Tag: Norwegian

This film was watched as a part of the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF). Dancing Queen has its Seattle Premier on Tuesday, May 16 2023.

Dancing Queen, young and sweet, only seventeen. Surprising that they haven’t just made a movie based off of that song yet.

Oh what is this? A movie called Dancing Queen from Scandinavia? Is this the time? Well, no unfortunately not. Because this movie is from Norway, and I cannot imagine them wanting to make a nearby countries most famous song from their most famous band? Now sure, they might make a reference to the song. But it can’t be a film based on the song. Because damn it, this main character is not seventeen.

Hmm. She is also not 7. Or 27. Or 57. Just listening more incorrect ages. 

In fact, our main character, Mina (Liv Elvira Kippersund Larsson) is uhhh, 7th grade age. Which eludes me at this moment. She likes school, and getting good grades, and hanging out with her friend Markus (Sturla Harbitz). Besties. But then at the start of the year, a new kid arrives, E.D. Win (Viljar Knutsen Bjaadal), from Olso! Why has he moved to a small town? Not actually sure, but he is internet famous for being a young hip hop dancer with tons of followers. So all of the girlies say heyyy, including Mina.

So once Mina finds out, that same day, that he is going to do auditions for a youth hip hop dance crew, she decides she has to audition. You know, with no experience whatsover. But E.D. Win smiled at her and made her dance in a circle and didn’t mock her, so it is true love. And she will go and audition with no experience. And sure, she might not have a stereotypical dancers body. Or like, thin. Or like, full of endurance.

But she has gumption. And she has love.

Also starring Cengiz Al, Anders Baasmo, Andrea Bræin Hovig, Anne Marit Jacobsen, and Ylva Røsten-Haga.

Whenever I look at myself in the mirror, I am always stuck looking at myself.

From the trailer, and the storyline, it looked like this movie wanted to be Norway’s answer to Little Miss Sunshine. I love Little Miss Sunshine! It is perfection in film. And unfortunately, this story is a lot more basic than Little Miss Sunshine. A bit by the numbers, with okay performances, but nothing as great as I had expected and hoped.

The story is where the main problems lie. It is easier to explain with direct spoilers which I will avoid here but, there is a lot of stuff that just doesn’t make sense based on how it was described. Like, the final competition was no where similar to what it was advertised early on. It makes me confused at why E.D. Win even wanted a dance crew for, since it didn’t seem to even use dance crews? It was all like, middle school duo groups only? They described it as a big national competition, with dance crews, and not even specifically kid based. So the final result is very strange.

I will also say that some characters leave the narrative at, frankly, random parts for motivation, with no great reason or foreshadowing behind them. It feels hollow. The whole ending feels hollow and forced, given the events that lead up to it.

I am all fine for body positivity films, sure. And I am glad it talked about them, and had one character be an absolute dick about it, in order to drive the narrative towards that and the extremes that one’s body can not endure. But Dancing Queen still ends up being a very basic film, with a plot you can predict, and no real shocks along the way.

When you hear the name Thelma, you really only think of one thing. Well, technically two things. You think of Thelma, and you think of Louise. You don’t even need to have seen the movie to have understood the reference. If you didn’t, then well, you suck at pop culture.

When looking up Thelma pictures, I was flooded with a lot from the 1991 film, despite putting a year in the google search as well.

But there was ANOTHER girl in these images as well. Because it turns out we had a Thelma movie in 2011, from the Philippines, about a girl with powers.

Huh, this is a Norwegian movie about a girl with powers. Today you just learned that Thelma is the most powerful female name around the world.

Blows your mind a bit, doesn’t it?

In Oslo, Thelma (Eili Harboe) is finally going to university, so she can learn at an accelerated pace and discover new things about the world. You see, she grew up in a smaller area. Her family didn’t have direct neighbors, but land around a lake, which is a real sweet spot for fishing, or skating, depending on the time of the year. Her father (Henrik Rafaelsen) is a huge Christian man, and her mother (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) also that, is in a wheel chair.

