Understanding Editing: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

This is the final in my 2025 monthly series in which I've been watching Oscar best editing winners, alternating between those I'd seen and those I hadn't seen, to get a better sense of superlative versions of the craft.

David Fincher is the man who famously said "There are two ways to shoot a scene, and the other one is wrong." 

What better way to conclude this series, than with a man for whom perfection is paramount, and whose 2011 film won an Oscar for one of the embodiments of that perfection -- its editing?

In fact, this was Fincher's fourth (and so far final) film to be nominated for best editing. Se7en and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button didn't win, but The Social Network won just the year before. I couldn't have watched that for this series, because the repeat viewings in this series were designed as movies I'd seen only once before. I've seen The Social Network four times. 

As you might suspect, you reach such levels of perfection by finding collaborators who help deliver your vision. Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall won those consecutive Oscars in best film editing, and they were also the nominated pair for Benjamin Button. Even when Se7en was nominated he was seeking out the best of the best, as the editor on that film was Richard Francis-Bruce, who was nominated the year before for The Shawshank Redemption. 

But you know what? Baxter and Wall did design the famous titles for Se7en, so they have been with Fincher in some capacity the whole way. Baxter has continued to edit his increasingly lesser output of feature films, though Wall has not, and has no further feature editing credits to his name. I'm not going to dig into what happened there at this time, but don't worry, Wall has hung around as a producer. I also just noticed he graduated from my alma mater, Bowdoin College.

Well, all this build-up to the final film in the series really paid off. Although I had to watch The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in three sittings -- a symptom of this time of year and some of the things that have been going on that are not directly related to it -- at every moment I appreciated its superior craftsmanship, especially in terms of the editing, though the cinematography is also first rate and was also Oscar nominated. 

This has been a series where I've meant to scribble down a lot of notes while watching, but in many cases found myself without the quantity of insights and observations in the moment that I thought I'd have. If you've been keeping up with my Understanding Editing writing this year, you've noticed that I've concluded on more than one occasion that I thought the film had won the Oscar because it was winning all the other Oscars already, and editing got swept up in the general furor. Which was never to say the editing was bad in those films, just that I rarely found the quantity of examples of why it was good that I thought I would find.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is basically nothing but examples of good editing. SPOILERS to follow. Here are some of the examples I jotted down:

1) I really appreciated the way this film conveys information just from people doing daily activities, like making a coffee or throwing a piece of food into the microwave. The film will convey this in basically three shots that are each cut off just a bit before the action seems to be fully completed, to convey momentum in an economy of storytelling, but also never to make you feel like you're being cuffed around by too many cuts. It's the sort of exact touch that you would expect other editors to notice and to nominate. 

2) The cross-cutting is excellent. The initial example I noticed, which was repeated throughout in other ways, was when Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) is arriving at Milton Security offices to report her background check on Mikail Blomkvist (Daniel Craig). As Goran Visnjic's Dragan Armansky is profiling her to Steven Berkoff's Dirch Frode, we go back and forth between what the two of them are saying in that board room and her steady approach through various parts of the building, of course beginning with her arrival on her signature motorcycle. It's a great character introduction, both showing and telling, giving us an idea of the way she's different in "every way," as Armansky says.

3) The cutting on action is also excellent. Examples of this are Lisbeth closing the top of a laptop, which closes the scene and whips us to another, or her zooming motorcyle transitioning directly into Blomkvist, much later in the film, getting swept along the floor in the rig where he's held captive by the film's ultimate villain, Stellan Skarsgard's Martin Vanger, before Vanger intends to kill him. 

4) The scene where Christopher Plummer's Henrik Vanger describes the sequence where his sister Harriet went missing is also expertly conveyed, interweaving his story with the images of it, doling out a perfect amount of screen time each time it switches between the present and the past. 

5) There's a scene that is both funny from a narrative perspective and clever from a storytelling perspective that involves editing. Blomkvist is going through a written account of something that occurred four decades earlier, and he uses a highlighter to highlight each line of text. As he highlights the text, the images alternate to a dramatic interpretation of what's happening in the text. Although this was smooth and effective, I couldn't help but wonder: If you highlight each line of something, isn't that the same as highlighting none of it?

6) I noted how this film uses dissolves regularly. So even though it has examples of cutting on action that involve a sharp line of demarcation between two scenes in two different locations, it also has these languid transitions, which I think were more likely to be used to convey progression within the same scene. You wouldn't necessarily expect both of these things to be a feature of the same editing duo, but I suppose a good editor has all the tools at their disposal.

7) And yet this film also has examples of the sorts of editing that were prevalent in the last film I talked about in this series in November, The Bourne Ultimatum, which you will remember I didn't particularly care for. That film was a flurry of quick edits in fight scenes in a style that ultimately exhausted me pretty quickly, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo shows us how that sort of thing can work like gangbusters if it is used in moderation. The example of that is when Lisbeth tries to fight off a mugger on a train station escalator, ultimately dispatching him in a quick series of frantic shots before escaping back down and to safety. 

