For the twelve people who haven’t heard of Stieg Larsson, he is the Swedish journalist turned novelist who wrote the ‘Millennium trilogy’, a phenomenally successful crime series which has sold over 3 million copies world wide. The first book, ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’, was adapted onto the silver screen over a year ago, and has grossed about $100 million worldwide since then. Larsson tragically died in 2004 before his books were published so was unable to see what a phenomenon he had created. However, it has also been rumoured that Larsson left half finished manuscripts on his computer, so we might yet witness the release of more books and films by this talented thriller writer. Having heard all about the hype, this reporter settled down in the balmy French countryside to read all three books as ‘research’ for reviewing the DVD. How’s that for dedication?

‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ follows Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) as they try to solve a 40 year old mystery. Henrik Vanger, the retired head of a Swedish industrial dynasty, wants to learn more about the disappearance of his favourite niece Harriet and hires recently disgraced reporter Blomkvist to help him. The film becomes very dark very quickly as Blomkvist and Salander delve into the hidden secrets and lives of the Vanger family, all of which are suspected to be involved in the disappearance. Director Niels Arden Oplev keeps very close to the original material, even including the disturbing sexual and religious aspects that could have been downplayed by a less daring director. Larsson himself was an expert in right wing, anti-democratic extremism and Nazi organisations, and to ignore the more disturbing aspects of his book would have been an insult to its fans. Thus, many scenes are necessarily graphic, and the 18 rating strongly hints at some of the horrors you might witness; even pre-warned readers will find certain scenes hard to watch – they are far more hard hitting than words on a page.

The stand-out character in ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ is Lisbeth Salander. Lisbeth is different, very different, to most heroines. She lacks the usual beauty of the girl-next door or the femme fatale, instead sporting the grunge look with an all black outfit and multiple piercings and tattoos. She is a social outsider, but has computer skills (amongst other talents) like no one else; she also has a strong sense of justice, an unbreakable will and a violent streak. All of these qualities make her unpredictable and therefore completely interesting to watch. Although Noomi Rapace plays Lisbeth extremely well, the film’s audience cannot understand her as well as readers of the book do. Oplev is unable to get into her head fully through the medium of film, and as a result it is a lot harder for the audience to comprehend the complicated mechanics of her mind and see her as more than just another troubled young woman.

In fact, losing detail in the translation from page to screen seems to be a recurring flaw in the movie. Many minor characters and plot-lines are missed out in order to make the 500 page book into a more streamlined 153 minute film. This, however, means that the story loses a lot of depth and characterisation, and at times it feels that you don’t really get to know any of the characters that have been left in, particularly the two main ones. For instance, Lisbeth’s first guardian and Mikael’s boss both play huge parts in the book in adding dimension to the protagonists, but in the film they do not feature at all. Still, Oplev does certain effective things with the film, such as showing the beautiful scenery of Sweden (one suspects the Swedish tourist board may have been involved at a few points in its creation) as well as having it all filmed in the country’s native language. Oplev also introduces new scenes to tie in with the parts of the story that become jagged due to the loss of minor characters. This is done very effectively so the film adaptation feels closer to ‘Lord of the Rings’ in continuity rather than ‘Harry Potter’. However the great aesthetics don’t counter-balance the slight loss in depth that has occurred due to the editing and alterations.

Overall the film is very good: dark, tense and rewarding. Its a good adaptation of the book and perfect for those who want to experience the story telling of Larsson, but don’t have the time to read the novel. Tragically, our American cousins’ dislike of subtitled films meant that it only grossed $10 million. Predictably, a Hollywood version is on the way. It remains to be seen whether Rooney Mara will be able to pull off unconventional Lisbeth Salander, certainly not if the studio bosses have any creative input. So before the American rehashes grace our theatres, it would be best to check out the original Swedish version on DVD and its sequel, ‘The Girl who Played with Fire’.

OK, I really screwed up this time. I went to interview a major modern pianist without having listened to her work or, indeed, to any modern piano music. It’s people like me who give journalism a bad name.

As luck would have it though, a blagging tongue honed by dozens of tutes got me halfway there, and Lola Perrin’s no-bullshit approach to music brought the interview home.

So who is Lola Perrin? Perrin is the latest pianist to be supported by Steinway, who are to pianos what Hattori Hanzo was to samurai swords. She is a minimalist composer-pianist, with deep roots in jazz. She is collaborating with the heavyweights of the art world – but more on that later. She is also, endearingly, still just a little starstruck by her own rise.

