Trailer Hitch

By Eric Hughes

February 17, 2010

He's going to regret this so much. She's not one to anger.

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Welcome to Trailer Hitch, BOP's look at the latest movie trailers to hit the Internet. This week: Aldous Snow is back!, an international bestseller is adapted for the screen and Ashton Kutcher shows Katherine Heigl his guns.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Opens March 19th

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is such a complex and sprawling novel that it's amazing to me that a theatrical adaptation could even be made. Even though the film clocks in at a hefty 2.5 hours, scenes and likely entire plotlines must have been removed to ensure the movie maintained a more standard runtime. With that said, I'm still grateful an adaptation was even attempted as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which I finally got around to reading last month, ranks high on my list of favorite books.




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In its native tongue, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's true title would be Men Who Hate Women. Much of its story is brutal and very frightening. And once some necessary exposition is out of the way, author Stieg Larsson spins his story in a direction I did not expect. Set in Sweden, the story concerns an investigative journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, who is hired by the patriarch of a wealthy family to solve the disappearance of his great-niece, who went missing some 40 years ago. I have a feeling that the adaptation skips over Henrik Vanger's other assignment for Blomkvist, so there's no use in getting into that here.

As for the trailer, what we're spoon-fed here is pretty compelling. Noomi Rapace, who plays Lisbeth Salander (the titular Girl with the Dragon Tattoo character), very much looks like the Lisbeth I imagined while reading Larsson's text. So at least that much was done right.

I hesitate to put The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in the same category as a book like The Shadow of the Wind, as the latter may be the best book I've ever read. Though for people who enjoyed Carlos Ruiz Zafon's masterwork, it's worth noting that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is just as epic and exciting. Both books – plot-wise – couldn't be more dissimilar. Yet both tomes share some significant resemblances, including similarities in structure (multi-generational storytelling), number of characters (it may be wise to take notes), critical acclaim and deserved success as international bestsellers.

Grade: B

Get Him to the Greek – Opens June 4th

A spin-off from Jason Segel's Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him to the Greek stars Brit Russell Brand as the infamous Aldous Snow, a character you may remember from Forgetting Sarah Marshall who has just a few days time to get ready for a reunion show at Los Angeles' Greek Theater. Jonah Hill, who was also in Sarah Marshall, plays a different character entirely. This time around, he's a record company intern who's charged with flying to London, connecting with Aldous and escorting him to Los Angeles. Besides the concert, Aldous' other interest in Los Angeles is reuniting with Jackie Q (Damages' Rose Byrne), a scandal-plagued pop star.


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