09-16-10 Movie review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

No less than six noncommercial movies are coming up between now and Wednesday, though three of them are competing tonight.

Tallgrass shows Sweet Crude, a 2009 Audience Award winner about distinctly bad times in Nigeria’s Niger Delta and, among other things, an effort to build a library among the chaos and corruption; Sweet Crude shows at 7:00 tonight in the former Hillside Baptist Church, 147 South Hillside.

At 8:00 tonight, the Murdock Theatre will show Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, about the financially unfortunate composer of Rite of Spring and the fashion lady best remembered for her offbeat personality, tonight at 8:00 at 536 North Broadway. And tonight at 7:00, the Orpheum Third Thursday movie is the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski, with John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, John Turturro, Julianne Moore, Jeff Bridges, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman: Orpheum tonight at 7:00.

Tomorrow night at 8:00, the Murdock will show Entre Nos, Spanish with English subtitles, about a Colombian woman who immigrates as far as New York only to find herself and her offspring deserted: again, 536 North Broadway. Also tomorrow, the Laurel and Hardy fan club will meet and show Our Relations, plus an Our Gang short and, unusually, a Mickey Mouse cartoon, in Calvary Methodist Church at 2525 North Rock Road.

And finally, the Westlink Branch Library is showing a feature movie, whose title can’t be announced but that tells the story of Tejano pop singer’s rise to the top and tragic death at far too early an age; it shows at 6:30 Tuesday in the Westlink branch, 8515 Beckmeyer – and the library can’t tell you the title, either.
And commercially, we have a rarely good and unusual mystery thriller in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the Swedish version with subtitles, and its initial announcement was that it would only show for a week, so it may close tonight. Check the Warren East.

It’s a highly unusual mystery, though related to such old favorite genres as the country house mystery, the locked room mystery, and even the un-decodable cipher mystery, with interesting variations on the loner protagonist, the last-case tradition, and the time-limit for solution; but it expands into something much bigger than a mere cold-case missing-person mystery, and the twists and turns are utterly unpredictable.

Let me warn you not to be taking notes: I had to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a second time to check on what I thought were gaps in the plot, and discovered that you have to keep eyes open and brain working, but everything is there and makes admirable sense, clear enough for anybody whose attention is not distracted. The worldwide bestselling novel is pretty completely represented, thought the pace is considerably quickened in order to fit into standard movie length, and the detective work, as a result, seems easier than in the novel. The characters, especially the heroine, are sufficiently vivid, though the hero becomes more stock than in the book.

The success of Winter’s Bone in Wichita suggests that the dour, almost humorless tone of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo may not kill it at the local box office, though the subtitles are a danger; dialogue is clipped and there are few long speeches, so I hope people will give it a try. And the sequel is supposed to be opening a week from tomorrow. For once, I am looking forward to a sequel.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo show times

Upcoming films at the Murdock Theatre, 536 N. Broadway, 8pm:

9/23 - Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky: Relations between the far from prosperous composer of “Tite of Spring” and the fashion leader most remembered for her spectacular personality (there was a Broadway musical about her).

9/24 - Entre Nos: Spanish with subtitles, about a Columbian woman who gets as far as NYC and is deserted, with children, by her husband.