‘There was this one time,’ she says, ‘when I was due to perform at the Teatro dal Verme in Milan. That’s right next to La Scala! And a Bentley was to come and pick us up from the airport, and we were going to stay in a five-star hotel with a, erm, what do you call it?’ – she tries to grab the word out of the air in front of her – ‘a butler.’

She started out on the piano at the age of four. The youngest of six piano-playing siblings, she knew the instrument was hers by right – ‘I hogged it.’ At 13, she was invited along to exhibition classes at the Royal College of Music, and then they gave her the chance to become a concert pianist. She turned it down.

The piano still haunted her. ‘Music picks you,’ she says. ‘A born musician has no choice. You’re completely miserable if you’re not doing it.’ She read Music at university, where she began to take theory very seriously indeed. ‘You had this linear progression from Baroque to Classical to Romantic to, erm, well I suppose you’d call it Impressionism. And then you have Debussy. Debussy destroyed the Western musical form.’

And after Debussy? ‘I guess you could say that Duke Ellington was the next big composer after Debussy.’ For Perrin, jazz is the natural heir to the classical tradition. The other modern schools squandered their heritage: ‘studying a lot of twentieth-century music was very distressing for me. Listening to much of it, I feel like I’m being tortured – you can’t even tell where the end is, it’s sadistic. And when it’s over, people applaud, but I bet they’re just glad it’s finished.’

‘I started to crave narrative,’ she continues. ‘And meaning. In my dreams, the Cohen brothers would come along and make me a 10-minute film.’ She began to crave collaboration, too. As soon as she felt her style had matured, she began to reach out to other artists. ‘I had this sort of VIP list,’ she explains, ‘these artists I admired and wrote to, and only Hanif Kureishi wrote back.’

The riotously successful novelist and scriptwriter’s reply was the start of an intense exchange of emails like something out of a South American novel. ‘He said, ‘I love your tunes.’ And I said, ‘I would love to work with your work.'” Soon, he began sending her Word documents with no explanation, and she began to take them as her inspiration. They only met each other face to face two years later, at a performance of her adaptation of his short story The Dogs. ‘I was so excited,’ she remembers, ‘that I couldn’t sleep.’

‘The first thing he said was ‘we’re going to do The Turd.’ He wasn’t smiling. I remember thinking, ‘I’m a minimalist. I don’t think I can write about turds.’ Luckily it turned out he was joking.’ Since then, the composer and the writer have appeared together onstage at Latitude Festival. Their creative relationship looks set to continue. I hope they fall in love.

Her dream, however, is to write a score for multiple pianos. How many pianos? ‘Many. I’ve already done six. It sounds…like an aural jigsaw.’ She vents a shuddering breath, and her eyes close. ‘It feels so good. It’s the most expressive instrument.’

After the interview, I watch Perrin in concert at my local literary festival. She’s doing things to the Baptist church piano that have never been done to it before. Keys used to banging out ‘When I Needed a Neighbour’ and ‘Shine Jesus, Shine’ are being teased into an electrical storm of shimmering riffs and growling basslines. I find myself wondering if some of this music will linger in the piano and make all the Baptists cry come Sunday morning.

And the music sounds everything that minimalist jazz shouldn’t. It’s expressive, tempestuous, eminently listenable, occasionally a bit naive, yes, but above all this is music with something to say. Like Perrin herself. The music starts to make sense when you’ve met its composer, for there seems to be little difference between her art and her life. I begin to wonder if I didn’t meet the woman and the music the right way round after all…

News of the production of ‘Salt’ first hit the media around the time ‘Changeling’ came out two years ago. Angelina Jolie had finally taken a role in a film that involved more than mere hip swinging and gun firing and – even if she spent the majority of that film just crying and yelling, ‘He’s not my son’ – it was undoubtedly a better choice and performance than anything she had done before. Hence the annoyance that will have come over a lot of people when Jolie, asked in an interview what her next project would be, confessed she was returning to the screen as what sounded like nothing more than a rehash of her Lara Croft character.

In a way, given the amount of men-bashing and car-dodging that is packed in here, ‘Salt’ is indeed annoyingly similar to any other action film that Hollywood churns out each summer. Yet at the same time, its marketing campaign has asked a legitimate question that spices things up a little bit more than you might expect: who is Evelyn Salt?

Well, she works for the CIA, and spent time in North Korea spying on their nuclear operations. That’s all we’re really shown and told before the action starts, by which point things have become incredibly mysterious. When a Russian turns up in Washington and claims to be a defector with highly important information, it is Salt who’s first to hear it: a Russian spy, so he claims, will assassinate the Russian President when he attends the American Vice President’s funeral the next day, in a grand operation to somehow destroy the United States. That spy is called Evelyn Salt.