But yeah! College! Time to study all the time! And apparently, have seizures. In the middle of a study hall, in front of future friends, pissing her pants. The doctor finds it strange, as she apparently has no history of seizures. She just wants this thing to be kept secret from her parents. Thankfully she is an adult now, and doctor to doctor conversations will not trickle to her parents officially, even if her dad is also a doctor.

The seizure did do something good though. It helped Thelma meet Anja (Kaya Wilkins), who just seems like the most special girl she knows. She definitely likes Anja, AS A FRIEND OF COURSE. There is no way that Thelma, good Christian girl, would ever be tempted into something sinful like being a lesbian. Yet still, she has a way about her, and Thelma cannot but feel something unique there. However, whenever her mind gets a hold of situation, she gets into that shaky, seizure-y territory again. And when she gets there, some bad things have happened. Unexplainable things. Dangerous things.

Also starring a lot of Norwegian people. If there are any Swedish or Finnish people, I wouldn’t have noticed!

I just see all Scandinavians as the same, to be honest.*

Thelma was a wonderful movie. It was a slow and careful. It moved at a speed that almost made me hate it, as I just wanted answers faster. I had to be patient and let the movie unravel. But even the very first scene, a flashback (can a flashback be the first scene, technically?), of our main character and father was haunting. It took a long time for that one to be answered, it certainly didn’t go the way I expected.

Thelma is a strange coming of age story. It starts with our protagonist already “of age” but just slightly underdeveloped mentally due to a closed upbringing. It has her alone for most of the film when it comes to her emotions and problems, because of fear of her parents, fear of regression, and fear of change. And it has some magic stuff too.

The magic isn’t some wonderful power of invisibility, or flight. It is a lot more accidentally sinister, in account of it being a repressed power that she really doesn’t have a lot of control over. You know, like Frozen. But in this version of Frozen, the parents don’t die and the power gets actively oppressed by others, not just the main character.

I was scared, I cried, and I loved Thelma. Good job Norway. This is officially their selection to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Picture. At this point, I hope it gets nominated.

Look, it is July, and here is a review of a foreign movie! Usually these reviews happen really late or really early in the year, and usually for award reasons. It is hard for me to go out of my way normally, unless something really captivates me, or I hear good things, or I am in the right mood.

And then I found Cave, which really fits none of these categories. But it was under an hour and a half, on Netflix, and about a subject that had some interest to me.

This movie out of Norway has only a handful of actors and the description implies a lot of thrills, so it seemed like an easy no-brainer for the site. However, going into it I want it to be warned: Despite being a Norwegian film and the language being Norwegian, this movie is in English dubbed. Or Spanish! Netflix didn’t have the original language as an option with subtitles.

Fuck, from this image, this movie might as well be French.

Time for a reunion for three friends, Charlie (Heidi Toini) (a girl), Adrian (Mads Sjøgård Pettersen), and Viktor (Benjamin Helstad). They are all war veterans and have been friends longer than before that.

In fact, Viktor and Charlie used to be a couple. Now, ten years later, it turns out that Charlie and Adrian are a couple. Only awkward if you make it awkward.

They decide to go cave diving together as a sort of reunion, to reconnect, because it has been some time. They are going into a cave where the exit has not been mapped out yet in its waterways, so as adventurers, they are going to check it out and try to be daring! Hooray!

And then some bad stuff happens, some dark secrets in those dark caves. Oooh, scary.

Also starring Ingar Helge Gimle as another extremely minor character.

This is not a spoiler because you can’t fucking tell what is happening.

Although normally I am a component for dubbed films and don’t care about the dubbed vs subtitled debate, this film suffered more from dubbing. We got three middle aged, probably in their 40’s old war people going cave diving in the middle of nowhere. They are gruff and experienced. And the two guys sounded like surfer dudes in their 20’s. Even if the film on its own was decent plot wise (it wasn’t), I couldn’t take anything they were doing seriously.

Nothing screams out real when surfer guys talk about the war and how serious being in a cave is. So much early just felt like a sarcastic joke, that the film felt like it was dragging despite its incredibly small run time.

The plot itself is pretty bad. It has appropriate foreshadowing to figure it all out, but it never really feels tense. You just feel that the characters aren’t actually as smart or believable as they say they are. I don’t know a lot about going into caves or cave diving, but I am pretty certain they make a lot of obvious mistakes and don’t look like professionals.

