The Girl Who

Well, last night I finished The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second book of Stieg Larsson's thriller trilogy about Swedes who have sex with everybody.  I enjoyed it (and could hardly put it down), though I understand criticisms that too much of the plot relied on coincidences.  Too frequently, a character just happened to be in the right place at the right time to see some important event.

 

Now I just need to read the final book to be free of this monkey.

 

I'll probably watch the Swedish movies, and I'm also interested in the American remake of the first movie, which might be out by next Christmas.  It will be set in Sweden, like the books and the previous movies, but this to me presents an aesthetic problem that I think about from time to time with movies.

 

If it's an American film intended for U.S. audiences, how will they do the language?  Most likely, they'll film it in English.  But will the characters have Swedish accents?  If they are filming it in English, why would they bother with the Swedish accents?  Will they adopt some sort of neutral-sounding blend of British and Midwestern U.S. accent?  That sounds like the best policy to me, assuming it would just take too much effort to get the cast to learn all their lines in Swedish.

 

The accent thing bothers me from time to time.  If they are supposed to be speaking in English, but they have an accent, that's fine; and if they are presumed by the audience to be speaking in another tongue, and they don't have any clearly defined (to me) accent, that works for me, too; but if it suddenly dawns on me that they are supposed to be speaking in their native language, but they are delivering their lines in English, and the director is making them adopt a foreign accent, it starts to bug me.