8) The final thing I'll mention is the way Baxter and Wall edit together the final car crash that claims the life of our villain. Lisbeth is chasing him on her motorcycle, and when he veers off the road and crashes, she also sort of spins out on the motorcycle, though is never in the sort of mortal danger he is. The editors combine shots of the two vehicles in their separate chase terminus spots, all within a quick two seconds of footage. 

If I didn't jot down more notes, it could be because my middle sitting was fairly late at night and I might have slept through some of it. 

When I went to Letterboxd to see what I'd given The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I was sort of surprised to see it was only three stars. I knew that this was not among my favorite Fincher films, probably for a couple of reasons: 1) it's very long and reaches its dramatic conclusion about 20 minutes before the movie ends; 2) the ending is a little unsatisfying as an explanation to the central mystery Blomkvist is investigating; 3) also making their second Fincher film in as many years, and also winning an Oscar for the first one, my beloved Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross did not transport me with this score the way they did with their score for The Social Network. In fact, I'm wondering how much of my feelings about the movie are tied up in the fact that I bought the score before the movie was out, and I already knew the score was much longer than anyone needed to listen to (something like 80 minutes) and that none of it stood out for me as it had for The Social Network. 

Having watched this movie specifically with a focus on its construction, via its editing, gives me a new appreciation for its quality, and I just luxuriated in how nicely put together the whole thing is. There's a reason we consider Fincher one of the masters of this form we love so much. Even when the movies he makes don't fully engage us -- which also happened for me with The Killer most recently -- they look absolutely astonishing, and Fincher has excellent taste in the collaborators he chooses. 

So yes, I feel like I'm wrapping up with the experience I always hoped to have in this series, but rarely did. Even if I don't feel like the series unfolded exactly as I'd wanted it to, it may just be that the thing I've come to understand most about editing is that it remains an enigma. Sometimes, good editing is there for you to see and to grab hold of, with numerous examples like I've listed in this post. Sometimes, editing is the glue that holds everything together and delivers you a smooth viewing experience. It remains part of that enigma that other practictioners in the field are able to identify both forms and come to a consensus in rewarding them accordingly.

And one thing I'll say for sure is that Understanding Editing put a lot of great movies in front of my eyes, both those I hadn't seen and those with which I was already familiar. 

Not just Trent Reznor's appendage

If you're watching a movie about the Beach Boys -- one that's actually allowed to use their music -- you wouldn't expect to be focusing on the non-Beach Boys music.

Yet that's precisely what I did when watching Love & Mercy, because I found an interesting name in the opening credits, reminding me who was responsible for its score: Atticus Ross.

I have previously known Ross only as a collaborator of Trent Reznor, the Nine Inch Nails frontman and my favorite working artist, who has turned lately to scoring high-profile movies. He won an Oscar for his Social Network score, and has also scored David Fincher's two most recent films, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl.

I say "he" and not "they," even though Ross worked with Reznor on each of those scores, because Reznor is known for subsuming other creative talents into himself. This is not to say that Reznor elbows these others out of the way to claim sole credit -- in fact, the opposite may be true. In the past, Reznor has listed other members of Nine Inch Nails as though they were full members, rather than what they really were: musicians who joined him for tours. Generally speaking, Reznor plays almost all the instruments you hear in the album recording of any of his songs -- the pianos, the guitars, the synthesizers, probably even the odd horn -- with only the occasional guest (say, Adrian Belew) being credited for his or her contributions. He is literally a one-man band, who has a group of revolving associates who sometimes join him for performances.

Ross has been one of those revolving associates, the most consistent one over the past decade. He has been a producer/programmer on each of Nine Inch Nails' last five studio albums, but he didn't really come out of the shadows to be recognized for his work until The Social Network, when he was of course listed with Reznor as a co-nominee.

Half of me assumed that this was just another instance of Reznor's characteristic generosity, that Reznor did all the work and just brought Ross along for the ride. After all, I didn't have any sense of Ross apart from Reznor, no notion of what any Ross solo work might sound like or even whether any existed. And since the music from their three movies sounded pretty much like Nine Inch Nails music without the lyrics, I figured Reznor was the one who deserved the credit and Ross owed Reznor a hearty thank you for allowing him to ride Reznor's coattails.

After hearing the Love & Mercy score, I'm not so sure. In fact, I might even like it better than his last two scores with Reznor.

That's not to say the score jumps out and grabs you. It doesn't. It's quite in the background, and about a third of the way through I realized I hadn't even consciously noticed it. I mean, there is a lot of Beach Boys music in this movie, understandably, as well as some other diegetic music that's appropriate to the film's two time periods. (I noted with no small amount of humor that Kenny G's saxophone breakout "Songbird" is playing when Brian Wilson goes to buy his Cadillac and meet his future love interest. It's followed by a song I like a lot less ironically, Heart's "These Dreams.")

