The Daily Grand and Sundry

“Män Som Hatar Kvinnor” is the original title, in Swedish, of a Swedish  film currently in release, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO.

The Swedish title is more, well….. appropriate , “Män som hatar kvinnor” – “Men Who Hate Women”.

It is a great film.

Three general impressions

A) THE LOSS OF THE YOUNG GIRL For some strange reason this film reminded me of the Australian film, Peter Weir’s PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK, and Ingmar Bergman’s THE VIRGIN SPRING. The films give you young girls of beauty, kindness and promise, then they are disappeared.

An amputee who has lost his leg always imagines he can feel the lost leg, even when it is gone; that is how the world reacts when young girls are snatched away from life before fulfillment.  Society is use to losing young men before maturity, that is what 5,000 years of war has been about; but there is still  poignant pain in the collective heart when a young girl is denied  dance lessons, grand balls, romance, courtship, a wedding, childbirth. The community’s  heart is amputated.

The death of a young girl abbreviates the life off all of us, it is like nurturing water being poured into the sand for no reason. There is nothing more powerful in literature than the death or disappearance of a young girl. Thornton Wilder knew what he was doing when he killed off  EMILY WEBB in OUR TOWN.

The history of Western civilization has been very simple, young men are replaceable, young women are irreplaceable. 

B) VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

This Swedish film contains the most violent, abusive scene against women since the French film,  IRREVERSIBLE. In that debased French film, the gorgeous Monica Bellucci is violated to a disgusting extreme in a Paris underpass.

The original Swedish title is much more accurate in encapsulating the film’s themes than the American title, which is a cuddly platitude. The theme of the film is about MEN WHO HATE WOMEN. In the first thirty minutes there are three violent incidents against the female protagonist.

She is beaten, seemingly randomly, by a group of male thugs in a underpass, while all the civilized people in Sweden stand around or go about their civilized business, without interfering.

The origin of the film is a Swedish novel by the late Stieg Larsson, a left wing Swedish journalist( think the personfication of all those milquetoast left wing talking heads on MSNBC, with a Swedish accent).

Some analysts and critics say all this violence is the writer’s hidden male fantasies finally given voice.  That the violence in the art is drawn from the author’s twisted pornographic fantasy life.

I beg to differ. I think what Larsson was after was revelatory; that underneath all this modernity, civilization, and social welfare, just under the surface is a brutality and meanness toward women worthy of Faulkner. His violence is not some Norman Mailer crap, but Faulknerian. Men, the male, whether  he is a gang banger, or thug, or baseball player or Swedish millionaire, just can’t get over savagery toward women.

One more point about the depiction of violence toward women in this film, it is very shocking. It is shocking for an unique cultural reason. After a decade of slight petite, tiny women beating up or knocking out husky men with just one punch( think Holly Hunter on SAVING GRACE or BUFFY); it is shocking to see the real limits of women’s physical power in a fight between an average woman and a husky, slightly out of shape man.

The violence toward women in this film has not been politically scrubbed to show empowered women. As a brain washed audience, we are conditioned to empowered women, who know karate, and kung fu; it is unnerving and shocking to see how much physical damage a middle aged man can do on a young fit woman.

The violence in this film is shocking because it is a truthful depiction.

I understand this film will be remade shortly into an American version, in which probably, the violent scenes will be re-crafted so the female will have untold physical power. If they do that, those scenes of the true nature of violence against women will lose their power and impact.

C)ThE FILM ITSELF

It was a great joy to see new and different locales on the screen(it was shot in Sweden), with new and vibrant Viking faces.

The female lead, LISBETH was played by  Noomi Rapace. WOW

Her performance was perfect, perfect, perfect and then pluperfect.

She gave her character the following traits: toughness, sexiness, vulnerability,brains,energy,wit,care,bewilderment.

And then, more than that, she made the leather jacketed, motorcycle riding, sodomized, bisexual, tattooed, nose pierced brat a Knight Errant, a Defender of Justice. It was the most amazing female performance I have seen in an eon.

When the male lead falls in love with her(a nifty performance by Michael Nyqvist), he first falls for her  photographic memory then her sheer competence. Memo to young women, Competence is sexy.

