sippan Reviews

Mammoth (2009)

Moodysson remains intact in English, too

[8/10 · 23 January 2009]

After seeing The Wrestler, by my once favourite director Darren Aronofsky, and finding that he had lost all of his personality as a director on his voyage toward mainstream cinema, I had been worried that my other favourite director Lukas Moodysson would suffer the same fate in his attempt to make an American, Swedish film.

But I can happily report that he didn't.

There is no director, alive or dead, whose films make you feel more emotionally immersed than Moodysson. Nobody's characters you care more about. This holds true even in this latest film, which sneers cynically at society at the same time as it glances warmly at the individuals society consists of, while in the meantime all of its characters are so busy caring for people that they neglect to care for the ones closest to them.

But while the individuals eventually find their way back, society carries on unstoppable.

Alive (2002)

No, no, noooo.

[4/10 · 29 December 2006]

I don't know where to begin, so I'll begin with a snippet from the back of the cover of this movie. "Alive combines the tension of Vincenzo Natali's Cube with Kitamura's own Versus." I have not seen Versus, so I can't comment on that, but I think Cube was an excellent movie which I recommend to everyone. However, in this case someone has clearly confused "tension" with "boredom".

I'll just go ahead and spoil the entire plot, because besides being one holy Swiss cheese of a plot, it's also moldy cheese, and the movie is not worth spending any time on even if you don't know the plot beforehand, so it doesn't matter. If I have misunderstood the plot, don't hit me - it's probably because I had to struggle to keep my eyelids open.

So the American military in Nevada once lost a UFO i the Nambi desert. This apparently makes sense because they're both deserts so surely they're practically the same place. Different continents or not. A monkey broke into the UFO and acquired an alien something which was passed on to a Japanese researcher who had to eat the monkey to survive in the desert. What ever. The alien thing is now passed on to anyone who's "bloodthirsty" enough to kill the current host. The Japanese military wants to use it for military stuff, so they decide to make it pass from the current host (the researcher's daughter) to some other dude. But instead of just picking someone out of the military, which is full of people who are bloodthirsty AND already on the military's side, they decide that it's probably a good idea to pick some criminal out of death row instead. Oh, and the reason they pick this particular criminal from death row is because he was the first person in history to not die from the non-lethal electric shock which is the standard execution method, because everyone dies from the placebo effect when they get electrocuted. I don't know if they do this so they can giggle in the staff room at how everyone dies even though it's not deadly, or if they just want to cut down the electricity bill.

Then the movie turns into what The Matrix would have been if it had been really lame, and superfluous fighting bores us to tears for what feels like an hour. And oh wait, now they remember that they already had a dude who was infected with the alien thing, so the entire movie up to this point was actually a totally waste of time and also human lives. Then everyone dies. The end.

The only one moment in the movie where I didn't want to go away and sleep or eat a sandwich instead, was when a dude was pinned to a wall by a pipe through his chest, and he's hanging around up there and another dude walks by. The dude hanging on the wall says "I'm in pain, shoot me". And the living dude looks at him, and it's not like he's a mean dude or anything, so he really looks sorrowful and doesn't want the guy on the wall to suffer. So he shoots him.

(Rhetorical pause.)

In the stomach. "Gee THANKS A FREAKIN' HEAP."

He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not (2002)

Don't look at the cover.

[10/10 · 15 June 2006]

If you haven't seen the movie, go away. Shoo. Read another review without spoilers in it. In fact, don't read another review because saying anything at all about this movie would constitute a spoiler. Bye now.

I have a personal policy about movies: I never, ever read the back of the cover. Not even the front of the cover if I can help it. People recommend movies to me, and then I write their names on a list, I quickly check their IMDb ratings to see in which order I should rent them, and then I visit the video store and pick them out of the shelf without looking at them. I go home and watch the movie. Then I take a look at the cover. Sometimes, it turns out avoiding the cover was not necessary. Usually however, the text on the back of the cover says *way* too much about the movie. I don't want to know anything when the movie begins. Movies automatically become better when you know nothing about them.

In this case, it's not just an odd quirk of mine. Nobody should read the back of this cover. Really, don't even look at the *front* of this cover! I don't understand what they were thinking when they designed this stupid cover!! This movie contains - no, it *is* - one of my favorite plot twists ever. But it's also the most fragile plot twist ever. As soon as you even know that there's going to be a twist, the twist is pretty much ruined. It's a romance drama, and you couldn't see the second half of the movie coming even if you had binoculars, or even a telescope.

And then they go and put the quote "Horror masterpiece à la Hitchcock" on the FRONT of the cover. WHAT IS YOUR MAJOR MALFUNCTION??

Never have I been as thankful for my policy about movie covers as when I came home and watched this awesome movie.

Silent Hill (2006)

How could they do this!?

[2/10 · 14 June 2006]

So when I first heard this movie was being made, I thought: "wow, this is the first game-to- film conversion that stands any chance of turning out nice." By the time it came to Sweden, which was today, I had already read some American reviews of it. In other words, when I came to the theater tonight, I was *expecting* that the movie would suck horribly.

And yet when I left the theater again, it had placed itself so far below my worst expectations that I was infuriated by how miserably deplorable it was. A pox upon the director.

I should declare that I am an avid fan of the three Silent Hill video games. (I pretend that the fourth one does not exist, just like I will banish the knowledge of the existence of this movie to the cobwebbiest corner of the most inactive compartment of my memory immediately after having written this review.) The Silent Hill games absolutely rule. I liked the second one the best. One thing that makes them good is that they manage to deliver that eerie Silent Hill atmosphere which most "horror" games and movies can only dream about. Another thing is that the game designers had found the *exact* point where the balance is optimal between how much is shown and how much is left to the imagination. A third thing is that the plot always was (although never quite as deep as I would have liked them) always deep *enough* so as not to be dull and boring.

