It was solely thanks to my film club that I recently watched what – as far as I can recall – must have been my first movie from South Korea.

Before you say anything, I’m certain that there are those who will grumble at this. South Korean cinema isn’t small and obscure; it’s pretty well established and has a lot of fans all over the world as far as I understand it. But for me it’s new, so bare with me for being a bit clueless. And if you have suggestions about South Korean films that I “must” watch, by all means, go ahead and share them.

My first encounter with this film country turned out to be a fairly new one, The Housemaid, which is a remake of a Korean movie from 1960. Obviously I haven’t watched the original, so I’m afraid that I can’t make any comparison of how well this holds up against it.

The film takes place in the house of a wealthy family. In the centre of it is a young housemaid who gets into a sexual relationship with the father/husband in the house, resulting in the housemaid getting pregnant. This doesn’t go unnoticed, obviously, and other inhabitants of the house see their positions threatened and start plotting against the housemaid. It turns into a thriller with class, sex and power games as the major ingredients.

While beautifully shot and technically impeccable, I must admit that I found this film a little bit shallow and too much of a soap opera for my liking. Towards the end the melodrama takes over completely and one of the last scenes is so over-the-top that it left me scratching my head. “Where did that come from? Really? Are you kidding me?”

On the other hand it gave me a change of environment and the opportunity to see a bit of life in South Korea (although limited to the life of the upper class) and this element of exoticism was enough to keep me interested.

The Housemaid gave me my first glimpse of South Korean cinema and while I wasn’t overwhelmed by it, I wasn’t completely put off either. I’m ready for more.

The Housemaid (Hanyo, Sang-Soo Im, KR, 2010) My rating: 3,5/5

Do you remember the sensation of it?  Do you remember the sweet taste of the moment when all your illusions suddenly are turned upside down and a truth that you couldn’t have imagined dawns upon you? Do you remember the surge in the stomach, like a rollercoaster taking a quick dive, your mind reaching for the stars, and for one brief second you’re feeling as if you’re weightless, independent of the small and futile restrictions of time and space.

Sadly enough it’s a state of mind that I enter more and more rarely nowadays. As I’ve grown older, those dwindling moments have become few and far between. I think the more experienced we get, the more stories and ideas we meet over the years, the harder is it to trick us or make an impression. We become cynics and “sense of wonder” is – mostly – just a fond memory.

One writer who gave me many experiences of sense of wonder back in the days was Fredric Brown, a master at the genre of very short science fiction stories. I used to love his punch lines before I turned old and jaded. The shortest one he wrote is titled “The Shortest Horror Story”. It goes like this:

 ”The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…”

This story used to give me chills and I came to think of it as I recently watched The Quiet Earth.

Descent into madness
This is a post-apocalyptic science fiction movie from New Zealand where we get to follow a man who one day wakes up finding the world he lives in all deserted. It appears as if everyone else not only has died; they’ve disappeared as well. He’s all on his own.

What do you do in such a situation? How would you react? I can imagine I’d do pretty much the same thing as Zac does. First there’s the curiosity, the efforts to find out what has happened. Then there’s a time where he enjoys the freebies, the access to free champagne and other luxuries that gives him comfort. But as time goes by and he doesn’t get any replies to the messages he’s sent out, he’s starting to descend into madness. Until….

Well, I suppose I’ll arrest myself there in order not to spoil anything. While it’s not quite as twisty as a classic Fredric Brown story, you’re better off not knowing too much about it.

Obviously the movie is a little bit dated in the terms of technology. You see it everywhere. The computers are ancient, the telephones are clumsy and his alarm clock looks exactly like the one in Groundhog Day, putting a very distinct time mark. But if you disregard of that, you’ll find a very enjoyable little science fiction movie that I think holds up pretty well.

Based on a tourist experience
I especially liked the first half where we follow Zac’s explorations of the deserted world. It looks quite convincing considering the low budget they probably worked with. Perhaps they didn’t have to alter reality all that much to make it look post-apocalyptic, at least if we’re too believe IMDb:

“The Quiet Earth is actually based the one experience of an American tourist in New Zealand in the 1970s. New Zealanders always take the weekends off and sleep late. The tourist arrived in the center of Auckland on a Sunday morning and found it completely deserted. He later said he felt like the last man on Earth.”

Remembering what weekends looked like when I visited New Zealand in the 80s I can actually vividly imagine that this was the source of inspiration.

I also loved the focus on atmosphere and human behaviour rather than on action and cheap thrills. There is certainly an element of techno-babble (no science fiction is complete without it!), but you don’t need to understand it to enjoy the film.

Like most science fiction stories it has a great ending with a beautiful final shot, so impressive and memorable that this alone justifies watching the move. As I saw it I felt the tickling in the stomach, still familiar after all those years. It was quite discrete, more quiet than sensational and there was only a mouthful of it, so it didn’t last for long. But there was no mistake about what it was.

The sense of wonder.

The Quiet Earth (Geoff Murphy, NZ, 1985) My rating: 4/5

When Eva, the mother of Kevin in We Need to Talk about Kevin, stops by a jackhammer, seemingly getting a relief hearing the sound of the drill over the sound of her yelling son, I know exactly where she’s coming from.

In our case the problems were temporary. One morning our daughter’s stomach was back to normal, she stopped screaming and began to sleep, at least as much as other babies sleep. In a snap those horrendous months became just a far distant memory.

For Eva however, her problems have only begun.

She and Kevin just can’t connect, no matter how hard she tries. And Kevin certainly isn’t an easy child to love. He seems to have a dark passenger, but unlike Dexter he appears to lack a code of conduct keeping it under control.

Eventually something will happen that makes Eva’s life go from bad to worse. She’s going through events that are the worst a parent could imagine and she’s torn by guilt as well as the uncovered contempt and hatred of the people in the neighbourhood.

We Need to Talk about Kevin is the first movie I’ve watched in a theatre this year to get a 5/5 rating. It was an amazing movie experience and I’m pretty sure it will be in my top 10 list of 2012. And as so often happens to me when I really, really love a movie, I find myself in a tough spot to explain why. True love is wordless. But I’ll make a five list to at least give you a few ideas.

Five reasons to love We Need to Talk about Kevin:

1. Because of Tilda Swinton
I can’t imagine Eva in any other way than how Tilda Swinton played her. It’s an amazing performance, on par with for instance Michael Fassbender in Shame. It’s beyond my comprehension why she wasn’t nominated for an Oscar.

2. Because it’s beautifully cinematic
We Need to Talk about Kevin is the opposite of “filmed theatre”, which I talked about in a post a few days ago. It uses the film medium to its full potential, showing rather than telling. It’s a movie that speaks to all of your senses. Even if it isn’t a “4d” movie, it was so sensual that I almost could feel the smell of tomatoes and paint and jam in my nostrils. It’s a mosaic of impressions and fragments of memory, forming a picture that isn’t complete until the final shot. The cinematography is breathtaking. While the topic is serious, it’s a joy for the eye.

3. Because it offers a new approach to an old topic
The story about what Kevin eventually does is one that has been told several times before in movies. But this isn’t yet another movie in that genre. We Need to Talk about Kevin is more than anything else a movie about Eva. It’s about what has led her to the point where she is now; it’s about what’s going on inside her – her depression, her guilt and her frustration. And it’s about how other people react to Eva and how she reacts to them. This is a perspective that I hadn’t given much thought before, but which I think is necessary to talk about. It’s thought provoking. Many people hold for true that evil deeds is something that doesn’t come out of nowhere, that it’s something that is caused by a crappy childhood. But how true is that?

4. Because the artfulness never is allowed to overshadow the storytelling
While the movie is very artistically made, it isn’t cryptic, hard to follow, overly subtle, slow or ambiguous to the point that you don’t know what the movie was about, which unfortunately sometimes happen with small arthouse movies. We’re jumping back and forward on the timeline, but it’s never hard to figure out where you are. And there is an underlying tension that made me feel fully awake, alert and eager to see what would happen next. It offers the perfect balance between being artful and engaging.

