Flickorna. Mai Zetterling. 1968. ⚅

*gasp* This has like all my favourite actors:

This is gonna be brilliant!

[the end]

OK OK OK, the plot here is very simple: A theatre troupe puts in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata in the districts, and the play and reality meld together kinda.

But wow! This is brilliant! It’s like post-Nouvelle Vague, post-realism, post-Bergman, post-everything: It’s totally new! Amazeballs!

I was riveted to the sofa the entire time! It’s like so weird — I’ve seen nothing like it (but I mean, there are obviously parallels to French and British late-60s cinema).

It’s gorgeously shot and strangely lit: It shifts between kinda semi-natural lighting to over-exposure-lighting in a hypnotic way. (I was wondering whether Zetterling was using infrared film at one point but I think not?)

Andersson, Andersson and Lindblom are totally amazing here — it’s just one iconic shot after another.

But I mean, it’s not perfect — two thirds of the movie in, the pacing gets a bit erratic…

Let my try my hand at a translation: “The film met harsh criticism and disappeared from the Stockholm cinema after three and a half weeks. ‘Such deranged menstruations!’, Bo Strömstedt of the Express newspaper commented.”

Fuck you, Bo Strömstedt.

Fuck you.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. J.J. Abrams. 2019. ⚄

Jay Jay is back? I have to admit I haven’t paid much attention to what’s been going on. But I like Jay Jay! He’s got the best anamorphic lens flares! We all love anamorphic lens flares!

So… Uhm… I’m not quite sure what happened in the previous movie? Uhm… did Luke die? Yes, I think Luke died? SPOILERS! And that guy from that marriage movie thing … went… evil? Or did he renounce evil? Is he nice now?

And that woman! Rey? She… she’s like a god now? I may be misremembering some details. I’m amazed that I remember anything at all! Let’s see.

[rolls movie]

[sixteen minutes pass]

Seeing Carrie Fisher … reanimated this way is really distressing. I’m guessing they took footage of her unused in the previous movie and dropped her in here? She’s doing lines that you can see how they wrote the surrounding lines around, to make they sound like something else than random samples dropped into the movie, and… it doesn’t work at all. She’s spouting non-sequiturs while connecting to nothing around herself, and it just seems cruel. Abusive.

[thirty-seven minutes pass]

Wow. This is all kinds of stupid — it doesn’t make sense even on a scene to scene basis — but it’s kinda fun? That is, there’s some really fun scenes in here, and then there’s some really dreary scenes, and the pacing is really weird, and I can’t believe that we’re 40 minutes in and… nothing has really happened yet, really? I mean, it has, but it feels like we’re still in the intro, and the adventure is gonna start any moment now…

But I’m enjoying myself; this is kinda fun.

[the end]

At one point in this movie, I was definitely going to ⚂ this movie. Because this thing, which I’ve seen on 9gag for seemingly years now, is true:

Basically, everything anybody else does in this movie doesn’t make much of a difference: They’re just landscape for Rey’s hero story.

On the other hand: I laughed (once), I cried (several times), and looks great. So who cares if the plot really… er… doesn’t really fit together very well? Sure, it’s too long, but there isn’t really a bunch of scenes that you could see being cut — there’s usually half an hour of padding in these movies, and that’s not the case here — instead there’s just half an hour of really boring scenes instead.

So: This was a really enjoyable movie to watch. Perhaps there’d be all these things to delight or enrage me if I were a Trekkie, but I don’t really … remember … any of the background to this movie, so I’m pretty much uninvested.

I like it! It’s sci fi! I like sci fi.

Hamlet liikemaailmassa. Aki Kaurismäki. 1987. ⚂

[fifteen minutes pass]

“starring Pirkka-Pekka Petelius”. Is that possibly the most Finnish name ever?

So this really is a version of Hamlet? So far the storyline is kinda vague… Is Kaurismäki depending on the viewer remembering how Hamlet goes? I mean, like everybody else, I’ve seen at least half a dozen stagings of it, but… I don’t… really remember the plot. I mean, beyond the basics of the uncle killing his father etc etc there’s the rub, but… this seems like it would have been more fun if I could remember just exactly what Rosenkranz and Guildenetc did, precisely? And I don’t.

Yes, yes, this is a comedy (a parody?), but still.

[the end]

Well… If you do the dead-pan the humour in excess, the movie’s gonna… die?

I’m kinda amusing, but it’s also kinda annoying.