But once I started specifically paying attention to what I knew must be Ross' contributions, I started really tuning in to some great sonic accomplishments. They are in the same mode that has been the primary reason why Fincher has used Reznor and Ross in the past -- setting a mood of eerie disconnection and creeping dread. The score announces itself in the moments when the paranoid Wilson is becoming untethered from reality, when they make the perfect complement to his encroaching mental illness. It's the score for Brian Wilson going way too deep inside his own head.

If it were only that simple, though, it might be just another installment in what I have found to be two fairly generic scores in a row by Reznor and Ross with Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl. I mean, those scores have their moments, Gone Girl more than Dragon Tattoo, but ultimately I have not listened to them more than twice each. (Only once for Dragon Tattoo, actually, though you really can't blame me -- it's 37 tracks long. That's 37 full-length tracks.) But overall those two scores have depressed me as follow-ups to The Social Network, which felt like it opened a new world of possibility for the creativity of Reznor beyond what I'd already known and loved from Nine Inch Nails.

What's got me looking forward to purchasing the Love & Mercy score is that Ross has also done some sonic arrangements that sound like a combination of Beach Boys music, static, voices, distortion, and shapeless horror. During one of his moments of dawning concern over the possible degradation of his mental faculties, Wilson puts on a pair of headphones in the studio and hears what sounds like shrieking ghouls. I'm pretty sure Ross composed that also, and I want to hear that again.

I perhaps didn't realize the extent of Ross' noodling around until the closing credits, which list the songs from the score -- and then the clips of Beach Boys songs that appear in each song. Some of the songs contain snippets from like nine different Beach Boys songs, assembled as a kind of sonic soup that's swirling around in Wilson's brain as he tries to reconcile his own artistic aspirations with the type of music he is expected to write ... with a touch of paranoia over his fears of inadequacy and irrelevance, overlaid by a certainty that any day now the song-writing muse could just vanish entirely.

The brain of a possible paranoid schizophrenic isn't a wonderful place to be on a good day. Ross' score -- which I'm getting more and more convinced I'm going to buy as I type this -- shows you just how unwonderful it can be.

Trent Who?

Guess I never ended up reading Hunger Games

I'm pretty disappointed in myself this morning.

Months ago, I vowed to read The Hunger Games before the movie hit theaters. Today, it's hitting theaters. And I haven't read it.

Yet more proof that I have become a hopeless reader. And maybe that's what disappoints me more than anything.

I have always been a slow reader, but at least in the past, I used to make my way through a couple books a year. At a minimum. But lately, I don't seem to make my way through anything.

It would be tempting to say that I don't find the time, because for the past 19 months I've been a father, and that kind of thing leaves you less time overall. But there has been no discernible drop in the number of movies I've seen -- those, I fit in. It's the reading that has really suffered.

Which, I try to tell myself, is okay. Fact is, movies are my "reading" -- they're the texts I'm consuming, because they're my passion. So while my friends may read more books than I do, I certainly see more movies than they do. Your value judgments on which practice is more objectively useful are yours -- but since this is a film blog and you're reading it, I'm guessing you're at least sympathetic to my position.

And I do this not only because of a personal love, but for professional reasons. If I wanted to be a book critic -- which I think would be a terrible job for me, because I read so slowly -- I'd probably read more books. But I'm a film critic, so films are my books.

But back to The Hunger Games. While I don't generally think it's necessary or even desirable to have read a particular book before you see the movie, I do think there can be a certain thrill to seeing something you read come to life on the big screen. From time to time, I think it's useful to create this situation for myself.

And The Hunger Games seemed like a good choice. I know it's sort of aimed at teens, but not to the same extent as Twilight, and a number of friends whose tastes I respect have spoken highly of it. Not to mention that it seemed like just the kind of quick, accessible reading to renew my interest in the joys of getting lost in a good book.

If not for a little twist of fate, I might have actually read it. A friend of mine was planning to loan me the book, but I didn't pick it up from him soon enough and he ended up loaning it to somebody else. With the pressure of having to read it and return it to the person who loaned it to me (even though he certainly wasn't planning to read it again himself), I certainly would have prioritized it. But without that pressure, it was left to me to either borrow it from someone else or buy it. With the ball in my court, I dropped it.

Yeah, there were a couple times I flirted with buying it. I had (still have) an Amazon gift card that would have been perfect for it. I also picked it up off the shelf a couple times in book stores, weighing the possibility of a purchase. But in each case, something stopped me -- like the fact that I'm still reading a book of Raymond Carver short stories my wife got me for my birthday in October, and have made almost no progress on it in the last three months. She actually bought me that book with the hope that the shorter stories would encourage faster reading, since she knows I aspire to read more. (When in fact, the opposite could be true -- you power quickly through a book because you become invested in its characters.) If I bought The Hunger Games before I finished the Carver stories, it would signal a certain defeat to both my wife and to me.