He captures the total bewilderment of modern men as they deal with these forces of nature,  modern women. His character   has a great line in he film, addressed to the girl after love making, when she asks him to leave “How did you get like this?”

That is the modern male lament.

How do you control modern women, obviously not by tradition, nor money, nor social mores.

The Men Who Hate Women do it by violence.

The moral of the film is this, better to be a bewildered modern man than an abusive modern man.

I know I am late on this review, but like an idiot I went to see AVATAR first. Catch this Swedish film, if not in the theaters , then when it comes out on DVD.

The American version will only bastardize and denude  it.

Noomi Rapace

“The title is from a biblical passage (1 Corinthians 13) in which seeing through a glass darkly refers to our understanding of God when we are alive; the view will only be clear when we die.” 

It is amazing how many of my former girl friends became born again Christians after their relationship with me. 

Once upon a time, my ex girl friend  took me to a Bible Study Group at The Church On the Way, in Van Nuys, California, which at the time was basically Wewoka, Oklahoma transplanted west. Today, the neighborhood is Zacatecas transplanted north.

The Associate Pastor or Assistant Minister or whatever, was the sweetest little thing I had ever seen, so,spunky. When you are a sinner of my dexterity, you always want to be saved by a religious man of Billy Graham’s statue. But hey, I was in Van Nuys.

In lieu of Billy Graham, who looks like he has seen God, I had one of those energized female soccer .playing religious types. Great legs though. In fact, come to remember, she reminds me  of Sarah Palin, all athletic point guard, barreling forward, with never a reflective thought on the horizon

The first few sessions, I was abnormally quiet, as we discussed the Bible, I kept thnking about  Luther discovering God while sitting on a toilet.

One dark and stormy night the Assistant Spiritual Leader asked me, “Tell us Gerald, what does Christ mean to you?”

My ex had forewarned me that this question was coming, so I had canned some pablum to regurgitate;but you don’t lie in church.

So I misplaced the pablum.

“Thank God for Christ, for without Christ we would have to deal with God alone, and God is the most frightening thing EVER. God is a rock star, I mean the first lyric ever of his song is ‘I AM WHO I AM.’

Think about that statement, what a declaration of narcissism; but more than that, what a declaration  of power. Not only unlimted power, Hitler had that for a time; but power which will never be diminished by death, ill heath,lousy kids, strokes, Alzheimer’s,defeat,bankruptcy, loss of bowel control. Unlimited power, undiminished forever.

I am not man enough to say God is wicked in and of Himself, but I do say he is cleverly ironic. Take Sodom ; have you ever noted the details of how God destroyed  Sodom?

Sodom is full of Sodomites, gays. God sends two angels down to do the dirty work of destroying Sodom. The angels bump into Abraham;  Abraham gets a deal out of the angels. Sodom will not be destroyed if they, the angels, find ten good people in Sodom.

Now it gets tricky, the angels….you are God, so you can make the saving angels look like anyone or anything  you want…the Judging angels could be dogs, could be birds, could be women, could be hags, could be Oprah and Joan Rivers….you could make them anyone/anything you want.

But God sends angels into Sodom with the appearnce of Ricky Martin and Rupert Everett, or for my older readers Rock Hudson and Dirk Bogarde.  He sends angels in the guise of beautiful men, into a city of gays, to test the reaction of the gays.

My attorney friends would call that entrapment.

I cannot say God is wicked, but I will say he is wickedly clever.

And all that stands between us, and this wickedly clever entity is Jesus; and all that stands beside us before this wickedly clever God is Jesus.  We are defnseless before God without Jesus.

Before Jesus there is no mercy nor compassion in this world; it is all Caesar killing the Gauls. After Jesus there is some mercy, not much, but some.

Mercy in not a human invention; mercy is a divine invention. Mercy was invented by Jesus.

This is what Jesus means to me, I am afraid of God; I am not afraid of the Nazarene.”

When I was done there was an unearthly hush in the room, the hush of how in the hell did we let this heretic in the building. I sneaked a glance at my ex, and she conveyed total disappointment in me.

