film
This post is now located, strangely enough, HERE.
I watched ten films at the 2014 festival, fourteen last year (at two festivals back to back), and this year I managed ten again. I had bought tickets for fourteen, but stuff got in the way: a huge blizzard that knocked out public transport, subtitles disappearing, and a call to marital duty.
The people who book movies for this festival really know what they're doing. Half of the ones I saw get my special recommendation:
Small Town Curtains / Småstad. Five middle-aged siblings play five middle-aged siblings dealing with the death of their father. In Vadstena. In a broad Östergötland dialect.…
Space Whale
The past two weekends were a lot of fun.
The Royal Technical College's orchestra and several combined student choirs from Sweden and Finland performed Giuseppe Verdi's 1874 Requiem, an intricate and operatic farewell to fellow composer Gioachino Rossini and poet Alessandro Manzoni.
Hallwyl House: carving in the doorway between the ladies' drawing room and the Golden Salon.
Gig with King Khan and the Shrines. Imagine a tall, psychedelic, semi-nude, portly, Canadian Wilson Pickett of Indian extraction belting out soul rock with a band consisting of extremely enthusiastic…
John asked me to create a permanent movie recommendations forum in the shape of a comment thread. Et voilà!
Vague and sweeping spoilers below.
The Force Awakens is fully on a level with the original three films, as far as I remember them. These are four good scifi action movies. The new one is actually better in being much more inclusive of women and non-Europid people. It's quite a loving re-visit to the original material.
My main complaints with the new one are that
The tempo is too uniform and too high
No time seems to pass between scenes, with the main characters never even having a change of clothes
People need no training to operate star ships and military weaponry
The story is a clear and…
It's been a busy movie-going month for me with the Monsters of Film festival, where I saw six films, and now the Stockholm International Film Festival where I've seen eight. Last year I saw ten films at the latter festival, and I enjoyed most of them, but overall I liked this year's crop even better. All but two get my special recommendation:
As I Open My Eyes. A late-teen girl discovers love and experiences political repression while singing in a band in pre-revolution Tunis -- five years ago.
Dope. By happenstance three geeky straightlaced ghetto kids find themselves in possession of a…
Turbo Kid -- see this movie!
Encouraged by my first film festival last year, I've signed up for two this year. This past week it's been the genre festival Monsters of Film, which leans towards horror but has a lot of other stuff too (but very few monster flicks, actually). I saw 5½ films in five days. Two get my special recommendation:
Turbo Kid. Fun over-the-top 80s superhero-comics nostalgia in a post-apocalyptic wasteland with BMX-riding road warriors.
Remake, Remix, Rip-off. Documentary about popular low budget Turkish movie-making in the 50s to the 90s. Voluminous interviews intercut…
A new study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences provides evidence that hummingbird tongues act like micropumps when drinking nectar. This finding is in contrast to the long-held belief that their tongues use capillary action to pull in fluids. A team of researchers from the University of Connecticut used high-speed film to capture 18 species of wild hummingbirds as they drank from special transparent feeders. They made sure to mimic wildflowers by developing feeders with similar shapes, volumes and concentrations of nectar as the real thing. What they…
I've written about The Recompense here, and that writeup includes interviews with the creative team putting the film together. This is just a quick note to remind you that The Recompense has a kick starter project with one week left. So, now, you have to go there and kick in a few bucks!
The graphic above is the budget breakdown for the film, indicating what has already been invested and what the Kickstarter campaign will fund. Here is a note from the film's team:
With just over one week left in our campaign, we wanted to show you how your contributions, if our project is successfully…
Bounty hunter Jahdo Kyn intends to start a new life, but in order to leave his troubled past behind he has to buy himself a new future. He has a plan, but as his plan develops he discovers a dilemma, one that requires him to make choices he is not well-prepared to make. This is what happens when you have the kind of past Jahdo Kyn has made for himself.
The Recompense concept art: Analiese Miller as Aisha Lefu.
The beautiful and deadly Aisha Lefu is part of that past. And she’s not the only individual that will make Jahdo Kyn wish he hadn’t gotten out of bed that one morning, a long time…
I remember joking with my friend Ana about how her name would be attached to the first named storm in the 2015 Atlantic Hurricane season. It turns out Ana is an exceptional individual. Both of them.