I guess I could still read the book before I see the movie. I am not by any means committed to seeing this movie in the theater, even though its 68 Metascore indicates that director Gary Ross seems to have brought it to the big screen successfully.

But now I'm also wondering if it wouldn't just be better to see the movie without reading the book. Sometimes, already knowing what will happen in a movie is a drawback to enjoying it as much as you might otherwise.

Let's take the example of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, arguably the most popular book in recent years other than The Hunger Games. (More popular, I'm sure.) I didn't read Stieg Larsson's novel, but I did see its Swedish film adaptation prior to seeing David Fincher's in December. I'd say that knowing how the novel ends, from seeing the first adaptation, did in fact affect my enjoyment of Fincher's movie. Then again, this may be a bad example, because in the end I just don't find the mystery itself in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo all that satisfying. It's also not a great example for this particular post because I didn't read the book. Reasons already discussed.

We can also look at the flip side -- enjoying a movie more because I hadn't read the book. I think one of the reasons I responded so positively to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II was because I watched it in suspense, not knowing what would happen -- whether one of our heroes would not survive the final chapter of this tale. If I'd read the Harry Potter series, I would have been watching the movie primarily to see how successfully they translated it to the screen, not getting caught up in a story whose twists and turns were, blissfully, still a mystery to me.

The nice thing about The Hunger Games, as it is now, is that I don't know what happens. Yeah, I know that the characters played by Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson are pretty likely to survive the first movie. But I don't know what happens with a lot of the other characters -- in fact, I don't yet even know those characters. Since this is a story about life and death, there are definitely going to be a number of people who die. Maybe I'm better off not knowing. Maybe I'll enjoy the movie even more.

Fortunately, I don't have to make up my mind too quickly. This movie will be in theaters at least until May, and I wouldn't be going in the first couple weekends regardless. And I don't have to worry about anyone spoiling the movie for me, I wouldn't think -- the benefit of it already existing as a book is that if people intended to spoil it for me, they probably would have done it already.

If you plan to see The Hunger Games weekend, good luck fighting the lines, and I hope it's at least better than the Twilight movies.

A thousand trips to the movies

I keep track of a lot of personal movie-related statistics, many of which I've discussed here before.

One of these is the number of movies I've seen for the first time in the theater.

Last night, that number hit 1,000.

The movie that took the title was David Fincher's Hollywood remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It narrowly edged out Albert Nobbs, which has garnered buzz for Glenn Close's portrayal of a 19th century woman passing as a man. Of the two of these movies, Tattoo was the one that interested me more. But Nobbs was finishing a one-week Oscar-qualifying run in Los Angeles last night, and I thought it would be fun to take my opportunity to see it in time to rank it with this year's films. (It doesn't open wide until January 27th.)

I have actually been to a movie theater more than 1,000 times in my life. There are 20-25 movies I've seen in the theater more than once. But as of last night, it's 1,000 different movies seen in the theater.

What's interesting to note is how that number compares to the number of movies I've seen total, which is 3,422. Movies seen on video outnumber those seen in the theater by nearly a 2.5 to 1 margin. I guess for the average person, it might be much higher, since I prioritize getting out to the theater more than most people do. (Then again, I also watch more movies at home than most people do, so maybe the ratio would be about the same.)

But my 1,000th theatrically screened movie was only one of several blog topics that came to mind about seeing The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo last night. Here, I've created subheadings to discuss the others.

Setting the mood

I picked a perfect night to see The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I suppose it might have also been a thematically appropriate night for Albert Nobbs, if Nobbs were set on the Scottish moors rather than in Ireland.

See, we had perhaps our foggiest night of the year last night. When I walked out of the house to leave for the movie, the landscape was suffused by fog. Not just a mist, but thick, mashed potato fog. Something that seemed to be a perfect complement to the wintry Swedish atmosphere I'd seen in the trailers for Tattoo.

This was the scene as I drove to the theater, listening to the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo score on my ipod, hooked up through my car stereo. (I don't have the Albert Nobbs score -- strike two, Albert.)

I'm a huge Nine Inch Nails fan (as I've discussed ad infinitum, it feels like), so Trent Reznor's scores (composed with Atticus Ross) for The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo have been right up my alley. Except I was having an extremely difficult time getting into the Tattoo score, seeing as how it is a whopping 39 tracks in length, and actually exceeds the movie's 158-minute running time. In fact, I'd been trudging through a bunch of atmospheric ambient noise for 26 tracks in the week before Christmas, before I stopped listening and failed to continue. Last night I finally picked back up, and it was just the right time to do so -- the last ten tracks or so of the score are phenomenal.