More importantly, there is a lot that goes unexplained in the film. Maybe they were hoping for a sequel. (Oh hey look, Cave 2 on IMDB, and one of the actors is listed again but with a new character name. What?) Maybe they were hoping we would draw our own conclusions, which I thankfully did do. A conclusion that said that this Cave movie stunk.

One of the main reasons to become a film reviewer is the search for the perfect film. Sure, many contenders exist, but for every person it is their own unique quest.

I for one think that the perfect film already exists, and it is called O Brother, Where Art Thou?, so the perfect film is no longer my goal. I have to get more specific now. The perfect musical. The perfect super hero film. And of course, the perfect film for the geologist in your life.

Geologists in films are all over the place. Usually they are buffoons but sometimes they can be bad asses. My two most recent good Geologist performances have to go to Adam Scott in Piranha and Paul Giamatti in San Andreas, but both arguably bad films.

So why don’t we have a well acted geologist in a well acted film? I don’t know. America has failed. We have to turn to Norway. We have to turn to The Wave (or Bølgen) to see if they can do better.

Yep, this is 100% scientifically accurate. I can confirm that this is a wave.

Geiranger is a small Finnish village right in a fjord. It is a mountain village with beautiful scenery and a giant coast. And of course, it is a dangerous place to live. No real crime of course. This is a happy place, no one is mean in Norway. But should the plates shift too much and a landslide occur, then it will cause an enormous tsunami that would wipe out most of the village in mere minutes.

That is why it is important for them to have people watching out for them. People like Kristian (Kristoffer Joner). He is good at his job, monitoring squiggles and minor movements. He is so good at his job, that he has been offered a better job in a bigger city working for an oil company. Heck yeah!

And so he is about to move out of Geiranger, his home for many years. He has raised a family here. His wife, Idun (Ane Dahl Torp) works at the hotel. He has an older boy Sondre (Jonas Hoff Oftebro) and a little girl Julia (Edith Haagenrud-Sande). But they are ready to get out and move. Until some movements start to worry Kristian. He doesn’t want to jump the gun, but with the water table dropping, he has to do more research. He was supposed to take his kids on the ferry out, but he made them stay just to get more research.

Which is bad, because shit is about to go down. Large mass is about to go down. Down into the fjord. A tsunami. And once it starts they will only have about 10 minutes to get everyone up the mountain and in shelter.

Laila Goody, Arthur Berning, and Herman Bernhoft also play geologists and Thomas Bo Larsen and Mette Agnete Horn as a couple of hotel guests. Of course, also, Fridtjov Såheim as Arvid the Geology Boss.

Fuck your hotel. This wave isn’t some bitch ass tourist. It is here to stay!

Yay Kristoffer Joner! The man who can play a geologist and seem like a normal person, like a hero. So the criteria for a bad ass geologist was definitely met, as it was just a guy who wanted to protect his friends and family.

But how about the science? For the most part, the science was also accurate and not exaggerated. A nice plus that they could keep the thrills and excitement up without going “Hollywood” with it.

But the crew themselves were a bit disappointing. They shouldn’t have had to wait til the last moment to issue the siren to warn the town. Ineptitude for the sake of moving the story along. Not that they don’t seem like competent workers, it is just that if they have one job, they should know what their numbers mean.

The movie is well shot with good practical effects. The story itself isn’t new at all either. It doesn’t mean the movie isn’t good, just not entirely groundbreaking material. Heh heh heh.

Also, I thought Ane Dahl Torp did a fantastic job.

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence was recommended to me months ago. But alas, it was a foreign film, and I put all of them in my “Get To Eventually” folder. And a couple months ago, it was even put on Netflix, making it even easier to watch it, but alas, subtitles.

And now I am finally forcing myself to watch it, not only because I love the title and want to know more, but because it was nominated for a Spirit Award for Best International Film! Didn’t get a pick for the Oscars, but hey, that’s harder.

Anyways. What the fuck pigeons, right?

Horses are notorious for their hatred of pigeons.

I have no idea what to say.

