Tag: Danish

Greenland. Green. Land. Greeeeenland.

A country with a lot of mystery, because honestly, they don’t have an army and don’t affect the world in any other way that makes us look at them. That isn’t a bad thing. Just somewhat of a truth. People hear about Greenland mostly when we hear about melting ice sheets and similar topics and that is bad.

Enter Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. You may know him as Jaime Lannister from Game of Thrones. You may know him from Black Hawk Down, you may even know him from Wimbledon!

He has a history with this country, but also knows little about it. His dad worked here in the 1980’s away from their home in Denmark, and his wife (Nukâka) is a Greenlander, also an actress and a former Miss Greenland. So he has been to the country, he has met with her family and friends, but he hasn’t really experienced all of what the country has to offer.

So in this five part mini-series, that is what Nikolaj is going to do. Experience the shit out of Greenland. He wants to go Through Greenland, which yes, is the name of the thing.

Regardless of content, it is a bitchin’ graphic to open the show.

At five episodes with around 45 minutes an episode, there is a lot of Nikolaj to go around. It is spread over a longer period of time of course, with various people he knows acting as camera men and guides along the way. He is visiting towns and communities, both small and really small. A military base! Schools! And places far from the communities as well. The ice sheets to spend the night, to go on a long arduous hunting trip and more.

Nikolaj has always cared about climate change and so it is clear another reason for this series is to focus on the changes that are affecting Greenland that are notable to the residents, who can attest to the melts.

And if you want your content to be in Danish, then I have good news for you. This is a lot more Danish than I expected. It started out misleading, since the first thing he did was go to an American military base, but after that it goes a lot out of the window. I can’t tell you if it is mostly in Danish or Greenlandic, but maybe our host knows the latter and thus naturally can communicate anywhere on the island.

This small docu-series is not going to change the world. But it does offer some insight to a country that is often ignored for its human population. When we speak of Greenland, we speak of ice and emptiness, and ignore that it has its own communities, customs, and ways of life. So it is good that something is putting a stamp on it.

It features Nikolaj going the whole Greenland experience, I don’t recall him saying no to anything really. And it really shows those details which might be a curse or a blessing. I feel at times we spend a lot longer on a scene than necessary, or conversation. As a viewer, you may wonder if they didn’t want to do too much editing? That becomes the problem. If they edited it down, then we wouldn’t see the real country. But then they’d also need more content to fill five episodes. I hope the goal was to showcase the country and then give it the episodes they felt represented their footage, and make it a goal specifically to just pad it to five episodes.

Oh well. Two-Handed Jamie Lannister does manly and impressive things in nature with friends. That is what most people might take away from this.

[Editor’s Note: I watched Land of Mine before the Oscars, but couldn’t publish it until March 10, so keep that in mind.]

In my attempt to prepare for the Oscars, I was able to see the Denmark film, Land of Mine, making it my second to last film in that category. Most years I see 0-2 of the foreign films, so I am quite surprised I made it this far. I haven’t reviewed them all, but damn it, I reviewed some.

Now sure, it is a foreign film about World War II, and we are chock full of World War II films, but for the most part, they come from an American/English/German perspective. So a Danish WWII film has the potential to offer up something new on the subject, and a hope to have a new story worth telling.

And please not just be a film about boot camp and normal war tropes.

The film begins with the end of World War II. The Germans have surrendered after the suicide of Adolf Hitler, and now reparations are being made.

For this film, we are focusing on landmines (thus the title), thousands of them placed on the Denmark coast by the Nazi soldiers. They have maps of each landmine of course, because they needed it to get out of the area, so the Danish government has said that the German soldiers need to disarm and remove them.

Germany has sent over a group of soldiers to take care of it. However, these soldiers are all men in their teens. They were forced to join the army in the final months, given the need of bodies, and probably didn’t do anything terrible in their short time. But they were given to this dangerous job so that the older soldiers with more clout could go back home. They were a sacrifice.

Sgt. Carl Rasmussen (Roland Møller) is in charge of training these soldiers on how to properly dissarm and remove them. He is hard on them, because damn it, they are Nazis. But he also needs them to do a good job, because he doesn’t want his own men to get rid of the bombs, and he doesn’t need them all dying leaving thousands of mines left to go.

It is a grueling process, and every time someone makes a mistake, body parts go flying and their life is cut short. But they are promised when they finish the beach, they can go home. They have something to work towards. As long as they can make it.