The car ride to the theater was only long enough for one or two of those tracks, but then I switched from car speakers to headphones as I listened to the rest, walking up Sepulveda Blvd. to the Howard Hughes Center, where my 8:15 show of Tattoo was scheduled to start. The fog enveloped everything in a surreal quality that was matched by the ethereal music pouring into my ears.

How to shave $3 off the price of your ticket

And why was I walking up Sepulveda to get to Rave Motion Pictures, the theater in the Howard Hughes Center? Because I've decided that the $2 surcharge to see movies at this theater is no longer something I want to pay.

Rave Motion Pictures -- nee The Bridge, or Cinema du Lux at The Bridge -- used to be the crown jewel of the Los Angeles theater scene. When it opened in I wanna say 2003, it was state-of-the-art in modern adult theatergoing, with fancy screening rooms and a fully stocked upscale bar. However, since then, it has been eclipsed by other new crown jewels, making it sort of the Skydome of new theaters. (That's a baseball reference, referring to the state-of-the-art stadium in Toronto that was initially heavily praised for being new and modern -- before a slew of cozy postmodern stadiums made it seem archaic.) But even though it is no longer a destination that would bring in moviegoers outside of the local area, it still has great screens, and is still one of our top few choices for where to see new movies projected in grand scale.

The only nuisance is that the ticket prices are bumped up by $2 for the flat parking fee you have to pay to park in the Howard Hughes Center lot.

And you pretty much have to pay it, because there's no free lot within what most people would consider easy walking distance.

However, I am not most people.

Last night I parked down the hill on a side street, leaving me a 10-12 minute walk to get to the theater. Honestly, I don't know why this hadn't occurred to me earlier. I guess it's not possible to do this when you're rushing to get to the movie on time, but the 8:15 showtime of Tattoo was timed perfectly to allow me the luxury of a gradual arrival. It allowed me to put our son to bed just before 7 and eat a quick dinner, and still have time to get to the theater early enough not to pay for parking. In fact, I hate that more movies don't start between 8 and 9 o'clock. In this case, Tattoo was playing on two screens, meaning there was a much greater likelihood of a starting time in this range. That's really the way to go -- see a movie at a theater where it's playing on multiple screens, and you can find that elusive start time.

However, it was a calculated risk. Although Rave Motion Pictures does have some theaters with assigned seating, the lion's share of them are old-fashioned free-for-alls. You have to get there early if you want to avoid sitting in the front row. And because I couldn't select my seats online -- a great way to tell what percentage of the seats have been sold -- I had no way of knowing, when leaving the house, whether I'd be walking into a near sold-out situation. (That's where I shaved off the other buck -- not buying the ticket in advance, and therefore saving the $1 handling fee. If you aren't buying an assigned seat, what's the point of purchasing in advance?) And since this was a screening of a much-buzzed-about movie that had only been out for eight days, during the prime evening hours in the week between Christmas and New Year's, there was a good chance I was setting myself up to fail.

Fortunately, when I arrived at 7:45, there were not large numbers of people teeming outside the ticket window. Shortly afterward, I discovered that the movie was only 6% sold at the time. Score. It might have been a bit sad to see the movie with less than 10% of the seats filled, so I'm glad to say that they were at least a third occupied by the time the movie started.

What's more, I really enjoyed that walk. Not only did I continue to listen to the score on my ipod, but I approached the Howard Hughes Center from a different angle than I ever approach it. It was cool to see the building's various neon features glowing behind a haze of fog, and I even got to take it all in while riding an external escalator. (It's the simple pleasures, you know.) If I'd parked in the lot, I would have been pretty much inside the building the whole time.

So, did I like it?

Yes indeed. It was by far some of my favorite cinematography of the year, and Fincher created exactly the mood I was hoping for. And as you've heard, Rooney Mara is a revelation.

Still, I have some complaints that may be inextricably linked to the source material. Both in the original Swedish version and in this version, there are story aspects that I think don't have the affect Stieg Larsson intended them to have. (A strange comment to make about one of the most popular books of the last decade.) I'll leave that comment vague for those who haven't seen it, but I guess I will never be a truly devoted fan of the story that's there, meaning that the potential impact of any film adaptation is going to be somewhat limited from the start.

For what it was, though -- quite impressive.

Now, bring on the next 1,000 trips to the movies. I just hope that 1,000 theatrical visits from now, people will still be going to a thing called a movie theater.

Fincher and Reznor and Mara - oh my!

I'd been stuck in a long flirtation with my second viewing of The Social Network.

I'd encounter it in the darkened corners of the library video section, and it would call out to me. "What me again, lover ... watch me again."