5. Because it haunts me
Some movies are just for the moment. Others stay with you, haunting you for days, months or even years to come. I have no doubt that We Need to talk about Kevin is one of those that will stay with me. It’s not only the stunning images or the creeping personality of Kevin that lingers in my mind. It’s also the perspective. The entire movie is done from the perspective of Eva, just like Martha Marcy May Marlene took Martha’s perspective. This is her recollections, her way of watching reality. But if you asked someone else, you would probably get a different story and how would that look? How much of this is real and how much is just going on in her head? I’m still wrestling with the thoughts over it and if you split the ticket fee on all the hours I will think about it, it certainly gives good value for your money.

And I’ll leave it there for now but if you want to hear more about my love for this film, you can listen to an upcoming episode of The Matineecast where Ryan McNeil and I gush over it. I’ll let you know when it’s up.

We Need to Talk about Kevin (Lynney Ramsey, UK, 2011) My rating: 5/5

“Hi Jessica,

I have a movie-related question and I thought I’d try ask you, since I really enjoy reading your musings about movies (and I trust you feel free to answer as much or as little as you feel like).

The question is related to Carnage, which I saw at my local cinema tonight. I’d read a newspaper review or two and they were lukewarm, but decided I wanted to watch it regardless, partly because I have enjoyed both Foster and Winslet in previous movies they’ve been in. And I found it very funny and enjoyable. What was striking though, was how the reviews I had read said something fairly negative about this being “filmed theatre”. I don’t think it’s a wrong description, but I have trouble catching what is bad about it. And it made me wonder, would you say that a movie lover is as likely, more likely or less likely to like live theatre? Do you enjoy live theatre as well as movies, or is the magic more in the silver screen?

I remember when I was a teenager, that I had this understanding that movies were cool, while theater was.. uhm.. cultured? (I was not cool, and strange enough to want to go to the theater with a friend rather than grown-ups at 16. I enjoyed movies too though). But since then, so many of the nerdy things I liked, like comics and computer games, have become totally mainstream. Watching this movie and considering the reviews really got me wondering what was different crowds, what was just different art forms, and what was, I don’t know.. something far above my head I understand that a movie is not the same as theatre, of course. But at the same time, if you have a favourite actor, you’d probably not say no to seeing that actor in a live theatre (I keep wanting to call them RL theatres..), so there has to be some connection too, right? “

And here is my reply:

“Dear Syrien,

I’m afraid I haven’t spent enough time in the world of cinephiles to be able to make any judgement about the status of live theatre versus plays that have been adapted for the movies. For my own part I think that live performances – either it’s in the form of theatre or music or dancing – has a certain form of magic that movies never can reproduce – namely the feeling of that you’re experiences something that only will happen once. No performance is exactly the same as the other. There will always be differences from day to day in how an actor perform, how the audience response. And there’s this special tension in the air, that something could go wrong, which adds a nerve to it. On the other hand there is a magic in movies that can’t be reproduced in theatres. There’s a different freedom to it, the possibility to go to places that only exist in our imagination, to jump back and forward in time and space, to play with perspectives and moods and effects. If someone tried to make a staged play out of Inception I can’t imagine it would be anywhere near as good as the film.

For me it’s not one thing or another. They two different art forms and both are enjoyable and respectable for their own reasons. But films are way cheaper and more easily available, so for every time I go to see live theatre, I’ve probably watched a couple of hundred of movies.

I agree that there is something negative in the expression “filmed theatre”. And I think this is related to a wish and an expectation on movies to offer something different than a traditional theatre. Since we have all the magic, all the possibilities of a different way of storytelling, it seems like a poor choice not to use all those options.

Of course you can just use the camera to document a performance and give a bigger audience a chance to see it. This is done more and more nowadays as some cinemas are showing filmed opera. But no one would think of calling this a “movie”. It’s just a documentation, a “next best” option for someone who couldn’t make it to the live show.

When the negative criticism comes up, I think it’s because a movie feels “stagy” when it doesn’t need to be that way. Many movies are built on plays that have been performed in theatre, but have been adapted for the screen so well that you have no idea of its origin. A good example of this last year was the Canadian film Incendies, which takes place in a fictive Middle East country on a number of different settings. I was really surprised to learn afterwards that this was built in a play. There was no way I could have guessed that. It was so cinematic, conveying a story not just in dialogue, but in moods created by cinematography, score and editing.”

But now I leave the floor to the guests of The Velvet Café. What do you make of Syrien’s questions? How is the relationship between theatre and movies? Is it necessarily a bad thing that you can spot the theatrical origin in a screenplay? Let’s have a conversation about this!

I give you free drinks. You give me your thoughts.

Cheers!

He’s the director who did Dogtooth, which was one of my favourite movies from 2011 (we got it late in Sweden). It was bizarre, disturbing, not like anything I previously had watched and I was grabbed by the story of the young adults who had been imprisoned by their parents their entire life, fed with lies about how dangerous the world was outside of their protecting wall. While opening for many interpretations, it also worked as a drama bordering to horror movie. I was equally fascinated and appalled and gave it one of my rare 5/5 ratings.

With Dogtooth in fresh memory I had pretty high expectations on Alps (and not just referring to the title.) I had heard that it was about a group of people whose job was to impersonate people who have died for a period to help the people who stood close to them handle their grieving. It sounded like an in interesting concept for something along the lines of Dogtooth. I imagined something that pulled towards science fiction, perhaps a parallel world like the one in Never Let Me Go, a place where the ethics and way of living had developed in a different direction than in our universe.

Sadly enough I was wrong. Whatever I had expected – Alps wasn’t it. God knows what it was. Frankly I can’t remember last time I watched a coconut movie with such a hard, unbreakable shell. Don’t ask me what it was about because I haven’t got a clue.

Disengaged reading
To say something nice you could say that Lanthimos has a style of his own. For instance he’s instructing the actors to read all the lines as disengaged as possible. This is not something I’m assuing; I heard it in an interview. And if this is his aim, he has certainly succeeded. They all sound like school children reading aloud from the text book with monotonous voices that don’t care about intonation and punctuation. But for what reason? I have no idea. Can someone please explain?

The cinematography is also quite special. Every once in a while the camera focus shifts and halts at something in the foreground, a person or an object. Everything is completely blurred out and there is no depth in the image whatsoever. Maybe it’s supposed to mean something, but all I see is someone posing for the sake of posing.

This is so bad that I really don’t know what to say more than to warn you. This is not a new Dogtooth. It’s crap. I don’t use the word pretentious so I won’t do it now either but I don’t think I’ve ever been as close to using it as in this review.

Popcorn
Is there anything good about it, anything at all? Well, that would be the final song. All of a sudden they played Popcorn. Yep, that Popcorn, the good old dance song that lasts forever and ever, my earliest childhood memory of pop music. It played in my head on my way home and it cheered me up a little. Then it kept playing for yet another day and I got annoyed. Once you got it in your mind it’s hard to turn it off.

Alps on the other hand will be easy to turn off because it gave nothing. Ask me in a week about it and I promise you I won’t remember a thing.

Alps (Alpeis, Giorgos Lanthimos, GR, 2011) My rating: 1,5/5

Fiffi, for instance, describes in her usual entertaining style (unfortunately not easily translatable to English with Google Translate) how sick she felt after watching it, claiming that she would rather had spent 146 minutes at a painful dentist appointment or standing on glowing charcoal than seeing this.

Sometimes Fiffi and I are like imagined twin sisters, loving and hating the same movies. But on some occasions the sisters disagree vehemently and this is one of those.

I hesitate to say it aloud since I expect to get a lot of crap for it, at least from my fellow Swedes, but I actually liked War Horse quite a bit.

What worked for me
I think there were a few things that made it work for me where it didn’t work for Fiffi.

1. Fiffi compares it to the classic Little House on the Prairie series that we both grew up with. The comparison is absolutely relevant, but while she seems to do it in a rather pejorative way, I do it in an appreciating way. War Horse is just as sentimental, celebrating American ideals of sticking together and never giving up, no matter how hard the circumstances are. It’s a brew that I as a grumpy, realistic, down-to-Earth Swede only can stomach in small portions. It would be unbearable to live in a world where all movies were like this. But once in a while it’s wonderful to get a bit of Little-House-ness.
2. Fiffi apparently doesn’t like horses. I do. I read the books about The Black Stallion repeatedly as a child and I could see a bit of a connection. They’re both stories about the magic bond between a horse and his owner, a bond that will make them overcome all sorts of obstacles and hardships. They’re both stories about a horse that keep surpassing people’s expectations.
3.  I was in a terrible shape when I watched the movie due to a stubborn cold that had deprived me of sleep for days and didn’t seem to go away anytime soon. When you feel that way – feeling sorry for yourself, in desperate need for someone to parent and take care of you – you regress mentally, in my case to about the age of a 12-year-old. And since the movie apparently is intended for that age, it couldn’t really have been much better. All my shields were down.

