film

Check out this film. My friend Marta plays "Holy Mary, Mother of God" a part especially well suited for her. Details: In this video: Adri Mehra (videos), Kristen Swenson, Louie McCoy, Lydia Schwartz (videos), Marta Haftek, Nicole LeDuc (videos), Peter Kenyon (videos), Taylor Park (videos) We entered a 24 hour film contest the weekend of April 4th. Friday the 4th at 10:00pm we received an e-mail stating the theme of the movie (Saving) and the action that had to be included in the movie (Knocking on a door). By 10:00pm the following day we had to hand in our movie to a nearby bowling alley…
9-y-o Junior has had a remarkable streak of luck involving the kids' fantasy movie Spiderwick Chronicles. First he managed to check his e-mail just as the book-club he's a member of sent out a mass-mailed invitation to yesterday's pre-screening of the film. Then, when he and I sat down to watch the thing, the Spiderwick books' Swedish publishers ran a lottery with the seat numbers, and he was the first winner, harvesting two new books and a merch note pad. In Junior's opinion, the movie was a 8/10. I'm not a member of target audience, and I give it a 5. It's a contemporary-world children's…
My friend Mickey Huss (the virtual lamprey guy) has alerted me to the existence of near-future noir flick Gene Generation. It's said to be the first Hollywood movie directed by a Singaporean. I haven't seen it, but I gotta say, that's the first non-porn movie poster I've come across that's shot from the perspective of a gynaecologist. Vadge power!
Scandy readers will be very familiar with this. As we learned from "Hatten Är Din", "Ansiktsburk", "Fiskpinnar" and other Turk Hits back in 2000, you can get wonderfully absurd results if you listen to a song in a foreign language and pretend it's actually sung in your mother tongue. Now, a talented Ansiktsburk poet has subtitled, in English, a typically over-the-top music video from southern India. Unbelievable stuff! "Have you been high today? I see the nuns are gay My brother yelled to me 'I love you inside Ed!'"
During the 1990's I can scarcely remember a time when one television station or another wasn't playing at least one of the four JAWS movies, TBS, TNT, or WPIX often devoting an entire day to films about killer oceanic creatures. Still, of the four films JAWS 3 (or 3-D, if you like) was one of the b-movies that was always making the rounds, and it's gratuitous special effects make it an easy target for this week's cheesy movie selection. Although I didn't realize it as a kid, JAWS 3 picks up the story of the Brody family at a Sea World theme park (Sea World Orlando, a landlocked theme park, to…
Yesterday may have been Halloween, but today I learned of a real horror story; the BBC is going to cut "a third of its 180 production staff, including 10 out of 35 producers, nine of 17 assistant producers, 23 of 33 researchers and 11 of 37 production manager jobs," from the Natural History Unit according to the Financial Times. The cuts are a result of the BBC attempting to make back about $4.5 billion due to a bad license-fee settlement, an estimated 2,500 job cuts resulting from the need to recoup the funds. As Julia has noted, this is especially shocking given the popularity, success, and…
Until I saw this 1972 film I had no idea that amphibians wanted to rule the world, but apparently they are cold-blooded masterminds bent on destroying Homo sapiens, or at least wrecking a crotchety old man's birthday. Oddly enough, however, Frogs doesn't even live up to it's own name, there being only one frog in the entire film (most of the "frogs" are really toads), but such considerations didn't stop the filmmakers from buying everything that slinked, slithered, or crawled from the local pet shops and creating a classic, putrid piece of movie cheese. The eco-thriller is a bit of a sub-…
If it wasn't apparent already, I'm a sucker for monster movies, especially ones involving oversized crocodilians. The vast majority of them are absolutely horrible (like tomorrow's movie of the week, Supercroc), but next month (Nov. 8) a more promising feature from the director of Wolf Creek will be coming out. The film is called Rogue, and while it follows the basic killer croc formula (come on, how many original story lines about giant man-eating suchians can you come up with?) it seems like it's actually going to be scary and enjoyable, unlike the cheese-fest that was Primeval. In fact…
What do you get when you put dinosaurs, terrorists, and Navy SEALs all in one place? The answer in "A mess," and in this case such a disaster carries the title Raptor Island. Starring Lorenzo Lamas, the film continues the long standing tradition of putting guns and monsters in the same place in the hopes that something good will come out on film. Indeed, it seems that more effort is required to serve up a plate of Hamburger Helper than was put into the story and dialog of this slice of movie cheese, and its painfully apparent from the very first scene. We meet our hero, "Hack" (Lamas) and his…
Over at David Nessle's, his witty readers are discussing translations -- more particularly, bad translations. I collect crap translations from English to Swedish, so I decided to offer some to you, Dear Reader. To make this palatable to non-Swedish-speakers, I'll add a second step to explain what the Swedish mistranslation means literally in each case. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Main character drives around on a rainy night looking for a place called Cornflower. Meeting someone, he asks for directions, but the other guy just drives off and our hero yells an insult after him."Excuse…
My kids have taken to watching LazyTown, this really druggy and garish kids' show on Playhouse Disney. It's got a lot of caricatured puppets of children with the hands of real people, but also three live actors, the main character played by a little girl in a pink wig. The live actors, particularly the tall fey lantern-jawed villain, ham up their performances mercilessly. Their interactions with the vacant-eyed puppets lend an extra dimension of unreality to the show, and when you add the fact that it's all been dubbed into Swedish so the lip movements don't synch, you've got a product way…
Here's a charming interview with Apples in Stereo front man Robert Schneider, followed by him performing "Energy" from the new album. All courtesy of the Instant Talk Show. (Total clip length 9 minutes.)