Okay, so there was nothing untoward about my desire to see The Social Network a second time. I ranked it third among the movies I saw in 2010, and I have a sneaking suspicion that if I were ranking now, it might be #1. Neither of the movies I ranked ahead of it -- 127 Hours and Tangled -- are defending their spots very well. I bought Tangled on BluRay and watched it a second time, and though I still loved it, the near ecstasy I experienced watching it the first time just wasn't there. And it's telling that I have had no such flirtation for my second viewing of 127 Hours. I've intellectually contemplated the idea that I should want to see it again, and thought about it in that respect, but it hasn't gone any further. And it's not that I'm squeamish over "the scene," which was actually one of my favorite parts in terms of the visceral intensity that makes me love movies. I just can't be bothered to prioritize a second viewing.

But my second Social Network viewing was so hard to resist that I finally broke down and borrowed it from the library yesterday. Truth is, I hadn't even been planning to go the library at all, but I had my son out on a walk and wanted to kill some extra time, to give my wife (sick at home) a little more downtime before we returned. Not only did I come away with The Social Network, but it made its way into the DVD player that very night, when my wife retired early due to her aforementioned physical malady.

I loved it again -- probably not more than the first time, but probably about the same amount. Especially the first half.

See, the first half contains all the Rooney Mara parts.

The old acting adage "There are no small parts, just small actors" certain applies to Mara. She's only in two scenes in this movie -- well, three, if you count her brief reaction shot to reading Mark Zuckerberg's blog post about her. And you should count that scene, because the look of indignant, hurt, disbelieving betrayal in her eyes, as they well up with tears, is itself a clinic on acting. The fact that I require so many adjectives to describe her performance in that one shot means that this girl has got chops, chops out the wazoo.

Which is why, of course, David Fincher cast "this girl" to be his Girl. When I spoke about visceral intensity in terms of Aron Rolston cutting off his arm in 127 Hours, that has a fairly literal interpretation. But visceral intensity can come in less obvious forms, and Rooney Mara is certainly one of them. There's something about her eyes that just penetrate through to the truth of any matter, and those eyes are going to tear people to shreds in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

But it's not just the reunion of director and actress that makes me excited for the Hollywood remake of Stieg Larsson's most famous novel. Don't forget a third essential collaborator who will be back for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo -- Trent Reznor, who won an Oscar (which he graciously shared with Atticus Ross) for his Social Network score.

That was another part of my second Social Network viewing that I really loved -- hearing Reznor's music, which I've heard many times on my ipod, in the context of the movie once again. The way those songs are interwoven into the action is simply chilling, particularly the two memorable uses of "Hand Covers Bruise" -- when Zuckerberg jogs back across the Harvard campus after getting dumped, and when Eduardo Saverin gets all up in his face after seeing his shares diluted down to worthlessness. I was enjoying the music so much that I pumped up the volume on the wireless headphones, far beyond the level that would have been needed for me to hear the dialogue.

It's appropriate that I should have just watched The Social Network a second time on the heels of a month in which I watched three movies from Hammer Studios, two of which featured director Terence Fisher, two of which featured actor Christopher Lee, and all three of which featured actor Peter Cushing. It's increasingly rare these days that you see collaborators work together with such frequency as they did back then. Oh, you might get an actor who likes working with a director, or even a pair of actors and a director (Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton being one example). But a director, an actor and a composer -- well, that's the kind of teamwork that goes beyond the relationship that exists on opposing sides of the camera.

You wouldn't want to push that kind of thing too far, of course. The most interesting filmmakers are the ones who test their boundaries by collaborating with people who can expand their artistic vision in differing ways. After all, does anyone think the Depp-Bonham Carter-Burton partnership has an ounce of fertility still in it?

But I'm just glad I've got at least one more film in the Mara-Fincher-Reznor partnership to look forward to.

I haven't been able to determine if there are plans to remake The Girl Who Played With Fire, and if so, whether the same principal talents would be involved. Perhaps it depends on the success of the first movie, due out next month. And even if successful, perhaps Fincher would not consider it a challenge to reprise as director. His only other experience making a sequel -- Alien 3, which was of course not a sequel to his own movie -- was an unmitigated failure. I could easily see Mara staying but Fincher and Reznor exiting. Actors often have sequels written into their contracts, whereas directors and (certainly) composers tend not to. (The whole continuity thing, you see.)

So I'll savor The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo when it comes out. The trailers have certainly primed me for that.

And, somewhere down the road, the flirtation will begin again for that third viewing of The Social Network.

Girl immersion

It had always been my intention to read Stieg Larsson's novels about Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist. You may have heard of them: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest.

Then after I was done, I'd watch the Swedish movies based on Larsson's wildly popular novels.

I don't normally prioritize such things. If I did, I'd probably watch a lot fewer adaptations. But with these novels, for some reason, I felt it was important. Maybe that's because the novels are considered more of a phenomenon than the movies, and if I wanted to experience the story in its truest form, I should go into the novels fresh.