My hang-ups
I won’t deny that there are a couple of things about War Horse that feel a little bit odd to me.

1. First there was this score by John Williams (who shockingly enough seems to be alive and still going strong). It felt rather invasive. Whenever something happened on the screen there was a response in the music. Field in the sunset with galloping horses? Get on with the violins! More violins! Yet more! Someone does something that is supposed to be a little bit funny? Enter a funny clarinet tune! It didn’t break the movie for me but it took me a little while to get used to.
2. With the exception of some really harsh battle scenes from the muddy fields where soldiers are dying left and write and the horses struggle until they fall down dead on the spot, there was something slightly artificial about the look of the film. It made me think of the illustrations in the publications that some Christian groups spread trying to make you join. Everyone has sparkling eyes and perfect skin and teeth. This is probably intended. If it looked like a gritty, realistic European movie, you couldn’t bring your kids to watch it.
3. Finally I couldn’t fully embrace that French and German people spoke English between each other. Once again – if you’re going for a young audience, it might be the way it had to be, as long as they’re not used to subtitles like we are where I live. So I forgive it, though I don’t like it.

A boy and his horse
In the end War Horse isn’t intended to be a documentary. I think it can bring a bit of insight to young people about the horrors of war and the nastiness of WWI, which I think is fairly unknown to most 12 year olds of today. And that’s good.

But most of all it’s a fairy tale about a boy and his horse. It’s told in an oldfashiond manner, which is a nice change to all the fractured, non-linear and ambiguous storytelling we usually see in modern films.

Does Spielberg “manipulate” the viewer, pulling strings to get emotional responses? Hell, yeah! But there’s nothing wrong with that. I was entertained and I got tears in my eyes once in a while and as the movie ended and the auditorium took up a spontaneous applause I was close to joining them.

I’m a little bit nervous about the next meet-up with the Swedish movie blogging community though. I’ll be alone in a land of haters, that’s for sure – pretty much like Joey the horse in the battle field. I can only hope I’ll do as fine as he did. Wish me luck!

War Horse (Steven Spielberg, US, 2011) My rating: 4/5

There are very few of them left these days, but if you’ve ever been to one, you know what I mean. Then you can understand my fascination for one of my favorite museums, the zoological museum in the town where I grew up. It consisted of huge halls where thousands and thousands of items – mostly skeletons and stuffed animals – collected for centuries from all over the world were crowding in glass cupboards in what appeared to be a big mess. I don’t think they ever had the intention to educate anyone about them. They were leftovers of some long time forgotten research.

The best part of it was the floor where they kept the yucky stuff – huge glass bottles where indefinable creatures were floating in liquid, which once upon a time probably had been clear as water, but now had turned yellow. The lack of information tickled my imagination and it the atmosphere in the most remote corners of this museum was creepier than a ghost train ride.

If you too find magic in this kind of places, I think you might like the silent film Häxan from 1922.

A curious film
This is a rather curious film, which best could be described as a documentary intending to give a historical view on witchcraft. The film consists of seven pieces and uses a number of different approaches to the topic. Some parts consist of slideshows where we get to see drawings and paintings that illustrate the practice of witchcraft in the past altered with cards with explaining texts. But the more spectacular parts, the ones I’ll remember this film for, are the dramatizations, with special effects that are far better than I would have expected from a film of this age. There are plenty of scenes that I can imagine must have been tickling, not to say shocking at this time. There is nudity, there are body parts, dark rituals, torture, ecstasy and we also get to meet the Devil himself quite a few times, impersonated by the director who seems to enjoy it quite a bit.

Häxan seems a bit randomly put together, just like a vintage museum. It’s a bit of horror and sensation, it’s a bit of lecturing, it’s a bit of drama and a bit of comedy. Once in a while the fourth wall is broken and the film starts to give out information about the actors.

It’s a bit hard to tell for sure where Benjamin Christiansen stands in the question of witchcraft. Does it exist for real or not? Regardless of which, there’s no lack of scenes that may not be terribly scary for a modern viewer, but nevertheless are funny, original and imaginative.

Not everything is for pleasure though. There are also parts that are rather unsettling and saddening, dealing with the collective madness that spread in Europe in the middle age, resulting in the death of innumerous innocent people, mostly elderly women.

A modern comparsion
The film ends with an interesting – and surprisingly modern – comparison between the treatment of “hysterical” women of today and the historical view on witches.

I’ll give the last word to Christiansen. I think he’s got some good points.

“Centuries have passed and the Almighty of medieval times no longer sits in his tenth sphere. We no longer sit in church staring terrified at the frescoes of the devils. The witch no longer flies away on her broom over the rooftops. But isn’t superstition still rampant among us? Is there an obvious difference between the sorceress and her customer then and now? We no longer burn our old and poor. But do they not often suffer bitterly? And the little woman, whom we call hysterical, alone and unhappy, isn’t she still a riddle for us? Nowadays we detain the unhappy in a mental institution or – if she is wealthy – in a modern clinic. And then we will console ourselves with the notion that the mildly temperate shower of the clinic has replaced the barbaric methods of medieval times.”

Häxan is a strange creature of a film. It’s probably not for everyone, but if you’re into curiosities and can see the charm of silent films, I think it’s a must-see.

Häxan (Benjamin Christensen, DK, 1922) My rating: 4/5

The hitchhiking
So where to start? I think we’ll begin with a thumb by the roadside just outside of Christchurch.

Do you remember when there were hitchhikers on the roads? Maybe you don’t; I have the feeling that some of you were born just around the time when they started to disappear for some reason. It’s like with the dinosaurs – we can’t be too sure about what happened, but we can have our theories.

Perhaps there was a change in the equation. The airplane tickets got cheaper at the same rate as the dangers lurking on the roads grew. The money you could save didn’t match the risk anymore. Or maybe it was the drivers who were to blame. They stopped picking up people for the same reason: the dangers overshadowed the benefits of getting company and the pleasant feeling of being helpful.

Regardless of what happened you’ll have to trust me: once upon a time there were hitchhikers, for real and not just in the movies, and I was one of them. For two months I hitchhiked around New Zeeland and this meant that I came to spend a good many hours standing by a roadside with my husband. Not because the New Zealanders didn’t want to pick you up, because they did – they were the most generous and friendly people I’ve ever met. But it was in the countryside and sometimes you had to wait for quite a while before someone came that way.

Twenty questions
So what do you do with all that time at hands? Well, I know what we did. We played “twenty questions”, you know the game where one of you think about a person and the other one asks questions that only can be answered with “yes” or “no” until you’ve figured out who it is.

Over time we had worked out our own rules about this. For instance we sorted the persons into a few classes. There were the fictive persons – characters from films, comics and books. Then there the people who existed for real, who could be either celebrities such as actors, writers or politicians, or people we knew: family and friends. Finally there was one last option which we called “Sune Mangs”. Sune Mangs was a Swedish actor who we and some friends of ours that also were into this game unanimously had decided was one of his kind. He had a special aura that made him into something in between a real or a fictive person. He was in a class of his own.

Our trip to New Zeeland took place in 1987. At this point George Clooney was already an established actor, but we hadn’t heard of him yet. This was years before his appearance as Dr Ross in ER. At this point he had just finished the recording of Return of the Killer Tomatoes and I don’t think that’s something that makes you into “top of mind” for twenty questions.

But if this had taken place today, I think George Clooney might have been the one to get a category of his own. There is something iconic about him, something that makes him feel like a cartoon rather than like a normal actor. He is The George Clooney.

A strong brand
For most jobs a strong brand is only an advantage, but not in the case of acting. It’s harder to get immersed and forget that there’s an actor involved, if the actor has a very strong personality of his own.