Two months ago my metal detecting team and I were visited in the field by the Swedish State Broadcasting company's TV science show for kids, Hjärnkontoret. They tell me they're running the story tonight, somewhere between 1830 and 1900 hours Swedish time. For those who choose to watch, it may be entertaining to know that minutes before the TV crew appeared on site, we found a 4th century ring made of a material we don't talk to the media about. So in the footage, everybody's quietly euphoric yet clamming up, while the TV people are being really thrilled to get to try out a metal detector and…
I am in mourning for a character in Six Feet Under who died on us last night. The fifth season is airing in Sweden. And I mull over the final scene. Did another character turn into Shaggy from Scooby Doo and act as the dead person's psychopomp on the way to the hereafter? Bizarre, typically bizarre. And very moving to me. It's been a great, great series.
If you're like me, when you read a book, you form a picture of what's happening in your mind. I try to imagine not only what the characters look like, but also their surroundings. Eventually, I've created a picture of an entire world in my head. Then, when the book gets made into a film, I'm often disappointed when things don't look the way I imagined them. Could it be that the visual environment I've created in my head is just as appealing as the one created by the filmmaker? It makes some sense: if we've gone to the trouble of creating a visual environment, why not use the part of our mind…
I'm in the kitchen. My wife just sent me the most amazing link from the living room. TV Links Last weekend I missed the only TV show I watch, Six Feet Under, now being aired in its fifth season in Sweden. Since then, I've tried to find the missed episode on DC++ and BitTorrent, to no avail. At TV Links, a high-bandwidth video stream of the episode is just two clicks away. And they have all the other episodes too. Of all the other seasons. Of every single TV series I've ever felt even mildly interested in watching. I have no idea how they do it. But that site is amazing. I feel like an ad…
The Kuleshov Effect, discovered nearly a century ago by Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, posits that the context in which we see an image of an actor's face will determine the emotion the face portrays. For example, take a look at this short little clip I made (QuickTime required). First you'll see a gray screen, then a photo, then a second gray screen, and another photo of a face, taken just after that person looked at the first photo: What emotion would you say characterizes the second face? Is it neutral, subtly happy, or subtly sad? Kuleshov's work suggests that most viewers will see that…
On the opening episode of the Colbert Report, faux conservative Stephen Colbert expressed his preference for "guts" over facts: That's where truth comes from -- the gut. Facts come from the brain -- and some people think that makes facts better. But did you know you have more nerve endings in your stomach than in your brain? You can look it up.... Anyone can tell the news to you. I'm going to feel the news at you. In Colbert's signature parodic style, he appeals to the "common-sense" notion that "guts" matter more than "brains." Even his dubious claim about nerve endings has some merit --…
My 8-year old son is, like myself at that age, a big Star Wars fan. But his road to the stories has been more complicated than mine. Much of what he knows about them comes from a computer game version where everything is for some reason visualised as built out of legos. So he asks me a lot of confused questions that I can't always answer. Just now we had such a conversation where I learned that he had gotten all three main female characters mixed up: Luke Skywalker's grandma, mother and sister were the same person to him. When I teased him about this he just replied, philosophically, "It's…
A few words about the Spanish fantasy film Pan's Labyrinth. It's extremely pretty, well made and finely acted. It's very violent, enough to gross me out, and unsuitable for anyone under the age of 20. The plot is driven entirely by the pointless cruelty of a psychopath. Pan's Labyrinth is thus a story of pointless suffering and cruelty, which is a genre I loathe. That's what the real world is like, I don't need that in fiction as well. Oh, and the title's mistranslated. It's actually El Laberinto del Fauno, "The Faun's Labyrinth". [More blog entries about film, movies, panslabyrinth; film,…