2 shit films and 1 great book

So, I don't really write reviews for films. This is because I don't usually have anything new or worthwhile to say, and I therefore consider it a waste of my time. Thesedays I only write reviews for films when I feel especially annoyed at them for having wasted my time. The following reviews I'll keep brief; they may not be 100% objective because I only watched about half of these films, but I think I saw enough to pass judgement. And anyway, I'm no professional, this is just a quick opinion on each one.

A Complete History of my Sexual Failures (2008)
The guy making this film is a complete moron. From the 40 or so minutes of the film I saw, the guy tried to raise laughs with his Louis Theroux style voiceover. He was trying to be ironic and self deprecating, I think, although he only came across as a repellant wanker.
'I fail with women because I'm lazy and I never show up on time.' - That was the main line. He went around askinf the women who had dumped him over the year's why they had done so. Those were the main reasons. Although he didn't appear to be learning anything.
From there the documentary side was getting quite dubious, and I began to assume that this was more mocu than docu-mentary. Maybe it was, I actually couldn't care less.
It was about a charmless, arrogant, lazy ass bastard who couldn't get it up in the bedroom.
Truly pathetic work.

Martyrs (2008)
A French horror film, but unlike some of the ones from earlier in this decade - Haute Tension being a prime example of one of the good ones - this tried to do the same thing but failed. The introduction of a gollum-like imaginary demon was a good effort, and the extreme violence might have worked, but it just didn't.
The film set up two unlikeable women in a plot that was cloudier than a river running through a nuclear powerplant.
Ah, it was just appalling - violence for the sake of violence, held together by a matchstick plot.

Okay, as you may be able to ascertain, I am not very good at writing reviews on films. And ironically, I tend only to write opinions of films I particularly disliked. More ironic still, I generally hadn't watched the film in question in its entirety, and felt so repelled and annoyed by it that I didn't care to write a full and detailed account of it anyway because thinking about how bad it was made me angry again.
Very self defeating! I digress.....

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo!
I had heard quite a lot about this trilogy by now dead author Steig Larsson, who tragically died before seeing the worldwide phenomenom his novels would become. The guy wrote only three, entitled the Millennium trilogy.
I began reading this first installment today and am quickly hooked. Larsson weaves his story with immediacy. It is fact laden but never dull, characterised competently, and is full to the hilt with intrigue. So far it does not feel in any way formulaic or predicatable. On the contrary, it is a fresh piece of writing with an effortlessly readable prose style and characters who are genuine and actually original.
So far the answer is wow - things are very captivating. A quarter through this one already, it has really 'consumed' me - the term I like to use for a book that doesn't let my brain release it from my hands!