Some actors are neutral and anonymous. They’re as neutral as cream that you add to a sauce: they can carry just about any taste, any type of personality. Their own personal will never take over and dominate over the character they’re supposed to be. They become one with their role.

In the case of George Clooney it’s the opposite. It’s hard to forget that it’s George Clooney I’m watching on the screen. I always make a mental note: “Oh, there is George Clooney! He certainly looks like himself!” I don’t even remember the name of his president candidate in The Ides of March or the landowner and father in The Descendants. He’s always just “George Clooney” to me.

I can imagine how challenging it must be. How can you possibly break lose, how can you make people forget that you’re George Clooney?

Ugly running
In the case of The Descendants, George Clooney is once again casted as a successful and wealthy businessman. As the film evolves, it turns out that his life isn’t quite as happy and enviable as you would imagine, just as Hawaii isn’t just the paradise we see in the tourist ads, but also a pretty grey and average place. The facade of Clooney’s character’s life crackles as his wife gets into a serious accident, ending up in coma at a hospital and it turns out that she’s been cheating on him. The movie is about Clooney’s following journey where he searches for the truth about his wife while at the same time reconnecting to his teenage daughters, who suddenly have become his responsibility, a situation he apparently isn’t used to.

So how did it work? Did I get immersed and touched enough to feel the pain of Clooney’s character under my own skin? Could I stop thinking about “George Clooney is on the screen” and start just caring about the character?

Yes, most of the time I could, with one exception: whenever they had Clooney go running. It happens a couple of time in the film and I don’t know what the idea is. Perhaps it’s an effort to get away from the Cloonian image of perfection and success. But did they really fool anyone? Not me at least. All I could think of was: “Oh, there is George Clooney. Why is he running so ugly? He must be trying to prove something. Is ugly running what they give you Oscars for?”

The verdict
And this will finally bring us to the verdict. Is George Clooney worth an Oscar award for best actor? Yes and no. Of course I’d rather have seen it given to Michael Fassbender for Shame. But as the nominations look now, Clooney could as well have it as anyone else.

Did I like The Descendants? Oh yes. There’s always something soothing about watching millionaires struggling with their lives, ending up eating comfort ice cream out of the box in front of the TV. Deep down we’re all the same – fragile, messed up and uncertain about where our journey will take us. It’s like hitchhiking. Life will take you into places you didn’t plan. You just need to learn to cope.

The Descendants (Alexander Payne, US 2011) My rating: 4/5

I should worry about him, but I didn’t. I was busy worrying about his dog Skeletor. The Screenplay Minimalizer had hit once again.

Ever since he gave the dog that one last meal, I had been waiting for him to say something about his plans. “Mum will look after you”. “Be kind to my buddie when he comes to take you for a walk”. Something like that would have been enough to sooth my mind. I would know that Skeletor was taken care of and I could focus on Joseph’s sufferings. But that line never came and even as he was taking a gripping farewell of his mother in the hospital, I couldn’t keep the voice inside me completely silent. “The dog! Tell your mother to take care of the Skeletor!”

But the decision of the screenwriter of 50/50, wasn’t up for negotiation.

One option was to imagine that the cancer patient arrived back at his house days or weeks after his surgery (provided that he survived it), meeting a starved version of his dog and a house full of dog poo.  Another option was to assume that he had taken measures in this matter somehow, but that it wasn’t shown on the screen.

Not Big Brother
Without knowing anything about the craft of screenwriting I assume that it’s the kind of things they have to do to keep the movie nicely paced and interesting: cut out things and expect people to fill in the gaps with their imagination if they need to.

They don’t show every toilet visit, every piece of food the characters eat, every nap they take unless they have a special reason for it. And I support this. If I wanted to see every detail, how people eat and pee, I could as well watch Big Brother. As a movie watcher I expect scenes to be meaningful and juicy.

It’s just that sometimes the eagerness to trim down the movie goes a little bit too far. In this case I would have preferred to know what happened to the dog, so I could get it out of my mind. I would attribute the case of the abandoned dog to carelessness.

Meeting arrangements
However there’s another shortcut that screenwriters take regularly which bugs me much more. This particular shortcut is not a mistake. It’s the standard way of writing this kind of scenes. But this doesn’t prevent me from getting annoyed every time I see it (and that is often, believe me).

I’m thinking of the meeting arrangements. Regardless if it’s a TV series or it’s a movie, it barely ever happens that people agree on a time when they decide to meet later. They always name a meeting point, but they never say anything about what time they’ll meet. At the most it’s a vague “tonight” or “tomorrow”. In my world that’s not how people book meetings. They pick up their smart phone and start negotiating until they finally can find a slot that fits both. Or if they’ve got a good memory, they rely on the calendar in their head. But they always, always set a time. They don’t turn up at a restaurant randomly at six, hoping that the other person would turn up within the next four hours.

I suppose you could argue that maybe they decide for the exact time later on, confirming it to each other by text messages. But it’s an excuse I don’t buy. It’s just as easy to decide the time at once, saving you the trouble of getting in touch again just for the scheduling.

A plead
I guess you could say this is a pet peeve of mine. So if any aspiring screenwriter reads this could you please either a) give me a good reason why you don’t include the meeting time or b) stop taking that particular shortcut?

I understand the need for cutting down the script and leaving out redundancies which risk devouring precious run time without adding any content. I’m cool with that.

What I ask for is discretion. If you minimalize the screenplay you need to do it with finesse, so that the viewers don’t even notice.  If I worry more about the whereabouts of a dog than about the protagonist who is on the verge of death, something must be wrong, no?

I’d better add that for the little issue I had I really liked 50/50 quite a bit and the screenwriter Will Reiser, who based this script on his own experiences from a cancer disease, has my fullest respect.

I love the screenwriting aspect of movie making and I think we give the writers far too little attention compared to how much we talk about the directors. So the toast of the week goes to all screenwriters out there, either you remembered to take care of the dog or not.

This one is for you!

Cheers!

Spirited Away

Until that point my only experience of Japanese animated film was the TV series Sailor Moon. My daughter was a fan, so I couldn’t escape watching some glimpses of it, even though I never quite figured what the big deal was. To me it looked cheap and clunky with too few images per second to trick the brain into seeing one flowing motion. It was a bunch of still images presented one after each other, reminding me the second class children programs when I grew up in the 70s.

But Spirited Away won me over. It wasn’t just that the quality of the animations was on a different level to Sailor Moon, technically on par with anything else I had watched. What attracted me most of all was that it felt completely alien to me, sprung from a different tradition of storytelling. It had a completely different logic. Side stories that would be have been cleaned out in a movie from the western hemisphere were allowed to spring up and flourish, even if they lead into nowhere.  You never knew quite where the story was going. There was also an abundance of strange creatures, which it turned out that my daughter was familiar with since she’d been on a manga diet for years. She became our guide into what felt like a new, unexplored territory.

I had never heard of the name “Studio Ghibli”, but I learned later on that this was the Japanese studio behind not only Spirited Away, but a number of animated films that are highly regarded in film fan circles.

The Secret World of Arrietty is the most recent film from this studio, but unlike Spirited Away it’s got its root in the European tradition, being an adaptation of Mary Norton’s fantasy novel The Borrowers. This was one of my favorite books as I grew up, so it’s an understatement to say that I’m familiar with it. I know every inch of the story about the world of the secret miniature people.

Speaking as a fan of the book I have nothing to complain about in this version. The drawings are just beautiful, in a classical, nuanced style that feels refreshing in a time where 3D seems to grow into a standard for animated movies. The music is enchanting and puts you into a dreamy state of mind. Not even the dangers that present themselves feel truly scary and threatening.

A film watching friend of mine called it a “leisurely stroll down the river” and I agree on that description, even though we disagreed on the conclusion. He thought it was a bit boring. I would rather call it enjoyable and relaxing, an opinion which I seemed to share with the kids in the audience as I watched it. They were dead silent throughout the film, seemingly absorbed, and when it ended their only complaint was that they wished it had been longer. They didn’t want to leave that world quite yet and neither did I.

I would give the critic right though that it lacks a bit in the terms of wonder and imagination compared to a movie such as Spirited Away. It really didn’t bring much new to the table. Just moving it to a Japanese setting doesn’t make any huge difference, especially not since the adaptation follows the original story so closely.