Whether she is indeed a mole or not is something the film refuses to tell us for some time. Her reaction to the revelation is suspicious. Rather than remaining calm and rubbishing the Russian’s accusations, she goes on the run, apparently fearing for the safety of her husband. But once she has escaped past a dozen gun-bearing men who could have taken her down at any minute if only they shot before she punched, and after jumping off a bridge and naturally landing safely on top of a moving lorry, she ends up fulfilling the prophecy and heading to New York. It’ll take some incredibly decent guesswork, in the midst of a heap of mindless action and a plethora of twists and turns, to work out what is really going on here: is Evelyn Salt actually the Russian spy she was alleged to be, or is she a grandiose utilitarian calculator using some pretty disturbing means to justify her ultimately noble ends?

It goes without saying that this is all completely unbelievable, not only in the film’s reality-defying action sequences in which Salt is lucky not to die on multiple occasions (apparently Jolie did gain some real life injuries during filming that put her in hospital for a day), but also in the film’s wholly implausible number of twists premised on the existence of a world packed with spies and double agents that have somehow reached the peaks of their rival government’s hierarchy. ‘Salt’ is marketed as an action thriller with a typically intricate plot, and indeed it is exactly that. With Jolie at its centre, however, it becomes annoyingly watchable, and also surprisingly intriguing. This film requires an audience willing to suspend its belief in reality. And if you can manage that, ‘Salt’ will deliver the goods.

‘It’s about worrying and science and faith and miracles and love and memory’. In one breath, Rachel Barnett sums up the themes that run through her new play ‘The Law of Inertia’. The plot centers on a man who survives and near-fatal car accident and is left with questions of luck or destiny and begins to see danger lurking behind every corner. Barnett says that she came up with the idea in the midst of running her theatre company for children, Peut-Etre Theatre, and writing for theatre for education pieces for schools across the country. She refers to ‘The Law of Inertia’ as a ‘grown up play’ and its staged reading as a important step in the writing process.

The story of Barnett becoming a playwright raises the same questions of luck or destiny as her latest work. Writing her first play which was short-listed at a national festival at only 12 years old, young Barnett vowed not to write another play until she was 20, because, as she says ‘I was too young to know anything’. After taking it up again in university, Barnett applied to the Central School of Speech and Drama for a course in dramaturgy but was placed instead in the playwriting course. Since then, she says, she’s been writing plays to ‘pay the bills’. It seems that the combination of children’s theatre, TIE writing and the occasional ‘grown-up play’ has enabled Barnett to circumvent the stereotype of the starving artist and she is the first to admit that, ‘I am incredibly lucky that I’ve been able to support myself on my writing for the last four years’.

Barnett adores the world of children’s theatre, saying that it is very communal and ‘simply lovely’. New writing, however, she perceives as often a competition between who can be the ‘most hip’ new playwright: ‘I’m a geek.’ she says. ‘I’m not cool. I wear cardigans. My iTunes playlists are all from before the 1940s. I’m not political and I’m not with-it. I’m happy. I’m not hungry. And I’m not pretending to be hungry’. If this is why she doesn’t identify as a new writing playwright, it is to her credit; Barnett exudes contentment, warmth, and a down-to-earth quality which are rare in a playwright who can actually survive on playwriting.

Her advice for young playwrights that would like to follow in her footsteps is twofold: ‘Write a play and don’t expect people to put it on. Why should anyone put on your play?’ And, ‘Have a giggle’. With these adages, maybe playwrights would have to sacrifice high-brow artistic aspirations for writing children’s theatre and theatre for education. But maybe they would be better at paying the bills. And having a giggle.

‘The Law of Inertia’ is having a staged reading at the Burton-Taylor Studio, Wednesday August 25th. See www.oxfordplayhouse.com for details.

It was with a strange uneasiness that I made my third annual pilgrimage to the Big Chill. My previous two festivals had both been fantastic experiences, but it was not simply the weight of expectation that troubled me this time around. The festival brand was sold last September to Festival Republic, who are perhaps best known as the organisers of Reading and Leeds festivals. In the light of this I had certain anxieties as to whether one of the finest and most vibrant bastions of trip hop and ambient counterculture could withstand the onward march of the indie machine. One festival featuring acts such as Massive Attack, Bonobo, Roots Manuva and Morcheeba was not enough to confirm my fears. But my enduring feelings after the event were that the reference to the event as a ‘Chill’ amounted to almost criminal false advertising, and that a better outcome might have been served in allowing the Eastnor deer to enjoy what for the rest of the year is their exclusive pasture.

