While I’m more than willing to enjoy mainstream Hollywood movies like Up and The Hangover, I also like to find and watch less well-known but well-regarded movies.  I would never have seen the very good (but frightening) documentary Jesus Camp or the enjoyable Rudo y Cursi, and I knew Slumdog Millionaire was a winner long before it won Best Picture.  The most exciting, as a Genghis Khan history buff, was the discovery of the beautiful Mongol.  So I’m always on the lookout for other movies that are catching peoples attention but aren’t necessarily in the mainstream.  Therefore, when I started seeing more and more positive mentions of the Swedish film LÃ¥t den rätte komma in (Let The Right One In), I moved it to the top of my NetFlix queue.

While the plot — a love story between a bullied boy and a girl who turns out to be a vampire — gave me pause (it sounded like the unnecessary teen-angst Twilight film), the praise it was getting across the interwebs was more than enough for me to have an open mind about it.  Unfortunately, I finally watched it last night and was underwhelmed.  It definitely comes across as an art-house movie — beautiful, deliberate… but boring and pointless.  I suspect the filmmakers were trying to convey that love can outweigh terror or some other metaphorical agenda.   All I took away from it was that I wished I had spent those rare 2 free hours doing something else.

However, of those that have seen the movie, I seem to be in the minority in my opinion.  There are already plans in the works for making a Hollywood adaption of it by the same guy who made Cloverfield.