But you have to keep in mind that the main market for Arrietty is the domestic one, and apparently it’s been a box office hit and you can only speculate for the reasons. Perhaps the story about the borrowers feels as new and fresh and exotic to them as Spirited Away felt to someone from here?

Spirited Away opened my eyes to the Japanese anime treasure and remains and outstanding film experience in my memory.  I’m afraid The Secret World of Arrietty doesn’t reach that level. It’s a little bit too European. This doesn’t take away from it that it’s a good and enjoyable animated movie, well worth spending a Saturday afternoon on.

The Secret World of Arrietty (Kari-gurashi no Arietti, Hiromasa Yonebayashi, Gary Rydstrom, JP, 2010) My rating: 4/5

I finally had to acknowledge it after a recent confrontation over Happy Feet.

By accident I had won it in a lottery and now that I had it I thought we could as well watch it, so I suggested we’d do it together, making it into a come-together-in-the-family event.

But my girls reminded me that they were 17 and 19, not 7 and 9. They’d be perfectly happy to join me for the next upcoming Woody Allen movie, but made it clear that the position of animated movies in our household had changed. They were now museum objects, a part of our history, reduced to being objects for nostalgic affection. My only chance to watch Happy Feet in company with a kid would be to put it on hold until the potential arrival of grandchildren in the future.

I pushed out my lower lip and sulked a little (mostly over my 19 year old moving away from home next weekend.) Then I shrugged and decided to watch Happy Feet on my own. Who needs a child as an excuse to watch animated films anyway? Not me. Dignity as well as company for movie watching is overrated. Besides this one actually had won an Oscar in 2007. That surely must have meant something?

Or did it? That’s the question. I’m frankly not entirely sure it did.

But let’s start with the good stuff: the prettiness of it. The animation is pretty amazing at times. The furs look like you imagine a penguin fur would look. They swim like penguins would swim (apart from in the action scenes, but well, that’s action you know). The airborne scenes where you see thousands and thousands of penguin fathers protecting the penguin eggs looked could have been taken straight out of a documentary about penguin life. Well if it wasn’t for that the penguins once in a while broke out in singing and tap dancing, which looked kind of believable too, as believable as a dancing penguin can be. It must have been awesome to watch on a big screen.

Strange pacing
Unfortunately there are other components to the movie that don’t quite match the level of the visuals, such as the pacing and the storytelling. There is something strange about how the whole thing is put together. It’s as if they had two movies in their mind and couldn’t make up their mind about which to do, so they did both with a sudden switch in the middle.

The first and longest part deals with the issue of being different to everyone else. I don’t know if you remember the children book Spotty by Margret Rey about a dotted rabbit born in a family of one-colored rabbits who has a hard time to become accepted. Happy Feet is pretty much the same, but in this case it’s a penguin which has a talent for tap dancing when everyone else is more into singing. It’s a story we’ve hard many times before, but it’s worth telling since feeling like an outsider is a problem that I think many children (and adults) can relate to. I think this part of the movie works fairly well, although it becomes a tad slow at points when the musical numbers are a bit too frequent and long.

Perhaps the film makers too felt a creeping sense of slowness, because all of a sudden the film takes a twist into a completely different story about environmental protection, telling us that you should be nice to the animals, at least as long as they’re into tap dancing. The hero travels with the speed of a lightening to a zoo where he by intensive tapping of his feet contacts the humans and makes them realize that they’d better stop stealing the fish from the penguins.

At this point I imagine someone at the production company threw an eye at the stopwatch and realized that the film already had become way too long for the young audience.

“We need to think about the kids! They’ve got small bladders you know and they’ve already had too much soda. We’d better put this to an end, asap!”

And before we know it we’re back to the penguin colony and everyone is dancing in what apparently is the final show number and I’m sitting there, scratching my head, wondering what just happened.

The lack of company
I thought Happy Feet was absolutely okay, but not excellent. It takes more than pretty fur for that. But perhaps my major issue wasn’t at all about the movie but my own lack of company.

In the end there’s nothing that can increase your appreciation of a film as much as hearing your child praising it wholeheartedly when it’s over.

Happy Feet (George Miller, AU/US 2006) My rating: 3,5/5

With fighting spirit and a little bit of support from his family he raised from poverty to glory, with the spirit of the American dream: “You can if do anything you want if you just set your mind on it.”

Don’t get me wrong: there is nothing wrong about that. I like a good old success story as much as anyone else. There’s so much to love in Billy Elliot: the music, the dancing, the humor, the drama and the spirit. It’s this kind of stories that keep us going, keep our dreams alive and I’ll always keep it way up on my top 100 list.

But even I have to admit that Billy Elliot is a fairy tale among others. For most people who are born into that kind of environment it’s far from the truth.

Billy the second
Of course there have been Billies who have overcome the difficulties by luck and effort, who have made it all the way to the opera stage. But for each one of them there were hundreds of others who also liked to dance, but didn’t make it. Maybe they never even knew they had the talent. Maybe they didn’t get that ticket to travel to the audition or maybe they dropped it on their way. Maybe they just ended up on the wrong side of the sliding doors, by circumstances or poor choices, not necessarily their own. Those were the Billies who eventually had to bury their dreams in oblivion, taking comfort in football and beer.

We don’t talk as much about the second type of Billies and we rarely see them on the movie screens. Perhaps we don’t need to be reminded of the harsh realities of life; we have enough as it is coping with our own lives and broken dreams. Perhaps it doesn’t make as good and engaging stories. Watching Billy Elliot conquer the world makes me believe that I too could accomplish great deeds. Watching Billy-who-couldn’t-break-loose-from-his-origins makes me sad and gives me a vague feeling of guilt. Why is it that some people are born to walk in broken shoes, as the Swedish/Dutch songwriter Cornelis Vreeswijk puts it? “God Father who lives in heaven maybe wants it that way?”

The taste of salt
However – balance is the key to remain a happy, content movie viewer. Once in a while I don’t want to hear another story about someone who succeeds. I’m sick of the sugar and I need to taste some salt. I want to hear about Billy 2, and that’s what I got as I recently watched Kes.

Like Billy Elliot, Kes is the story about a boy named Billy who grows up in poor circumstances in the mining district in Northern England. He struggles to get his life together. The extra work he needs to do to help to provide for his family makes him tired at school and he finds himself bullied by almost everyone he meets, including his own brother and most of his teachers.

The only bright component in Billy’s life is his own undertaking of taming a kestrel falcon (named Kes, hence the name of the movie). With a lot of patience and some advice from a book (assumingly the only book the boy’s ever had or read) he dives into the project and needless to say the bird becomes a symbol of Billy’s own destiny – the dream of a possible escape.

WARNING FOR MILD SPOILERS

The film ends fairly abruptly and without giving it away I’d say it’s open for interpretations. Will Billy be able to pursuit the office job he’s more interested in, which will require him to study more? Or will he end up in the mine like everyone else? It’s all up in the air but I can’t help hoping for the best. I just refuse to embrace the idea that someone is so bound by heritage and destiny that he can’t make himself free. Perhaps I’ve just watched too many Billy Elliots over the years. We want our heroes to succeed. Period.

Recommended viewing
Kes is considered one of the classics in British movie making, but I’ve never cared much about the cinematic canon, so this fact alone wouldn’t make me demand a watching.

However I think it stands well enough on its own to deserve a recommendation. Watch it for the humor (it’s actually surprisingly funny at times), watch it for its natural, almost documentary style, watch it for its humane perspective. It’s apparent that even the bullying teacher deep down is a sad person, as much a victim of broken dreams as anyone else.

I believe the mining areas aren’t quite the same anymore (most mines were shut down during the Thatcher era if I remember it correctly) and I hope that the school system in UK has reformed a bit. And yet I think that Kes is not just a historical documentation of working class life 40 years ago in UK.

It’s still valid. There are still boys like Billy who feel trapped. Class differences prevail. And very few of us are likely to rise from the ashes and become Billy Elliots.

