miss the physical aspects?

A: Not at all! There's plenty of time to do physical roles. I'm in no hurry to get my head beat in. I enjoyed the emotion and putting myself into that.

Q: You have an extremely emotional scene with Richard Jenkins, who plays your father. How do you prepare for something like that?

 A: Jamie Linden, the writer, pitched that scene, and it made me tear up in the meeting, and then when I read it, it got me. I just tried not to read it again until I had to do the scene. You just hope you can get out of your own way. . . . You're afraid of it going in. I'm going, "Channing, chill out; just stop thinking." Then you get in the scene, and
you look at the other actor. Richard Jenkins is one of the finest actors we have today, and I owe that scene to him in a lot of ways. . . . He's such a sweet and giving person. I think he knew what he was doing: He was taking care of me. He brought his hand up and grabbed my face, and that ripped my heart out!

Q: You have good chemistry with Amanda Seyfried who plays your love interest. Does that
come naturally?

A: For us it happened really naturally. She came in, and we all just sort of clowned around, and she just was that girl. She has qualities that Savannah has, that assured feeling about herself, a kind of freedom. There's a beauty and strength about her.

Q: Dear John is set in Charleston, S.C. You were born in Alabama and grew up there and Mississippi. Was the southern setting a draw?

A: Absolutely. I can't express that enough. It was like doing a movie in my backyard, the sensibility and the speed and romance and energy. And the food! Even the town is a character, so old and historical. I loved it.

Q: You lived in Miami Beach for a year when you were modeling. What'd you think of it?

A: It was probably one of my favorite cities. I lived at 13th and Collins. You get up in the morning, you go for a run. You go to the beach for half an hour because it's a stone's throw away, and then you go to work. It was great.

Q: Do you still dance?

A: I wish I did. There are no dance clubs in L.A. At clubs people just stand around staring at each other. It makes me crazy.