Change Your Image
nottelmann
Reviews
Holiday (2018)
Depravity and beauty
Many other reviewers on this list have split into two camps: Those that find this film an exploitative waste of time. And those who find it a masterpiece of art cinema. The truth probably lies in-between. This is a beautifully filmed portrait of the seedy low-life of a Danish mobster family in a Turkish tourist town, as seen through the eyes of Sascha, the king pin's blond arm candy and sometimes courier. In the style of Refn's Pusher II, also about low-life gangsters from the island Amager south of Copenhagen, their lifestyle is portrayed in its unadorned proletarian dullness. No witty one-liners or criminal honour here, just tedious boozing, brawling, and boasting. Not to mention awful fashion taste. But unlike Refn's preference for grainy tinted images through shaky hand-held cameras, Eklöf lets us witness this depravity in splendid technocolor and careful lingering shots.
The sophistication of the script lies in the way it plays with our feelings for Sascha. At first she seems a naïve victim in deep waters. She is left to wait for her contact at an unbearable family hotel, and is punished disproportionally for spending a tiny amount of money without prior permission. Clearly, she is at the very bottom of the family hierarchy. But soon we learn that, even if she often feels above the unsophisticated mores of her fellows, she is very much an integral part of the family. The infamous explicit rape scene is hardly very shocking to anyone accustomed to recent Danish film making. To those largely indifferent to the on-screen display of genitalia or sex, it is not anywhere as shocking in context, as is that infamously grueling rape scene from Irreversible. At this time in the plot Sacha has already been drug raped at least once within a few days and has simply accepted it as normal fare. And obviously she submits to her rapist without much quarrel or protest, as if this is routine to her. In some scenes, it seems she even enjoys being abused by her sugar daddy. What is shocking, if anything, is the implied normalcy of this. Sascha, like her fellow minions, willingly subject to the king pin's strategies of domination. In turn he lavishes them with ridiculous gifts, in turn he rapes them or savagely beats them up, while the family kids watch tv shows in the adjacent room. Always he expects their compliance and gratitude. This is simply regular crime family life. As a side character finally calls Sascha out on her complicity, she responds by demonstrating her personal callousness and temper. Life goes on, as the family helps clean up the mess. What remains disturbing as the end credit rolls, are the mixed emotions the viewer is left with.
Were we tricked into caring for a callous manipulative minion, simply because she is pretty and naïve? Or did we witness the ultimate perversion of a fragile young woman at the hands of an evil sadist? The film offers no definite answers. Herein lies its primary quality.
Black Earth Rising (2018)
Captivating political crime drama
Having just watched this series and having much enjoyed it, the many harshly negative reviews on this page disturbed me, not least because some of them have a valid point or two. I write this mostly to dissolve my own cognitive dissonance and to encourage other viewers to bear over with the flaws of this production and benefit from the experience.
1. Many object that the main character played by Cole is too unlikeable to cheer for. Surely, Kate Ashby belong to the same school of female investigators as e.g. Saga Norén from the Bridge, or Lisbeth Salander from the Millenium Trilogy. Harrowed by a violent and troubled past, deceived by her own family, no close friends, an instrumental relation to sex and intimacy, introvert and suspicious to the brink of sociopathy. Those tolerating only a sassy heroine with a cheeky smile should look elsewhere. However, Cole has more than enough screen presence and charisma to make up for the sulkiness and taciturnity of her character. Her reactions to dramatic events and trauma triggers are believable in many ways, even though sometimes a bit overdone (perhaps one or two vomiting scenes too many). She portrays the character's inner turmoil and social ackwardness with gripping intensity. At all distances, the camera loves her statuesque and expressive facial features. A great acting performance overall, beautifully filmed. Not least the obvious stark contrasts in appearance between Cole and Goodman are played to great cinematic effect.
2. Perhaps a bigger problem than the above are the facile plot devices sometimes employed. Unlike her Northern detective sisters-in-kind seemingly Kate Ashby has no impressive detective skills to show. She is not a world-class hacker or a stellar crime scene investigator. More or less her method is patiently hovering around people she were told were important, until miraculously she gets help from hidden powerful allies. When she resorts to more conventional detective ploys, she often has the great fortune that hardened members of international conspiracies fall for cheap tricks out of Spying 1.0.1. Sometimes she suddenly meets up with key figures in ways so implausible that literally those figures offer on-screen excuses for being in the scene. This is quite distracting. The redeeming feature: This is no conventional whodunnit. Kate's detective work is merely a side story to the real drama on the top international level, between politicians, CEOs, diplomats and high-ranking civil servant. And here Kate's lack of demonstrated traditional detective skills (except from perseverance) plays to the advantage of the plot. To a great extent her story arch illustrates how the whims of post-colonial power games powers make mere pawns out of the people on the ground, who must suffer the traumatic consequences.