But then I had to be honest with myself. I'm a really, really slow reader. Not only that, but I barely budget the time for it. It's been so bad that the last new novel I started was almost a year ago, when World War Z was supposed to be my 2010 summer reading. I just couldn't get it into it, but stubbornly refused to abandon it. Finally this past April I allowed myself to move on, to read an old favorite (Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye) to jump start that part of me that likes to read. I read about 200 pages of it on vacation in Mexico ... and about 15 in the 2.5 months since I've been back.

So even if I'd started Larsson's novels when I first got the urge, it's possible all three American remakes of these movies would be released before I'd finished reading.

So I came to the realization that I'm going to be the guy who sees the movies and understands the phenomenon based on that only. Oh well. That's just who I am.

Which cleared the way for us to have a themed watching weekend this past weekend. That's right, we watched The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo on Friday night, The Girl Who Played With Fire on Saturday night and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest on Sunday, thanks to all three being available for streaming on Netflix. And each night prepared a Swedish dinner to go along with the theme.

So instead of honoring the United States on 4th of July weekend, we honored Sweden, even kicking things off on Thursday night with our screening of the Swedish film Together.

The first time we'd used this template was for our Godfather weekend, back in the summer of 2008. On Friday night, we watched The Godfather and my wife made a pasta dinner. On Saturday night, we watched The Godfather Part II and I made a pasta dinner. Then on Sunday night, we ordered pizza, which turned out to be an appropriate level of respect for the vastly inferior Godfather III.

In that case we'd both seen the first Godfather but none of the others. This time, neither of us had seen any of the movies, though my wife did read all three novels. That background provided an interesting contrast for how we might receive the movies.

First let me tell you what we ate. Friday night, since we'd both been working that day, we decided to keep it simple. I stocked up on a trip to the Ikea grocery on Thursday, and that night we had their famous meatballs in their signature gravy, with mashed potatoes on the side. Scrumptious. I was amazed at how well their mashed potatoes cooked up in the microwave. For desert we had Frodinge cakes with raspberry filling and marzipan topping, seen here. They were even better.

Saturday was supposed to be the day I ventured into genuine Swedish cooking, making something both authentic and tasty from scratch. I'd settled on something called Swedish Chanterelle Mushroom Pate. We agreed that the ingredients sounded good, and it was decided. But my trip to the grocery foiled us. I figured I wouldn't find chanterelle mushrooms, and was prepared to accept a substitute. I felt the same about shallots, hoping that scallions could take their place. But when I couldn't find ground pork, and asked my wife if we could just grind pork cutlets in our food processor, she made the wise suggestion that this recipe just wasn't meant to be. So we shifted our planned Sunday night dinner to Saturday night: Smoked salmon and cream cheese on toast with a salad.

Saturday may have been noteworthy for a different thing we did not eat: herring in mustard sauce. I'd procured a jar from Ikea and we intended to eat it on something called Skorpor Fullkorn, which is a pretty flavorless crusty oat bread, at happy hour time. However, I could only stomach a single slice, at which point we threw out the herring sauce without my wife even trying it. Hey, there's a reason herring is not more popular. At least the Swedish cheese I'd picked up livened up the Skorpor Fullkorn.

We also had our only Swedish themed drink on Saturday night, when my wife made a vodka drink with lingonberry syrup over crushed ice. She flavored it with lime and ginger and it was delicious. Our desert was also good, a Swedish chocolate almond cake, but it could not live up to the standard set by the Frodinge cake from the night before.

I determined not to let the whole weekend go without preparing a Swedish meal from scratch, but we cheated a bit on Sunday night. Wanting to use up some leftover ingredients, we made something called Pasta Med Ost Och Skinka, which just translates as "Pasta with Smoked Ham and Cheese." It ended up seeming more Italian than Swedish, but we got it from an online Swedish cookbook, so it counts. We ate it with garlic toast and the whole meal was pretty yummy. And for desert we relished the remaining two Frodinge cakes.

To close out our consumption of Swedish foods, we had Swedish pancakes with lingonberry preserves on Monday morning. Man, were they good. They were like something you'd get from a creperie, and a good one at that.

Oh, I suppose you'd like to know what I thought of the movies. Warning, thar be spoilers ahead.

First off, since there were three books before Larsson died, that made me naturally think "trilogy." I now know that perhaps there were other Lisbeth Salander adventures planned, and possibly even a fourth unpublished manuscript. Knowing that might have changed my expectations going in. As they were, my expectations were that events set up early in Dragon Tattoo might not fully pay off until the end of Hornets' Nest. As those of you who read the books or saw the movies will know, it doesn't exactly work that way. The second and third stories have a lot to do with each other, but the first has little to do with either of the others. I guess that was sort of a disappointing realization as I went on in the films, because the first story is the most interesting in terms of a traditional mystery, where Salander plays the role I expected of her most (a hacker investigating things that might get her into trouble). In the second and third movies, she's either on the run or already captured, and I felt like neither of these is the best use of her as a character.