I sat down, proud of myself, at least I did not present God as a spider.

“Through a Glass Darkly (Swedish: Såsom i en spegel) is a  Swedish film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman,”

“The door opened, but the god was a spider. He came up to me and I saw his face. It was a terrible, stony face. He scrambled up and tried to penetrate me, but I defended myself. All along I saw his eyes. They were cold and calm. When he couldn’t penetrate me, he continued up my chest, up into my face and onto the wall. I have seen God”

It is Jesus who defends us from the spider.

The JEOPARDY Question for the Day.

Who is a classically trained flutist? (trained at North Texas State, and Bren, Czech Republic), film maker ( her short THE SILENCE AFTER is a film festival film about the dilemma of women married to venal men)? and actor(the film IRENE IN TIME, with her co-starring,  is currently in theatrical release, her film, in which she stars, SLICES, just came out on DVD, and she just wrapped a starring role in the film noir thriller, THE CONFESSION)?

answer

KELLY DeSARLA

I first met Kelly as a screenwriter, she had written a very funny yet poignant comedy-thriller about four American women who, while on vacation in Spain, get caught up in the end of the world, 2012.

I liked the screenplay a lot, it has New Age mythology, Mayan myths, an a lot of scenes with women in bikinis.

I have also heard her play the flute, and she is better than MARTIN PRINCE, (the only other flutist I know).

I have seen her act on stage in Henry Jaglom’s ALWAYS BUT NOT FOREVER.

As someone who sees a lot of actors, on a lot of days, I can asure you we are in an age of  diminishing choices, REALITY Tv has over whelmed the art. So many modern actors always act as if they are always on camera, there is NO INTIMACY outside of their love affair with the camera, either real or imagined.

They think themselves interesting,not the characters they protray.

Kelly DeSarla is a throwback, to the birth of modern acting, Ingmar Bergman.

“In Henry Jaglom’s Bergmanesque marital comedy, ‘Always - But Not Forever’” Kelly DeSarla gives a “sweet and affecting turn” as “Dinah’s rigid best pal, Lucy”

- Paul Birchall, LA Weekly

The key word in that quote is BERGMANESQUE, which is dead on accurate. Mr. Jaglom is the leading exponent of Bergmanesque among our current crop of film makers/playwrights. And Kelly has delivered, exposing the sweet kernel of modern women, overwhelmed by the unrelenting demands of modern womanhood. Fresh and unscripted.

Kelly DeSarla is “sobering” as Lucy, Dinah’s married friend who is “so bonded to her baby that she is indifferent to her husband’s needs. . . The acting feels fresh and unscripted, full of amusing behavioral tics and nuances.

- Jay Reiner, The Hollywood Reporter

Fresh and unscripted… what a compliment to an actor, so many actors now are unscripted in the REALITY TV mode, always playing to the camera, even when there is no camera. Kelly has stepped back to a Golden Age of acting, where the actors interacted with the script and made the scripted scene, unscripted.

Reality TV acting has made the unscripted, scripted.

Henry Jaglom is a great American artist, working the Henry James/Ingmar Bergman vein of humanistic discovery. His film, IRENE IN TIME, is currently in theaters. It is a devastating look at the back stories of all those inane REALITY TV contestants. He has caught their pulse.

In it, Kelly gives a seasoned, and ripe performance as the lesbian who has a great deal of issues with her reprobate recovering, not so recovering, drug addict of a father, played by David Proval of THE SOPRANOS.

 . Kelly and David Proval from IRENE IN TIME, ,

What is it about Kelly DeSarla? Is it the way she holds a moment in her unpredictable way or the way one can trust her never to betray her own truth? Maybe it’s all that fresh beauty or her unusual gaze. Whatever it is, you’ll find it hard to turn your head away from the screen.” ..Karen Black,Academy Award Nominee, Golden Globe Winner.

Ms. Black cut her acting chops working with Jack Nicholson, Burgess Meredith, Lee Remick, James Coburn, Gene Hackman, she knows that Kelly could maintain herself with the best.

So I recommend actors watch her work, and the public enjoy her films.

 HENRY JAGLOM’S IRENE IN TIME