Now, before I’m accused of being a misery, I’m not trying to suggest that there was no fun to be had at the festival this year. It remains an excellent weekend, with a fantastic line up, weather (the sun always shines on Eastnor on the first weekend of August) and the best balance between site size and capacity of any festival I have been to. The site and its surrounding are beautiful, with the arena nestled in a part-wooded valley within sight of the Malvern Hills, one of the oldest mountain ranges on the planet. The festival has a tradition of curious artistic installations that shows no signs of retreat: one side of the valley was dotted with enormous flashing balls; the Starburst stage faced onto a field of brightly lit towers of water containers; and on Sunday morning there was the mass naked photograph organised by Spencer Tunick, without which any festival is incomplete. Nor was this year’s event by any means devoid of those great unifying moments that festivals rely upon for survival – Thom Yorke’s harrowing rendition of ‘Reckoner’ and a stage invasion to the tune of M.I.A.’s ‘Paper Planes’ in particular come to mind. But even these were somewhat tainted by the festival management: no sooner had the party begun on the Deer Park stage than the sound was cut and the ravers escorted from the premises.

The essence of the problem with this year’s festival seems able to be reduced to one factor: Festival Republic. Given the fantastic endowment of site, scenery and history passed on with the rights to the festival brand, it would have been remarkable if the festival had actually become a bad one, though clearly every effort was made in this respect. Instead it appears that the changes made to the existing formula were exclusively malign, but thankfully there were not enough of them to completely spoil the event. A reorganisation of the arena access shut off a path with a wonderful panoramic view of the site and surrounding hills, discouraged lounging and sun-worshipping on the adjacent slope and also denied access to the woodland that usually provides such a welcome variety of landscape. Other minor annoyances included the absence of screens next to most stages, including the main stage, and the failure of the famous Big Chill sign to stand upright for longer than ten minutes at a time. However, the single most efficient enjoyment sap of the weekend undoubtedly was the security policy. New ownership meant a new security firm whose personnel, either from habit or on orders, enacted the most intrusive and least ‘chilled’ treatment of paying customers I have seen at any such event. Gainsborough Security insisted on checking every wristband at every gate, regardless of the direction of travel. This led to bottlenecks and long queues of very frustrated festivalgoers, only partly placated by the apologetic smiles of the friendly Oxfam stewards. The new addition of campsite CCTV was creepy at best, and the supposed criminal activities of individuals that it was claimed had been caught on camera seemed a pretext to search any tent within the postcode. Tobacco, cigarette papers and alcohol in containers that were permitted were all arbitrarily confiscated from those with adult wristbands and confirming identification, and the experience of a friend working as a steward confirmed that these confiscated goods were seen as bounty by the security personnel. Given the inevitability that drugs will be taken to festivals, it seems abundantly clear that resources should be focussed upon controlling the substances that pose the greatest risk to all of those present. Refusing somebody entry to the festival because of possession of a cannabis grinder, despite having no cannabis, is a completely inappropriate way to treat a person who has spent upwards of £120 on a ticket to the festival. It was this level of intrusion that left such a bitter taste in my mouth at this year’s festival.

I was searched comprehensively twice in two days, was party to a run in with two undercover policemen, and either witnessed or heard countless reports of needless aggression, often aimed at those under the age of eighteen, on the part of the security personnel. It may be unfair to blame Festival Republic for all of this; to some extent Gainsborough Security may be responsible, or else new restrictions put into place by Herefordshire Council. If the council is to blame, I hold little hope for the future.
It seems there is a race on, a race to destroy festivals as a cultural expression. On the one hand we have the monopoly power of the music promoters. Companies like Festival Republic cannot help but trample on the autonomy that is so necessary for festivals to coexist as independent and distinct entities. On the other hand we have the creeping parasite that is council and police regulation, which places stringent security demands upon organisers and offers little or no funding, making such policies difficult to execute, and impossible to do so with any subtlety. This approach was employed to a ridiculous degree in the case of Glade Festival by the local authorities, and many suspect quite reasonably that it was done deliberately to drive the festival into the ground. Until festivals are seen as something other than an excuse to traffic and deal lavish quantities of Class A drugs, I cannot see the Big Chill being able to live up to its name. And until Festival Republic relinquishes its monopoly grip on the festival market, I fear that Eastnor is sliding towards becoming the third Carling Weekend.