This is a weird movie with a lot of smaller plots. Most of them are pretty much on their own, but occasionally, some of them get connected.

The picture above is pretty sweet though? A lot of strange things going on there. We got a horse, we got uniforms, we got a bar, we have some scared women, and a dude in a mask. Just give it your full attention. It is strange, and it is meant to be strange.

The picture below is less exciting, but it was my favorite scene. Why? Well, the place burst into Norwegian song, and it was a great feeling. I stopped looking at the lyrics just to listen and watch, because song lyrics rarely matter.

If there was any story, it would be about Jonathan (Holger Andersson) and Sam (Nils Westblom), two novelty item salesmen who try to sell some items and wander around and have bad shit happen.

Ever feel like everyone in a restaurant is staring at you?

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence is probably the weirdest movie of 2015. Take that American Ultra. And I mean weirdest by a mile.

It isn’t super absurd, like Rubber, it just has that strange aura throughout each scene. First of all, the camera doesn’t move or follow anyone around. Each of the pictures showcases a scene, and in the entirety of the scene, you will see it from that point of view. That makes the viewer feel disjointed from the action, like an outside observer. Like a…pigeon…staring through the window…or something.

Secondly, the characters are just weird people. The scenes are amusing just because they don’t feel normal. No one is extravagant with their emotions. They are all low key and living their monotone lives.

A very strange film to describe, so much that I have used that word five times already and this review is getting repetitive.

Is it good? Debatable. I would say it is unique and well made and it did what it was going for. Not really anything I’d suggest to most people, nor would I ever watch again. Norway. You crayyy.

When I put Kon-Tiki in my Blu-Ray player, I found out that Norway is a cocky country. Look at this picture. I took it myself. (No it is not my penis).

I won’t describe it because I want you to see it. But Damn, that is some serious ego shit. Who would do that to start a film? Someone who has too much pride in a language, I tell you what.

Or just pride in their original movie. Ohhhh, pretty.

Thor Heyerdahl (Pål Sverre Hagen), besides having a bad ass name, grew up to be a scientist. He is an ethnographer, so basically he helps figure out how humans moved throughout history, and where certain cultures evolved from. In a nutshell.

He has spent a long time in Polynesia, working on his theory that the culture came from South America. There are many similarities in statues, and they have a tale of a tribe who came from the sea. He has all this evidence! No one will publish his work, because no one would believe it. No way could primitive people have gone from Peru to Polynesia. No way. And he can’t prove that they could, either.

Or could he?

He decides to build a boat, calling it Kon-Tiki, and sailing the journey himself with a small crew, just as they would have built it 1500 years ago without the aid of technology. No, it will be strictly ancient. Can he make it across the ocean in a small raft, over three months? Yes.
Yes he can. Some of the other crew members were played by Anders Baasmo Christiansen, Tobias Santelmann, and Gustaf Skarsgård. Shit, those are all super Scandanavian.

I haven’t seen this many bearded Norwegians since prom!

So I found out why the DVD menu went super egotistical and language-ist. The mother fucking Weinstein Company did it again. They cut out like, 17 minutes of the original movie for the English movie. What?

To make matters even worse, every scene that needed it was filmed in both Norwegian and English, so that they could release the same thing in both places. They are identical. It isn’t bullshit dubbing. The words that come out of their mouth are English. So yes, I watched it in English, not knowing that so much was cut out, and I just feel wronged.

It is the exact same thing they are going to do for Snowpiercer. They want to remove 20 minutes of material to make it so the people in “Iowa and Oklahoma” will go see it. Fuck you fuckers. They are calling Americans stupid. And I live in Iowa.

That all has nothing to do with this movie, but everything. Since I haven’t seen the Norwegian version, I really cannot compare.

What I can say is the version I watched felt lacking in some way. Sure, it was beautiful as fuck. Gorgeous. Well shot. Sexy almost. So many beards. But it wasn’t completely interesting. Their story basically paved the way for many adventurers back in the 50s, and probably helped inspire the journey to the moon. But their accomplishment isn’t as powerful feeling because we have already done crazier things to surpass it.

It is still an interesting and awe inspiring story. But not as exciting as I would have hoped.