Ana Miller as Aisha Lefu in "The Recompense: A Star Wars Fan Film."
Ana, my friend, is an actor and is currently engaged in a project I'll be telling you more about later. But in the meantime, you can visit this page and find out about a new and very interesting Star Wars related crowd-funded production called The Recompense. Give them money.
Meanwhile, back in the Atlantic Ocean, Tropical…
From "Reactions" (from the American Chemical Society).. Without chemicals, super heroes would be impossible!
See Also: The Physics of Superheroes–Jim Kaklios
Before this month I'd never attended a film festival in any concerted way. But I was inspired by Ken & Robin's podcast to do so, and got myself a membership card for the Stockholm Film Festival, 5–16 November. The festival's excellent web site made it easy for me to choose which viewings to attend. And I enjoyed myself! Teaching in Umeå and a boardgaming retreat in Nyköping took chunks out of the festival for me, but I still managed to see nine feature films and a programme of nine short films.
Three of the feature films have my particular recommendation:
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night…
In honor of the Discovery Channel's "Shark Week", check out these shark cams.
National Aquarium Reef Shark Cam:
Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream
SHARK FIN CAM: Video taken from a camera strapped to the dorsal fin of a shark:
Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream
If you have not yet tuned in to Discovery Channel, there are still a few days left of shark week!
"Why should people go out and pay money to see bad films when they can stay at home and see bad television for nothing?" -Samuel Goldwyn
There are few experiences that we can share together -- no matter the great distances in space or time -- like a good movie. Encapsulating a great variety of aspects of the human experience in just a couple of hours, a movie can take us to places we've never been and inside the minds of people we've never known, as Janove Ottesen reminds us in his song,
Black And White Movie.
This weekend, I'd like to highlight for you three of my favorite fake film…
As an ex-Catholic, I can appreciate a good movie involving Satin1 or his Minions. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, I get the jokes.2 Some of them are rather subtle and require an understanding of church dogma. Also, I can relate to the stranger side of the belief system from personal experience. When the book The Exorcist came out, everyone in my family read it, we all discussed it, and we considered the question: "Is it true or not?" And we decided that it was true. It probably helped that my cousin was a trained Exorcist, though I don't believe he ever actually…
We braved ice and fog to go down to see Harry Potter this morning. And yes, it was indeed icy, which was a bit traumatic for me. Last time I was walking on glare ice, I fell and seriously injured my knee. That was last February and I'm still doing physical therapy and taking the occasional pain killer. We did make it across the glare ice of the parking lot safely, but the manager of the movie theater did find regret in his decision to put no salt out to keep his customers in said parking lot safe. Yes, it was an embarrassing spectacle for all but when we left the theater after the movie…
I like Wikipedia, I really do. But there are also some serious, very serious problems with it. I just read the entries on the Battle of Rorke's Drift, a few related historical entries, and the entry on the movie Zulu, which is about the Battle of Rorke's drift.
My interest here is in looking at how things African are depicted in movies and other aspects of popular culture, especially historical events and "traditional" cultures. (I am not an expert on modern African studies.)
I will write about that at another time: Suffice it to say that at this point it is obvious that the overall…
Replacing floors is a total exercise routine. Moving furniture out of the way, ripping up whatever is there, measuring and cutting new sub flooring, carting around heavy sheets of plywood, tacking and nailing, and so on and so forth works every single muscle in one's body. That's what we did last weekend. Also, I was able to demonstrate my special technique for testing if a particular floor is safe, or if it is so rotted out that it has to be replaced; You stand on it bouncing up and down a little bit and if you crash through to the basement, that part of the floor was bad.
Saw the…
I've found out about the spooky cartoon show my daughter watches that I wondered about, the one where one character looks just like Riff-raff in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. It's Die Schule der kleinen Vampire / School for Vampires, a co-production among Germany, Italy and Luxemburg. The Riff-raff look-alike is named Nestor (Lenny in the English version). Explains the show's web site,
Nestor is the heart and soul of the school.
Driver, cook, janitor, secretary, guide, nurse - there is nothing that Nestor can't do.
And he is the only one at the school who was not born a vampire, but was…