3. Some complain there is not enough character-development. Some of those reviewers therefore gave up on the series midways. But here the manuscript is quite original, giving us character development in reverse. The initially very sketchy and unexplained relations between the main characters and their subplots are gradually revealed and their motivations are made understandable in retrospect. In fact this is the real drama here. Surely the dialogue overplays the tension a bit. There is at least one dialogue too many along the lines of: "Let's talk about the big secret we all kept for so many years!" "No, let's wait at least another hour".. Still, this does not detract from the fact that the reveal of the greater picture is well paced over-all. And in fact that picture is well worth waiting for,
Behind the Curve (2018)
Fascinating documentary
The key virtue of this fim is showing us flat-earthers as fairly normal people going about their daily life. Surely, we also get briefly to see some stereotypical conspiracy nuts screaming absurd rants into a web cam or practising weird habits like juggling pingpong balls with sledge hammers while reciting the periodic table. But those are not the characters carrying the film. Rather we follow a couple of close friends, that seem fairly normal and likeable apart from their weird cosmological theories. As we get into their daily habits, their characters, their hopes and their lifestory, the real drama of this film is their ostentatious normality. Sure enough they seem blind to obvious counter-evidence and are inclined to motivated reasoning. But those are merely standard vices in exaggerated form, They are not vicious, unintelligent, or very pathological in their reasoning patterns. Rather they show great affection for each other and considerable kindness and social skill in maneuvering the unruly flatearth community. They are self-reflective and engaged individuals. Their possible tragic backgrounds, sexual problems, and religious obsessions are hinted at, but never allowed to take center stage. The viewer is left to wonder how the belief systems of such fairly ordinary people could pervert on such a drastic scale. This is the engaging mystery presented by their normalcy. The reviewers protesting that following those people around is merely a bore seemingly miss the key point of this film. It would be so easy to vilify flatearthers en masse, having scientific authorities point out their fallacies and blaming their ignorance. Then all we normal people could safely go back to sleep, convinced that nobody near us is vulnerable to such mental corruption. After this film we can't! If those people could become flatearthers, perhaps our friendly neighbours also could? perhaps they already are?
The film also has its moments of absurd and dark humor. The main protagonists trust heliocentric cosmology enough to drive hundreds of miles to witness a solar eclipse predicted by it. But once at the correct location, they use the opportunity to spread flatearth geocentric propaganda. Also, while distrusting the heliocentric account of the eclipse on complex (pseudo)-scientific grounds, they happily offer in its stead the childish alternative that the Sun simply hides itself, because it sure looks that way! And any purported counter-evidence produced by directing binoculars at the sky is explained away is either a hoax or simply part of The Great Presentation. In another laughable scene the main character refuses to recognize any direct flight routes on the Southern Hemisphere, despite the fact that e.g. several flights leave Cape Town for Sydney every day. The directors wisely choose to let this absurdity play out without interference or raised fingers, thus recogmizing that for someone so deeply distrustful, such blame is ineffecutal anyway.
In a funny way, some of the portrayed flatearthers to al arge degree exhibit the very virtues that led to modern science: Rather than accepting anything on blunt authority they hanker for explanations they can understand and evaluate by their own mental powers. Also they are willing to sacrifice anything else in pursuit of such understanding. But without any sufficient education, with no outside checks, and left to the ruthless social dynamics of modern internet life, however, such virtues are quickly eclipsed by the vices of narrowness, paranoid suspicion and confirmation bias. This holds a crucial lesson to anyone interested in scientific education policy, and the sociology of belief.
Next Gen (2018)
Daring and original work
In terms of general plotline this film is hardly very original. Rather it is a too predictable mashup of plot elements and genre tropes from various predecessors, not lest Big Hero 6, Wall-E, and the Marvel Ironman franchise (with some Terminator mixed in). Added to this are brilliant artful animation and some good satirical punches, not least aimed at Apple and the late Steve Jobs.
What makes this film stand out is rather its courage in depicting the complex psychology of a grieving and conflicted girl in her early teens. I watched this film with my 12-year old daughter. She sympathized deeply with the main character Mai in a way I have never seen with similar films in the genre and was moved to tears by more than one scene.
Many reviewers have shown outright contempt for the main character. Perhaps they are not teenage girls, have not been one lately, or have never tried their hands at raising and living with one. Mai is no angel or Disney Cinderella, suffering in either silence or beautiul song (one may conveniently forget that in the original Grimm fairy tale, Cinderella ultimately tortures her step sisters to death at her wedding). Mai is an angry kid, resentful of the father who abandoned her and her mother who entirely ignores her in favor of a surrogate relationship with a robot butler. At her new bleak and industrial school, educational life is pointless and automatized. The rich kids in her class use their shiny robot assistents to catch and hold her, while they savagely beat her up. No wonder she hates robots.
In the character defining opening scene, her insensitivized mother decides to bring her to a robot fair, triggering all of her trauma. Mai literally runs against the mindless stream, refusing to let the robots control and sedate her. In her backpack she carries some of the artwork that keeps her spirit alive in this dystopian world. She is a free spirit, one of the very few fully recognizing the shackles humanity has imposed upon itself. In an unlikely turn of events she forges an indirect alliance with the other singular human with the power to make a difference as the robots extinguish the last remnants of real humanity.
Many have complained that Mai is unlovable, since she often treats those who love her with disrespect. Sorry to say, this is typical teenage girl behavior, very accurately portrayed. Yet teenage girls are not unlovable. They need the care and guidance of adults more than ever in coming to terms with adult feelings and the adult world. Surely, Mai's robot friend must suffer some abuse from her. But one hardly needs Freud to observe that the robot becomes her father figure, onto which she projects the grief and anger she rightly feels toward the father that cruelly abandoned her.
All in all Mai is a complex and psychologically realistic character beyond what Disney and Pixar would ever have dared. Watch this with your teenage or preteen daughters!