The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

CHICAGO – With David Fincher’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” hitting theaters today, there seems to be no better time to revisit the Swedish trilogy that set arthouses on fire last year and appreciate these films from a new angle. Music Box Films recently released a lavish Blu-ray box set with extended editions of all three films along with a complete disc of bonus material. The set includes two hours of footage, detailed material from the books that fans of the bestselling trilogy probably longed for when they first saw them. Now, your vision of Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist can be more complete.

CHICAGO – Shouldn’t it be called the “Millennium Trilogy”? Or the “Girl Trilogy”? Only the first movie has the words “Dragon Tattoo” in it. Anyway, I’m being picky. Whatever you call it, the three foreign films adapted from Stieg Larsson’s uber-successful series have been now included in one box set that should appeal to fans of the books hoping to have their favorite series in one place.

CHICAGO – One of the biggest pop culture stories of 2010 has to be the various incarnations of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. As millions read the books on their way back and forth to work and David Fincher prepares to turn them into star-making vehicles for Rooney Mara, the foreign-language film versions of the books have been released in theaters and the middle story, “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” was recently released on Blu-ray and DVD.

CHICAGO – Now that the third and final installment of Stieg Larsson’s posthumously published, phenomenally popular book series has been turned into a feature film, the questions emerges: ‘Was it worth it?’ To the worldwide box office and the creatively bankrupt Hollywood, of course it was. But were moviegoers truly satisfied by the experience?