Film review time...

The rabbit has been to the cinema on two consecutive Saturdays. The first cinematic excursion was to see the latest Leonardo Di Caprio vehicle, Inception. Here follows a short rabbit review:

Don't. Bother. It's. Bollocks.

Trust this clarifies matters.

I had wondered if it was a generational thing, but the rabbit's companions for the evening included a 23 year old and he was bored by it too. The rabbit managed to fall asleep half way through the film, which was quite an achievement as it is noisy in the extreme.

The rabbit was a bit slow out of the blocks in catching his second cinema experience last Saturday, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. This film is not bollocks. It is about as unbollocks as you can get. The still above is the splendidly named Noomi Rapace as the tattoed one. The film is in Swedish and is with subtitles. It doesn't matter. By way of brief background, the film is adapted from the first of a trilogy of crime novels by Stieg Larsson who died aged 50 in 2004 having left behind three completed but unpublished manuscripts. Of course they were published posthumously and were a huge commercial success. Unsurprisingly an ugly brawl over his estate arose but that's by the by. I'm told by someone that the book of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is better than the film. In which case it must be seriously good. I shall investigate.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (film version) was a huge success in continental Europe before being released in England in (I think) March so the rabbit was abit slow out of the blocks as regards seeing it in the cinema. The second and third parts of the trilogy have already been filmed and, after testing the waters with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the second part of the trilogy The Girl Who Played With Fire is about to be released. A slightly (and unfairly) sniffy review in the Guardian summarises the film as 'a forensic procedural with explicit violence, sex, sexual violence, violent sex and crime-scene photos of the sort that were once never shown, then just glimpsed and now blandly (sic) lingered over in every detail' It's - well - forensic and maybe the rabbit's work hardens him to the kind of thing complained of but - although violence against women is a difficult subject for fiction - this is a work of high quality and merits more than the kind of approach exemplified in the quote.

So as a non-spoiling (go and see it!) summary, the plot goes something like this: Michael Blomkvist is a reporter facing jail time (wrongfully) for criminal libel. He is hired by a wealthy industrialist to solve the mystery of a niece who disappeared, presumed murdered, in 1966. By a somewhat contrived device, Blomkvist was babysat by the missing niece. He sets about investigating the seemingly impenetrable mystery of the niece's disappearnce and uncovers a string of hate crimes, teams up with an emotionally troubled but beautiful computer hacker called Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace), the tattooed girl of the title. As to the rest, as I said, go see it.

To totally change the mood and because it came to mind, here is the Beach Boys' Surfer Girl - a summery sound for a summer that, at least here, started off very promisingly but failed to really deliver. And now there's not much more left of it. Almost time to get out the raincoats.