Män som hatar kvinnor

was the original Swedish title of Stieg Larsson's best-selling first novel in the Millennium trilogy. Translate it into English and you get "Men Who Hate Women."

However us in the English speaking world know the novel and subsequent movie as "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" due to marketing purposes and I'm sure also because mainstream media doesn't have a backbone.

I saw the movie a few days ago at my beloved dollar theatre because there wasn't much of selection this week and it had a good score on rotten tomatoes. I really love the dollar theatre because I see a lot of movies that I wouldn't normally risk to see at movie theatres for $8 or rent on DVD and
"Män som hatar kvinnor" was no exception.

I don't like watching movies about murders or crime drama or psychopaths because I don't derive entertainment from watching such an ugly side of humanity.

However I was really impressed by this movie. It explores pretty heavy stuff like violence against women and Nazism. Stieg Larsson was a journalist for a Communist newspaper in Sweden just like his character Mikael Blomkvist and wrote what he thought were prevalent stains in the fabric of Swedish society... or so wikipedia informed me.

Goodness knows I don't often see a Hollywood movie with a solid narrative. Not sure if I can explain what it is that felt better than most movies I see... Everything came together in it.... character motivations etc. and I wasn't left feeling the obvious holes in the plot. It's really hard to get a good sense of a character in 2ish hours but this movie really pulled it off. HOLLYWOOD TAKE NOTES!

Oh, and did I mention Hollywood is already gearing up to do the English language version?
Is it that strenuous to read subtitles? No!! get a grip English-speaking world!

NPR: 'Dragon Tattoo' Has Designs On U.S. Audiences

Black and White

I love looking at old photos especially ones from the time when photography first was popularized. They have a really eerie quality to them that's fascinating to me. 


In early portraits its cool to look at how different the style of dress was and compare the idiosyncrasies of fashion back then to today.

The Sartorialist is doing a contest on his blog about old photographs that display fashion. Check out his blog - there are much better photographs there than I can supply on my blog. Fear of copyright infringement leads me to choose from safe avenues like Wikipedia or the Life photo archive (which consists of mainly famous, widely circulated photos) so I won't get into trouble.


I wonder when people started doing the whole "smile into the camera thing" because when you look at early portrait photography the people aren't usually looking directly at the camera, much less smiling into it, which adds to the eerie-ness factor. 


I did find some Civil War era photos that show more of an acknowledgment of the camera. Maybe it has something to do with the proximity of the subject to the camera. If you're closer to it, it makes it harder to ignore?

Then there are old photographs that you see and you feel something, a palpable sense of time and place. A photo that elicits emotion and reflection:

That image of Abe Lincoln gets to me. A towering figure in the picture (and in American history for that matter) he's also the one that seems the least defined...

Then from still photography came film- "moving pictures".  Below is the first known film recorded. The user on youtube describes it well if you wanna know more about it!

In the decades proceeding the first known film came Hollywood and the star system. The star system in turn produced iconic photographs of movie stars that adolescents admire in their bedrooms and that fashionistas drool over for their displays of style.

After the classic Hollywood period color came into photos and film and something changed with that. Color does something to images, to people that I can't really explain. The shadows in early photographs created not only an eerieness but established a sense of distance from people living then to those in the modern era because of the odd quality it gave to human figures.  There's something about color that distracts from human subjects and glosses them over... as if black and white photography shows truth more than color?

Genius Award

aka MacArthur Fellowship gives $500,000 (given over 5 years) to Americans who "show exceptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced creative work."


The fellowship is funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which might be familiar to all you listen to NPR, specifically the list of its sponsors. The foundation began after billionaire banker John D. MacArthur died in 1978 and left 92% of his estate to begin it. It's one of the largest philanthropic organizations in the U.S. and is based in Chicago! The foundation (under its General Program, the same program that supports journalistic institutions like NPR) thus gives grants to arts and cultural programs within the Windy City.


For this fellowship, you don't apply. Rather, anonymous people nominate you to an anonymous selection committee who then notifies you that you won by a nice phone call. :)


Last year the award was given to a diverse group of professionals including a poet, an investigative reporter, an evolutionary biologist, an economist, a painter, a papermaker, and an ornithologist among others.


I first heard about the fellowship when I watched Synecdoche, New York, the first film Charlie Kaufman directed. The main character in the movie receives the fellowship (he's a playwright) and uses it to construct a play about his life, meticulously creating sets that mirror the places he and the people in his life go and hiring actors to live it out. The project goes on for years and you can see how the people, who are the project's focus, age as it seemingly fails to come to fruition. The film itself got mixed reviews - it's long and complicated and weird, but I enjoyed it. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the main character Cayden, a brilliant man though he goes about his life in lacluster, fearful way that is pretty pathetic. I never warmed up to him as a character... Come to think of it, one of the few if any characters in the movie that the audience can like is Samantha Morton's character who serves as Cayden's companion. She is the light of the story, all the other people make you remember how much people suck. Despite the lack of heart-warming characters (does that say anything about Kaufman's view of humanity?) it was a really interesting, complex story let alone movie to make. Tell me what you think when you watch the film (which I hope you do)!


Watch the trailer! see if you can tell when he's using the fellowship!

I think the idea for the fellowship is amazing. I was looking up some of the fellows' previous work today and it's all inspiring and amazing work! I want to try to apply for a Fulbright Student Grant within the coming year, so it's exciting for me to see how programs similar to the Fulbright program work and give people the opportunity to do great work that may have otherwise gone undone.