Also starring Louis Hofmann, Joel Basman, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, Emil Belton, and Oskar Belton.

My years of minesweeper playing has taught me that they should be placing red flags.

Yep, as I already mentioned we got another WW2 war film. Thankfully, this one is heavy on the drama, and weak on the war. Taking place after the war is helpful in that regard. It still has some graphic violence of course. Given that we are dealing with land mines, it should not be surprising that some people blow up thanks to these minds.

And those scenes were gross. But they were realistic.

Land of Mine tells a story that decades ago no one would want to tell. No one wants to here the plight of the Nazi. But these kids were barely Nazis, barely adults, and didn’t deserve to die either.

Land of Mine is well acted, but hard to watch at times. And hard to hear at other times. But a worthy foreign film to be nominated.

As a reminder, we have no age limit when it comes to Documentaries at Gorgon Reviews. They can be old as fuck and I might want to review them for my website. And some times, instead of a documentary, I will review a foreign film on a Thursday, just to keep things interesting.

In the case of The Ambassador, well, it isn’t super old, but it is 2011. Half a decade ago! But hey, it also happens to be a foreign documentary. That’s a double whammy here. I watched it with subtitles. Sometimes they spoke English, sometimes not English, but I read the whole dang thing. The reason I am watching The Ambassador is because I bought it blindly at a sale. It was a $3 Blu-Ray, so my deal alarms went off and I just snatched it up. If I didn’t watch it right away to review, that $3 value would have evaporated into thin air as the movie entered my DVD Case, most likely never to be seen again.

Shit, that just got dark. Hopefully The Ambassador is a cheery documentary about nice things and happy thoughts!

The Ambassador is about a real live journalist, Mads Brügger, from Denmark. I don’t know if he was famous before this documentary, I don’t know if he became famous after this documentary. But he wanted to talk about corruption in Africa and blood diamonds. He wanted to do some of that investigative journalism, putting his own butt on the line to tell the story. And tell the story he did! With hidden and visible cameras.

First thing I need to make clear is that Brügger is a man who was born in Denmark and lived there hist whole life. Sure he has traveled, but he is Danish through and through. Repetition of this fact is important, because to expose corrupt government officials, Brügger is going to become a political ambassador. Not from Denmark, but from Liberia, an African country, with his goal to become the Ambassador to the Central African Republic. A really ballsy goal. And a strange one.

This feels like a movie with that plot line. I already can’t believe this super white guy can do any of this.

But he blends in so naturally with the natives.

So how does any of this work out? Well, first, if you are stupidly wealthy and European, there are people who want to talk to you. You can pay an absurd amount of money to become an ambassador or consul of a poor struggling nation. The funds you pay go to the nation (And the people who broker the deal) and they have openings that need to be filled. Now of course, if you become a representative of a country, you can not just go and do illegal things. That will make them mad at you and bad things will happen.

But this is corruption we are talking about! Of course people will do bad things. But his idea is to go to the Central African Republic (CAR), pretend to want to set up a match making factory, but instead secretly get into the diamond business. Once he gets involved with diamond people, he can get uncut, unlicensed diamonds, sneak them out of the country to wherever he wants, and take them home. It isn’t easy, CAR is a dangerous country with government issues. But it isn’t super hard either. A lot of people are willing to help him out, because it means they can make money on the side as well.

And honestly, money is the greatest way to get things to go your way.

Needless to say, some of the things Brügger are able to do end up being quite shocking. By the end I was surprised. I was more surprised that this thing was even released, because certainly it will make government agents at various places around the world quite pissed off. And some rich people as well.

I am watching this film five years after the fact though. I don’t know if this documentary led to any change about anything. It is still crazy that just anyone (with money) could do something like that and gain some diplomatic immunity.

My biggest problem with this documentary though is that it is incredibly hard to really follow, especially early on. They talk to a whole lot of people, some of which are important, some of which are not. Names are hard to remember, which part of the process is happening gets confusing and it is just a struggle to keep up. I figured out most of it by the end…kind of. But man, I was lost constantly. I was scared to even write this review, wondering what I would say when I had to descrbe the movie.

The answer was keep it vague, stall in the beginning, and talk about how insane of an idea this was in the first place. Brügger could have been killed. He could be dead right now for all I know. But Journalism is sexy and sometimes you gotta take some risks.