Two films

I saw two films yesterday which couldn't have been more different in style and in content: 'The girl who played with fire' and 'Serious Moonlight'.

The first film ('GPF') is, of course, the second installment of the 'Millenium Trilogy', about which I seem to have written quite a lot. The film was in Swedish, but I'm used to reading sub-titles, so this wasn't a problem (Hollywood has only made a version of the first book so far). Fortunately, the film makers read the book and edited the multiple storylines into something much more understandable; the film runs for almost exactly two hours. In fact, I'm not sure whether the film makers dumbed down the book too much; knowing the story allows my mind to fill in any details which might have been missing from the film. Otherwise it was a faithful rendition of the story and was executed well. Not very much coffee drinking and protagonist Blom­k­vist didn't get much bedroom action.

The second film is a newish film (2009) of Meg Ryan. Co-starring is Timothy Hutton, who was Ryan's fiance in 'French Kiss'; maybe this film is the sequel to that earlier film - at least, had Ryan married Hutton, instead of Kevin Kline. The first hour of the film was tolerable, but after that it completely degenerated and finished a mere twenty minutes later. It's as if a whole section of the story had been left out. I felt short changed at the end of the film, and its good parts in no way compensate for the exceedingly weak ending. This is definitely not a film worth seeking! 

Ryan and Hutton are supposed to be a couple who have been married for thirteen years; at one stage, there is a flashback to their wedding party and some wedding photos are shown. Fair enough, but the two actors don't seem to have aged since their wedding (in other words, they look exactly the same in the flashbacks as they do 'today'). Had the producers bothered a bit more, they might have tried to get some pictures of Ryan and Hutton from their earlier film - they definitely look younger then!