film The Girl Who Played with Fire. (Music
Box; 129 minutes; R; 2010). The year’s big- gest gift to art-house audiences comes from Chicago’s teensy distributor Music Box Films, which acquired the three movie adaptations of the late author Stieg Larsson’s popular Millennium trilogy and is in the process of doling out this Swedish cinema catnip. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo amassed $10 million last spring, not exactly chump change for an art-house release (it earned $93 million overseas), and now the middle book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, has hit theaters, with the grand finale, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, due before year’s end. Round two moves like a bullet, too, with
some obligatory nods to the complicated backstories and motivations that inflated Dragon Tattoo’s running time to 2½ hours. Gloomy Noomi Rapace returns as the title lass, pierced bisexual computer hacker Lis-
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beth Salander, last seen confronting personal demons and befriending investigative jour- nalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist). Lisbeth’s pervy legal guardian Bjurman (Peter Andersson) is back, too (for a while, anyway), and his dastardly presence helps trigger a complex scenario concerning sex trafficking, guilty johns and the double murders of a hot- dog newshound and his girlfriend. Lisbeth, naturally, is caught in the middle, with Mikael intent on clearing her name. Although only a year has supposedly
passed between the central characters, Rapace has taken on a harder, chiseled look, certainly in relationship to the damaging events that have shaped Lisbeth’s character arc, while Nyqvist’s hangdog charm is even more appealing as his Mikael goes into determined super-sleuth mode. Also aboard for this installment: a hulking blond assassin (Micki Spreitz), a kickboxing lipstick lesbian (Yas-
Roll out the barrels: Noomi Rapace in The Girl Who Played with Fire.
mine Garbi), and ex-boxer and occasional actor Paolo Roberto playing himself (!), who at one point gets involved in a car chase that includes a side trip down a busy Stockholm sidewalk. What more could art-house mavens possibly want? Director Daniel Alfredson’s compact style
makes solid use of the Swedish countryside and cities, while also tossing in subtle flour- ishes like the sinister john who is always leer- ing at nearby ladies. This thriller is so compel- ling, especially with its final reels jammed with jaw-dropping revelations, viewers will probably not even notice that Rapace and Nyqvist only share screen time in The Girl Who Played with Fire’s closing minutes.
Music Box Films must be having the same
giddy feeling with its Millennium threesome that United Artists had during the mid-1960s, when the studio knew it was sitting on a gold mine with its about-to-be-released Dollars trilogy of director Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood. While Music Box is reportedly grooming Rapace for Academy Award contention, Hollywood is prepping the inevitable Americanization of Dragon Tattoo with Fight Club director David Fincher guiding 007 star Daniel Craig and newbie Rooney Mara (the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street) in the key roles. Fincher and company will have a hard act to follow, let alone successfully emulate. —BILL DELAPP
DRINK YOUR WAY TO THE TOP!
Irish Festival Sept. 10th & 11th@NOON
Ladies, show up to any of the below locations and sign up to be the next Miss Guinness! Whichever contestant has the most pints bought in her name will be crowned!
Participating locations: Kitty Hoynes George O’Days
Meghan MacMurphys McNamara’s Blarney Stone
8/26 8/28 9/2 9/7 9/9
THE WINNER WILL RECEIVE: $500 CASH PRIZE • FREE GUINESS FOR 1 YEAR 12 Aug. 25 - Sept. 1, 2010 Syracuse New Times NEWS & OPINION FEATURE ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT EVENTS CLASSIFIED
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