Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö. Aki Kaurismäki. 1990. ⚄

OK, here we go. After I don’t know how many movies: Here’s Kaurismäki’s breakthrough movie, that in retrospect made all his previous movies seem better. (After this movie, an eight-movie Kaurismäki er festival? was mounted in New York.) And I think I saw this at the Cinematheque back then!

[rolls movie]

[twenty minute-ish pass ok it’s a lot longer but that’s how far the movie progressed]

So I started this move and then switched to something else because of reasons, and then I learned that Ruth Bader Ginsburg is dead so now I’m back watching this movie. Who’s going to be the next supreme? Stephen Miller?

*sigh*

So I’m now a lot more depressed than when I started watching this movie, and now every single scene seems filled with depressing dread, as they should be.

[the end]

All of Kaurismäki’s strength and weaknesses are in this movie: But to the nth degree. Kaurismäki’s loathsome taste in music is even worse here than normally, making many scenes unbearable, and his staid actors are better here than ever before, making many scenes scintillating.

But it’s a really good, unique movie, deserving all the plaudits and general excitement that it received at the time.

Vi har många namn. Mai Zetterling. 1976. ⚃

Ah, this is a movie commissioned by the BBC and SVT in 1975 on the occasion of UNESCO’s International Women’s Year.

[ten minutes pass]

It’s very experimental. And Zetterling plays the er lead herself.

[the end]

The last half of this is brilliant. The excruciating scene with the well-intentioned cop is… well, excruciating. But brilliant! And then the ambiguous scene with the mom on the phone…

Zetterling is awesome throughout as an actor. Just stunning. Her stillness in the next-to-last scene is fantastic.

But then there’s the first half, which I… wasn’t quite convinced by?

So: Uneven, but with some scenes that are better than anything else in the world.

Mai Zetterling’s Stockholm. Mai Zetterling. 1979. ⚃

So this is a TV episode about Stockholm? From a series called Cities? Looks kinda interesting?

[ten minutes pass]

It’s very arty, but doesn’t quite have the confidence to be art? It drops in a sound “bed” all the time, and there’s all these pointless pans and cuts. The music is especially annoying since the transfer is really wobbly, so everything … wobbles.

[twenty minutes pass]

The docu is kinda fun: It’s a lot about Strindberg (of course) and stuff, so it’s not really… that much about Stockholm.

[the end]

It got more about Stockholm towards the end.

I like it, but the audio almost drove me insane.

INSANE I TELLS YA