Kes (Ken Loach, UK, 1969) My rating: 4/5

Cube is by far the movie that has been suggested to me most times. I think it first was brought up in connection to my review of Buried as another example of an excellent movie with a very tight budget. Later on I wrote a love post about Splice and then I was once again told by readers to watch Cube, since it’s an earlier work by the same director, Vincenzo Natali, and according to some an even better movie.

I can honestly say that if it wasn’t for the film blogging community I wouldn’t have heard of either the director or the film. And that would have been such a shame, because of course you were right. This was exactly the kind of movie I fall for.

A puzzle
And now we’re moving into the area where it gets tricky. I knew nothing about Cube apart from the name and that had been recommended to me. And I don’t want anyone else who hasn’t watched it to know much more. So how can I describe it without giving away too much?

Well, I think I can say as much as that it takes place in a cube. That’s given away in the title, isn’t it? One day a group of people wake up and find themselves inside this cube and the movie is about their search for a way out. I think that will do for the plot description.

It’s not just me keeping you in the dark; the film does a bit of the same thing. We don’t really know very much. All we can do is to guess and have theories, trying to solve the puzzle alongside with the party.

If you’d ask me to describe Cube, I’d say it’s a science fiction film with horror and thriller elements and a touch of drama and insight into the human psyche. Think of it as a crossover between Buried, Lost and No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre. (In case you’re not familiar with No Exit, it’s a play about three persons who find themselves stuck together in a closed room with no way out, after a while coming to the conclusion mirrored in a famous quote: “Hell is other people”.)

Entertaining
Is it low budget? You bet. I don’t know about the exchange rates, but a production cost 365 000 dollars doesn’t sound like a lot to me. It was shot in twenty days on a single set, mostly with a handheld camera. But the simplicity doesn’t prevent it from being scary, engaging, thrilling, stimulating and entertaining.

You’re most likely to see more gushing from me over Vincenzo Natali’s work in the future since I still have a couple of more movies of his to catch up on.

Thank you for leading me to him. I owe you one.

Cube (Vincenzo Natali, CA, 1997) My rating: 4,5/5

If you’d let me guess, I’d say chances are that it has something to do watching explicit sex scenes in company with your parents or some other relative.

You know how it is. Of course we have those “important conversations” with our teenagers if we need to, but aside from that on some level we still want to live in the illusion that the stork must have brought us. We don’t want to imagine our parents doing THAT, as little as parents want to think too closely about what activities their children take part in with their partners. The moment we watch a sex scene together, we risk shattering the wall of discretion we’ve agreed on. Sex exists all of a sudden. We know that they know and they know that we know. Yak.

My moment of awkwardness
We’ve been sharing awkward experiences in a discussion thread at the Filmspotting forum where I use hang around.

My own contribution to the topic was nothing spectacular. Either I haven’t been into much of awkward situations, or – more likely – I’ve been able to repress those memories successfully. Anyway, I’ll share the moment of awkwardness that I came to think of.

It happened a few years ago, when my oldest daughter was about 11 years old, old enough to go to movies on her own. It was close to Christmas and I got the idea to send her and a friend of hers off to see a what I assumed was another nice, cosy “spirit-of the-season” movie that would put them in the right mood.

As they returned home I asked them about how the movie had been, but they just blushed and refused to talk about it any further.

The movie in question was Bad Santa. As I checked it up a bit closer than I had on beforehand, I felt like a Bad Mother.

Yeah, I told you it was a lame story. Especially compared to the following story, provided by Sandy, who is the gentlest woman you can think of, spreading warmth and happiness around her in the forum. Considering her personality she’s the last person in the world I’d expect ending up in the position she did during a theatre visit.

Sandy’s story
With the words of Sandy:

”In 2001 I was teaching a youth group on Wednesday nights and would go to a late show in a neighboring town after I was finished as a reward. I purchased a ticket to Josie and the Pussycats and sat in an empty theater.

20 minutes into the show, the lights went on and a swat team came down on both isles surrounding me. One of them came up to me and asked to see my license. I handed it to him and he left but the rest of them stayed put, and would not talk to me. After a long while he came back in, handed me my license and said, “Sorry for the inconvenience. Enjoy the movie.” They all left, the lights went down, the show started back up and I burst into tears. I didn’t know if I could leave and didn’t dare move, so I stayed and watched and cried. I hate Josie and the Pussycats.

After the movie I went out into the lobby and there where a dozen people standing around. They were not allowed to leave and the road was closed. While waiting, I talked to some of them about what had happened and they joked and said if I just turned myself in, they could all go home. We waited for an hour and finally I talked one of the workers into turning on a movie for us. After a while, we were allowed to go. I think a police car discreetly followed me home.

The next day as I was driving through a canyon, I almost drove off the road when I heard on the radio about a murder near the theater and that there had been a witness seeing a woman in a dark blue shirt walking toward the complex. I didn’t go to the late show for over a year after that.

Link to a news article about the case

They later caught the murderer. It was a woman and, I think, an employee of the victim.”

Friday night toast
It’s hard to beat that story in terms of awkwardness. But don’t let that stop you. If you have an awkward moviegoing moment to share, please go ahead and open your heart! It’s Friday night, the bar is open and we’ve got all time in the world for storytelling.

The toast of the week goes to Sandy.

Cheers!

A 145 million dollar movie hardly needs any help to get the word out. But I’ve decided to write a little something about every movie I watch and so far I stick to it. Besides I loved it so much that it would feel wrong to remain silent. I’ll keep it fairly short though, as I did in the mini review I posted on the Filmspotting forum, immediately after I had watched it, since I was about to burst of enthusiasm and needed an outlet.

This is what I wrote:

“I just returned from Mission Impossible – Ghost protocol. I looked like this all night: 

Entertained and thoroughly happy. It’s been way too long since last time I watched people climbing skyscrapers and blowing up stuff. In the biggest cinema in the city. Sold out. The awesomeness.”

Only afterwards did I find out that Nostra at My Filmviews had had exactly the same reaction, watching it with “a constant grin on his face”.

A ballet in disguise
Watching MI is like being in an amusement park, running all the coolest attractions but without having to endure the queues or the nausea that nowadays prevents me from trying even the smallest of merry-go-rounds. From the shock start of a wild breakout from a prison I was completely absorbed.

The scene where Tom Cruise climbs a skyscraper in Dubai by the means of magnetic devices strapped to his hands is no short of spectacular. And later on, as I watched the hero and the villain fighting in a multi level parking house, did I realize what it was that I had been enjoying all night. It was a ballet in disguise. And such a beautiful one! Action ballet never gets better than this.

This genre speaks to other senses than all those intellectual indie movies I usually stick to. The plot can be quite unimaginative; the characters don’t need to be fully fleshed out. They’re hygiene factors. Sure, you expect them to be there and do their job, but they’re not the selling point of the movie. It’s all about the visuals and the rhythm in the editing. Does it swing or doesn’t it?

Tom Cruise in tuxedo
In the case of MI there’s no question about it. It rocks. Almost everything about it rocks. I was delighted to see Jeremy Renner once again, the guy I learned to love in The Hurt Locker. In the trivia at IMDb it’s claimed that the character is created as a potential replacement for Tom Cruise’s character, in case he’ll decide to step back from the franchise. And I could definitely see Renner carrying a movie like this one. Simon Pegg is another favourite, bringing some humour to the party. And as of Tom Cruise, well, for all the appalling mumbo jumbo he’s into outside of the screen, he still rocks as an actor – as so many times before. I can think of very few actors who can wear a tuxedo as well as he can.

The only one in the cast who doesn’t rock is sadly enough Michael Nyqvist, who gives a fairly pale impression. I’m not sure Nyqvist is to blame for this; it could just be how the role is written. Perhaps a Swedish villain is supposed and rational rather than crazy and threatening?

I promised to keep it short, so I’ll stop here. Basically I could have kept down this review to just one symbol:

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird, US, 2011) My rating: 4/5

My crush lasted a few more years through 9 1/2 weeks and Angel Heart and then I lost track of him for many, many years. I think he went for boxing instead, though imdb says that he also kept doing movies meanwhile. They probably weren’t all that successful.