Overall I found the films to be more like extended procedural television programs than real movies. However, I wouldn't call this a criticism, as I was interested the whole time. I guess I say this because they generally have a small amount of action and a large amount of talking, meaning they were easy to complete under shorter production schedules -- though I still don't know how all three movies came out in Sweden in the year 2009. That seems nearly impossible.

As with most people, I really liked Noomi Rapace as Salander and Michael Nyqvist as Blomkvist. However, I found it strange that they spend most of the series apart from each other, with Salander basically disavowing her eternal champion for the last two chapters of the series. It's consistent with the books, I'm told, but it's a curious narrative choice in any case. Each has interesting stories and each has big moments in terms of taking down the bad guys, but they interweave only a few times after the end of Dragon Tattoo. I have to conclude that this was a problem for me on some level.

During the weekend I told a friend that I thought the events of the series would be more epic than they were, but later realized that the events are more epic than I was giving them credit for. In fact, it's damn near operatic in the sense that Salander's father, Alexander Zalachenko, is trying to kill her as revenge for her trying to kill him when she was a child. (He abused her mother, you see.) Not only that, but he's doing it with the help of her heretofore unknown half-brother, a huge, hulking man with a congenital disease that prevents him from feeling pain. So I guess it's the execution that leaves things feeling less epic than they should. As I said previously, there's a lot of talking and a lot of plot development, and while most if it is interesting and some of it is easy to follow, the lack of big set pieces gives it something of a smaller scale. I guess that's what some people like about the movies. Me, I appreciated that aspect, the sense that most of the things that happened could actually happen -- with the exception of a rather unbelievable occurrence at the end of the second film. However, it did make the whole thing feel a bit less cinematic to me.

One thing I found interesting is that the movies were each over two hours long, yet I did not get bored nor check my watch. The drama is kinetic enough that it keeps you involved even though it isn't "exciting" in the traditional sense. I do have to admit that we got a later start on Sunday, and eventually I just couldn't stay awake any longer (it had already been a busy weekend). So I watched the last 24 minutes of the series over coffee the next morning.

Even though I probably liked The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo the best -- I think that's also the story readers connect to most -- I did find its twist to be somewhat strange. The investigation by Salander and Blomkvist is designed to uncover who may have murdered Harriet Vanger. Turns out, they do find a murderer in the Vanger family, even though the reason they started looking for him -- the presumption that he killed Harriet, whose body was never found -- turns out not to be the case at all. In fact, they find Harriet alive at the end, living in Australia. Does that mean there's something less valid about the clues they've been amassing through the story? It almost ends up seeming like they found a murderer by dumb luck.

A former journalist myself, I liked the series' old-school casting of a journalist as a hero. These days, it seems that members of the media are treated with great suspicion in Hollywood -- they tend to be venal villains who only want to gum up the works. Nowadays, if you want to have a character turn the establishment upside down and risk his/her own safety to find the truth, you usually cast a cop or a private eye in that role. Glad to see Larsson make Blomkvist a genuine hero whose brilliant detective work is in service of no other gain than punishing the wicked and clearing the names of the innocent.

I felt the non-Hollywood ways of these films in other ways, such as the fact that many of the cases being discussed were cold cases to an extreme degree, involving people who were now extremely old. In a story that originated in Hollywood, the Harriet Vanger disappearance would be something that happened recently. Here, it happened in 1966, more than 40 years earlier. I don't think it detracts from the story, it's just curious to note.

I shouldn't close this piece without a word or two about Noomi Rapace. I thought she did great work, reminding me of a young Gina Gershon. I loved the way she gave Salander a hard shell, but not an impenetrable one. One way to interpret this role would be to have her be some kind of badass superhero who just goes around kicking the asses of people who deserve it. In fact, maybe that's what I was expecting. Since I was familiar with the poster for Hornets' Nest, specifically Salander's hairstyle, I guess I was expecting her to have some kind of rampaging Travis Bickle moment at the end, where she goes in shooting, expecting not to come out alive. I think these movies deserve credit for being more life-sized than that, and Rapace deserves credit for bringing subtleties to her characterization that may not have been required, or that a lesser director wouldn't have asked for. There are pretty evident stylistic differences between Niels Arden Oplov (who directed the first film) and Daniel Alfredson (who directed the last two), but both directors get a consistent portrayal out of Rapace, who seems to have really thought about this character and lived the ostentatious details of her life. I'll be eager to see if Rooney Mara can do the same when David Fincher's version of Dragon Tattoo comes out in December.

Is there probably more I could say? Yeah. But have I said enough? Yeah.