Various

Despite April being a poor choice of month for the release of a vampire film set in winter-bound Stockholm, I saw Let the Right One In on Monday evening. The film has had a clutch of very good reviews, and which I am happy to say it thoroughly deserves them, being a good-looking, well-acted, well put together, interesting, intelligent, and moving film. The changes from the book are largely omissions of sub-plot and backstory to produce a two hour film*, which happily involves removing a gross-out scene that I really hoped would go, but the core is very much there. The author of the original novel states that he did not start writing it as a vampire book, but that it became one, and I think this shows in the best possible way. It isn't a horror story, nor a story merely "made with vampires", but simulatneously an essential part of the heart of the work and an illumination of the surrounding themes.

Go and see it before the Hollywood re-make.

( Cut for possible spoiler )

*There should be more two hour films. There should be more 90 minute ones.

**Something which the foreign viewer might just say about the 1980s setting in the film, though not the book.

Finally, I don't really understand Dreamwidth - it is the annoying way of things that the very basic explanations happen at a point when you ignore them because they don't seem important yet - and thus I managed to miss all the hand-outs to free accounts. But if anyone has spares going, I'd be grateful.