But Mickey Rourke wasn’t the only remarkable thing about Rumble Fish. I also remember it for being very stylish, all shot in black and white, apart from a couple of fishes which were displayed in glowing colors. For years Rumble Fish was my favorite movie thanks to the style and Rourke’s bittersweetness. To be honest I don’t remember much else of it anymore, but when I did my top 100 list I included it, just for old friendship and in honour of the 16 year old me.

A lot of style
The other night I reunited with Mickey Rourke in Sin City. He had aged, but who hasn’t? One thing was the same as on our first meeting though: it was the most stylish movie I’ve seen for a very long time and just like Rumble Fish it was shot in black and white with only a few dashes of colour just for effect.

But the magic wasn’t quite the same and it wasn’t just that Rourke had lost his sex appeal. I guess I’m not quite as easily seduced by style anymore. I ended up admiring Sin City more than I loved it.

I know this movie has quite a few fans and I bet some of them are having coffee in this café at this very moment, getting it in the wrong throat as they read this. What is this lady saying, you may wonder? Doesn’t she LOVE this spectacular adaptation of Frank Miller’s comics? It’s brilliant! It brings the art of turning graphic novels into movies to a new level! It’s as if the drawings are coming alive! Did you ever see anything blacker, slicker, darker, prettier? What is there not to love about it?

Well, let me put it this way: I was on my toes for the first 15 minutes, my jawed dropped, at awe with the sheer beauty of it. And the violence I’d heard so much about didn’t affect me very much. It’s not the over-the-top acts that make me nauseous. So what if someone gets turned into a pez dispenser, their head hanging in a thin slice? It’s just a fantasy. (On the other hand show me a father slapping his son or a man raping a woman and I’ll want cover my face.)

Lack of heart
My problem wasn’t the violence. My problem was the lack of heart. The film consists of four short stories. They’re told with the biggest amount of voiceover I’ve ever encountered in a movie and I think this might be one of the reasons why the movie had a sedative effect on me as soon as the initial jaw-dropping effect had worn off. All that reading aloud was as soothing as any goodnight story and I caught myself having stopped paying attention, dangerously close to falling asleep. Time after time I had to rewind and go back to where I had dropped the ball in order to make sure I’d watched the entire movie. For being a movie that includes a lot of action, violence, bad deeds, drama, sex and revenge it was strangely uninvolving, not to say boring.

It’s hard to put a fair grade after such an experience.

Let me put it this way: I would happily recommend Sin City to anyone who has an interest above the average for comics or films. It feels like a “must-see”, one in a kind. But on the other hand, I can’t hide that I didn’t connect with it. Not even with Mickey Rourke.

Sin City (Frank Miller & Robert Rodriguez, US, 2005) My rating: 4/5

But he had no solution for cancer so he died and 9/11 happened and as little as I could prevent it could I understand it or accept it.

They say there’s this mourning process you need to get through when someone dies but after ten years mine hasn’t even started. There is a locked door to my emotions that I reckon I should open but I can’t bring myself to do it. I tell myself that one day I will, only not today. Tomorrow maybe. When I’m strong and mature enough. I push it forward, one day at a time.

And I’m telling you all of this just to make you understand why I watch every movie about people dying or almost dying in cancer or losing their parents in cancer that comes in my way.

Sometimes those films trigger me to cry a little bit, letting out a little bit of whatever is hidden behind that mental door I have. Sometimes they don’t.

The cancer humor
The last one I watched was 50/50 and it only made me cry properly once (a scene between the guy with the cancer disease and his mother, which really messed me up.) On the other hand I laughed or at least giggled quite a bit. For how weird as it sounds, this story about a young man who all of a sudden gets a severe form of cancer with 50 percents chance of survival is more of a lighthearted romantic comedy than it is a gripping close-to-death drama.

It’s actually not all that strange. Cancer is dark and scary and horrible, yes, of course it is, but it also puts you in situations you hadn’t imagined, makes you do things you never thought you would do and you can’t but smile at it in all its absurdity. This disease gives you a quite twisted sense of humor, which I think 50/50 reflects very well.

There are for instance some funny scenes where the cancer patients eat marijuana cookies as a pain killer and this immediately tossed me eleven years back in time, thinking of my own experiences of this.

My parents used to live in Netherlands, where the view on such things is vastly different from in Sweden. When my father was in his terminal stage and there was nothing to do but to wait and try to keep the pain as low as possible, a nurse recommended us to bake him some cookies with marijuana. To her it was as natural as if she had recommended us to give him vitamins. It’s sold openly in coffee shops where anyone over 18 is allowed.

For me and my mother the thought of entering one of those shops was shocking. She could as well have told us to buy heroine by a drug dealer in a backyard. But again: cancer makes you do things you didn’t think you’d do. While my husband stayed outside with our kids, mom and I entered on trembling legs, cleared our throats and did our purchase. And then we went home and made cookies. I can still remember the nauseating smell. The stench filled the apartment. And my father didn’t like them particularly much so most of them ended up in the trash. But thinking about how lost we were in that coffee shop still makes me smile wryly.

What I thought
But I’m losing myself in memories here. Let’s head back to 50/50.  What did I make of it? Well, admittedly there were elements I didn’t like all that much. Did the girl friend need to be THAT shallow? Did the psychiatrist need to look like a young cheerleader? How believable was that? Did his friend have to be completely obsessed with getting chicks and getting laid? It got a bit tiresome. On the whole I liked it well enough, but it didn’t break into my top 10 list of 2011, which I kind of had expected it to do considering the topic. I didn’t love it as much as I wanted to love it. Perhaps I could have done with a few more cries.

My 17 year old daughter on the other hand was super enthusiastic, but from a slightly different perspective. She told me that she had watched it vanilla, so the whole thing about the cancer theme came as a complete surprise to her. All she knew, all she even cared about, was that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was the leading actor in it, the same guy who had made her watch 500 Days of Summer at least four times, if not more.

“He’s so CUTE!” “Did you see his dimples?” “I want to watch this movie again. Three times is a minimum!” she exclaimed as we walked towards the car.

I gave her a hug and asked her if she’d push me away the way Joseph’s character did to his mother if she got cancer.

“No way!” she said, smiling at me. “I’d use it! You would get me ANYTHING, wouldn’t you?”

I nodded. Indeed I would. Anything.

50/50 (Jonathan Levine, US, 2011)  My rating: 4/5

Let me be clear on this point though: giant lizards isn’t the topic of this film. It’s not a Jurassic Park wannabe. If you want to sort your movies into boxes, think rather in the terms of gritty British misery, like Mike Leigh in his darker moments. It hits some of the tones of Naked, but with a slightly brighter lining.

And I can’t stop thinking about it. The images are too strong, to vivid, impossible to watch, impossible to look away from.

If there’s anything I can’t stand watching on a movie screen, it would be cruelty towards animals and sexual and physical abuse of women. Tyrannosaur has both, in abundance.

Joseph and Hannah
Joseph is a working class man who drinks too much and is full of unspeakable rage. The only language he seems to know is violence. In one of the first scenes we see him beating up a dog until it dies. Then we see him mourning. It turns out that it was his own dog – and about the only friend he had in the world.

Hannah is on the surface better off, living a middleclass life in a nice house with a nice car, spending her days in a Christian charity second hand shop where he offers prayers to those who seem to need it. And that’s how she gets to know Joseph, as he one day stumbles into her shop, taking shelter from the world and from his miserable life.

But it doesn’t take long before it’s clear that for all her prayers and good heart, Hannah’s life is no better than Josephs. We realize this as we get our first glimpse of her husband, who on his late arrival at home one night walks up to the couch where Hannah is pretending to sleep and pees on her. It marks the beginning of a row of cruelties and acts of unspeakable humiliation that he puts her through. And like Joseph, she has no one to turn to ask for help.

Needless to say, Tyrannosaur is a tough watch. It’s also dealing with an old topic, domestic violence against women. Is it still worth watching? Yes, definitely, if you ask me. It would have a 5/5 rating for me, if it wasn’t for the last 10 minutes, which felt a little rushed, as if they’d suddenly run out of budget and wanted to put an end to it as quickly as possible.

Amazing acting
The quality of the movie isn’t as much about the story as it is about the amazing acting by Peter Mullan and Olivia Colman in the leading roles. They are multidimensional and go far beyond the cliché of the hateful, violent brute or the spineless, submissive victim. In the fear and weakness there’s also strength. In the aggression there are strokes of tenderness and love. I could swear that Joseph and Hannah exist for real, and that’s about as good as acting can get I guess.

Tyrannosaur made me go into places, getting to know people and environments that I usually would make big extra rounds to avoid at any costs.

And the bells keep ringing. Mostly in minor, but if I pay attention I can hear the major, hopeful and soothing.

Tyrannosaur (Paddy Considine, UK, 2011) My rating: 4,5/5

Pretty cool, huh? Can you imagine the surprise? My heart popped. Why was this happening? He is a famous film maker. I’m nobody. I was planning to write a post about his new short film, The Wholly Family, but how did he know?

After enjoying this sweet idea for about a nanosecond I realized that I wasn’t the only receiver of this mail. It had probably been sent out in thousands, if not millions of copies. It was just a marketing device.

If I understood Terry correctly (the letter was signed “Terry” and he’s addressing me “Dear Jessica”, so I suppose that means that we’re friends and it’s okay for me to call him by his first name), he had a suggestion for me. He wanted me to help him to promote his film, which is available as view-on demand by sharing it on Facebook. That would render me 10 percent of whatever profit he made on it, an offer I’m afraid I’ll have to decline; I don’t even have a Facebook page, so this letter was a bit of a waste.

But apart from that I suppose he’s doing the right thing. It’s probably a good idea for a filmmaker of today to engage in viral marketing if you want to stay in business and would prefer to try out your own ideas to work on the fourth sequel in a superhero franchise on decline.

The world is changing. We need to adapt.  Terry realizes this. He’s a modern man; he’s flexible; he grabs the opportunities that arise.

And yet – I can’t completely rid myself of the thought that something is wrong. I can’t shake off the sadness in it.

The icky feeling
Terry Gilliam should be making the next Brazil or 12 Monkeys. He shouldn’t be doing this. It’s like watching the leading violinist of the best symphony orchestra in the world (knowing little of the classical music scene I can’t give you a name but you surely can thing of someone) turning into a street musician, playing for nickels and dimes.

I’m one of those who tossed him a few coins. That’s why I got the letter. I paid a couple of bucks to watch the film online through an offer at the website of The Guardian.

I’m not the only sponsor of Terry’s. He’s got a bigger one as well, in the form of a pasta producer in Italy which  gave him free hands with two minor exceptions as long as they could slap their logo on the film, like any production company.

I suppose that’s a fair deal and while there actually is some pasta appearing in the film, I’d have to struggle hard to say that it’s a sell-out. I’ve seen far worse product placement in ordinary movies.

While Terry is doing the best he can to be cheerful and positive about it, it’s apparent that it’s not what he’d like to do if given the choice. The whole thing feels a bit icky.

Live blogging
The Guardian ran a live blogging event in connection to a Q & A session with Terry. Here’s a sample:

“7.07pm: Peter wonders if this is a route back into conventional film-making. Not really, says Terry, but it seems to be what people want. He doesn’t want to make films for the internet – movies are for the big screen, but that’s the way the world’s going.

7.07pm: Terry’s talking about the Italian premiere of his version of the Damnation of Faust. “Last year was my year of experimentation – short films and operas. I’m trying to work out a career for myself”.

7.09pm: The Wholly Family was a way to work in Naples. The only conditions from the pasta company was that it was set in the city (it is) and nobody dies (they don’t).

Terry says that short films like this are a realistic prospect for him because the middle group – those who don’t want to make blockbusters, but need a mid-range budget to realise their ambitions – are getting squeezed out of modern Hollywood.”

So Terry is making films for the internet when he’d rather make them for the big screen. And similarly I’d prefer to see his films on a big screen sitting in a comfortable armchair to looking at my computer screen, my ears covered with a headset, trying to convince myself that my desktop chair is just as nice (it isn’t). What a world we live in.

What feels even worse (and I’m reluctant to say it since I love some of his previous films so much and really want him to keep doing films): I wasn’t really a fan of this short.

Lagging issues
One reason is that I’m not particularly fond of Italian circus music, masquerade traditions or dream sequences in movies (apart from in Inception) and The Wholly Family has all of this. But even so I might have overcome those aversions and liked it if it wasn’t for one major problem, which had nothing to do with Terry’s quality as a film maker: the film lagged. The staggering movements of the actors made them sometimes look as if they were doing a robot look-a-like peformance in a street. And what was worse: the sound didn’t sync properly with the picture. It was as if the voices and the images were different entities, kept in different layers and it made the whole thing quite unpalatable. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Not being a technician I don’t know who’s to blame. I suppose it could be a problem with my computer or IP, but I wouldn’t think so. I’ve got a high-speed connection and normally I don’t have any trouble watching streaming media.

Terry doesn’t want me to sit in front of a computer watching a staggering film where people aren’t allowed to die because it might look bad for the sponsoring pasta company. He wants the real thing as much as I do. But sadly enough this is the best we can get at this point.

There’s a good reason why nostalgia is the theme of the year at the Oscars. People dream back to a time when a movie was a movie and not a marketing vehicle for pasta to be spread over Facebook.

The toast of this week goes to Terry. For the problems I had I wish this film will be a success. And I wish that you’ll get back to where you belong. In a proper theatre.

Cheers!

This was the tagline of a Swedish movie, Love Me! This film from 1986 is mostly remembered because it was one of the biggest failures in Swedish film history after being delayed for several years and exceeding the budget with 50 percent. The director wasn’t let anywhere near a film production for 17 years since the industry had lost confidence in him.
Anyway – as far as I recall the film was OK, but that’s about all I remember. It opened the same night as the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was shot in an open street, so I guess our attention was somewhere else at that time.

One thing stuck with me though after all those years, and I remember it as clearly as if I had watched it yesterday: the tagline that was quoted in trailers and ads for the film.

 “If I’ll ever find someone who will love me all the way down to hell, I’ll stay there”.

The words come from a troublesome teenage girl who has lived her entire life in foster homes. She’s provocative and demanding and frankly pretty annoying and I wouldn’t blame the foster parent who gave up on her. She asks for unconditional love, no less. And how do you know that the love is unconditional? You pull it to its furthest edge, making yourself impossible to love. In hell can you see what kind of love it is.

I hadn’t thought of this movie for a good many years, but the tagline came back to my mind as I watched The Kid with a Bike by the Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.

11 year old Cyril is only at his first foster home, but he certainly doesn’t make it easy to love him. If it wasn’t for Samantha, who steps into his life, takes him under her wings on the weekends and him a break from the orphanage where his father has put him, I would expect him to end up in a bad place.

“It’s him or me”, exclaims Samantha’s frustrated boyfriend, who isn’t an angel but a normal person.

“Him”, says Samantha without a moment of hesitation, thus making me tear up. It’s a standpoint she’ll get the chance to rethink this quite a few times as Cyril continues to make worse and worse choices.

I’ve often heard it said about movies that in most cases you could easily cut it down 20 minutes and it would only get better. But The Kid with a Bike has already gone through that process and it’s only 1,5 hours long. This means that we stick to the essentials. No time is wasted on irrelevant side plots or lengthy explanations about where those people are coming from. I get as much as that Cyril is in a crappy spot but I don’t get to know why Cyril’s father can’t take care of him. Is he just an egotistical asshole or is there something more to it? Has he done something criminal? And what happened to his mother? Not a clue. What’s life like at the orphanage? We only get a glimpse if even that. And who is this Samantha? An angel trying out the life as a mortal? Is she real? It’s like a fairytale; there are very few details. Not that I miss them. This movie is like a nice port – it’s concentrated so you only need a little of it.

In spite of the format The Kid with a Bike deals with big issues: love, loss, betrayal, revenge and forgiveness. I’ve seen some critics claiming it’s biblical. Perhaps they can’t imagine any unconditional love existing without divine inspiration.

If you ask me it’s just deeply human. There are a lot of shitty parents out there, but that doesn’t mean that their kids need to grow up without ever experiencing unconditional love. The Kid with a Bike is a good reminder of that. We may need to follow the kids and love them down to hell. But we don’t need to let them stay there.

The Kid with a Bike (Le gamin au vélo, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, BE 2011) My rating: 4/5