The Silent Hill movie is a shallow, uninteresting, and *incredibly* annoying excuse for a pathetic, brainless gore flick that could have come out of that miserable genre's most disgusting peak in the 1990's, if it hadn't been for the special effects.

The first half of the movie was actually slightly better than I expected. So I kind of regained some hope there. The classic Silent Hill imagery was brought to the screen pretty nicely, the music was great - although that might have been due to the fact that they simply took the entire soundtrack straight out of the games - and all I really had to complain about was that they had decided to scrap the Mark of Samael/Seal of the Metatron/whatever and that the volume was way too loud way too often, to the point where it became ridiculous. And then, the middle of the film appeared. Hello and welcome to The Middle of the Film, the moment where we take a never-ending break from *not* completely screwing up this game- to-film conversion. Cue a very long hour of extremely graphic close-ups of people being burned to death, penetrated by and torn in half by rusty barbed wire, superfluously stripped naked and then skinned alive and so forth. Reveal the plot in its "dramatic" and "shocking" entirety - and the plot is basically a mix of the first and third games, except stripped of everything interesting and dumbed down to fit the lowest common denominator.

By the time the miserable movie finally ended, I was just p'ed off.

I hope the design team behind the games had as little as possible to do with this production, because if not, the next game is likely going to be as much of a waste of time and money as this movie was.

Mystic River (2003)

Worthless and unoriginal

[4/10 · 26 September 2004]

I had high expectations for this movie. Everyone said it was great, I had only read reviews that praised it and it's even on IMDb's top 250 list. But after I saw it, I couldn't understand why everyone liked it so much. It's completely bland.

I feel like I've seen it all before a thousand times. Childhood friends are brought back together under different circumstances in their old hometown. How many times have we seen this before? And it never gets more unique or interesting than that.

The only thing that makes this any different is that all these famous people are involved in it. And they aren't even making their best performances.

Dull movie, 5/10 at a max.

Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973)

If only it had been made today

[6/10 · 14 September 2004]

So I finally got my hands on this movie. Wow.

Let's start with the negative stuff:

The soundtrack. Jesus Christ. I can't even describe it. In fact, I'm not quite sure if it was the soundtrack or if there were glitches in the audio. The ending credits were cool though, they are set to NES music.

The special effects. "God damn, this is the 70s! We only know how to make one special effect!! But hey, let's use that single special effect (SLOW MOTION!) gratuitously in /every single scene/ in the /entire movie!/ Yay!"

The porn. One could say there are two kinds of movies: porn and not porn. Any movie automatically becomes porn when you add extreme closeups of genitals bouncing into each other, even if it's only a handful of 10 second clips. And porn is automatically bad. The rest of the movie is awesome, why in the world did they ruin it with porn?!

OK, the positive things:

Christina Lindberg. She's awfully cute, and gosh darn awesome, too.

The clothes. This IS the Matrix look, 30 years before The Matrix. And the color-coordinated eyepatches are simply /brilliant/. I don't blame Kill Bill for "borrowing" it. =)

The bad guy. He's got Mikael Persbrandt's voice, but it's not Mikael Persbrandt. It's eerie. It's not like it's just "similar" - I'm not sure I could tell the two apart in a dark room.

The scene where a Bert Karlsson lookalike gets shot in the face with a shotgun. Hilarious.

The car chase. It's the most awesome car chase I've ever seen. Why? Because she's *not going anywhere*, she's *not chased by anyone* and she's *not in any hurry* - and yet she drives like CRAZY and five cars explode in the process. Whooo!

Wow, pretty much everything else, too. In fact, it feels to me like the director had this awesome idea for a movie, and found all these great actors and wrote a great script and made great costumes - BUT, the special effects in the 70s just weren't enough. I strongly believe that if you today took the exact same script and the exact same actors (but they haven't aged, due to a mysterious time warp) and remade the movie with the special effects available today (and just about any soundtrack except the one they actually used) it could be one of the coolest movies ever.

The Visitors (1988)

There are only two countries that can make good horror movies.

[8/10 · 29 February 2004]

The first one is Japan. And they know it. The second is Sweden, but for some reason horror movies are extremely rarely produced in this country. There are only a handful. But almost all of them are great, and this one is no exception. It's only the first movie I've seen that manages to be very amusing, at no expense when it comes to the fear factor. A Swedish viewer would look upon this movie with much doubt, because it is a movie starring Johannes Brost and Kjell Bergqvist, yet calls itself horror. That's sounds like a combination that doesn't work. But strangely enough it does! The movie is awesome.

Forgotten Silver (1995 TV Movie)

As Monty Python as anything can be

[8/10 · 26 September 2002]

Absolutely hilarious. It just gets better and better even when you think it won't be possible. If Peter Jackson's name wasn't on it, I would believe without hesitation that Money Python had made it. I already knew Peter Jackson could make action movies, dramas, and horror movies... (and whatever-category-"Braindead"-falls-in movies) Now I also know he can make comedies. He is in the world of directors what George Clooney is in the world of actors, and this is one of his best movies.

Chobits (2002–2003)

"Chobits" is the best anime I have ever seen!

[11 August 2002]

Chobits hasn't been officially subtitled, but I have seen fansubbed episodes and I must say, since I was first introduced to manga and anime at the age of 13, I have never seen anything this cool! No other anime series is as funny, and none as addictive.

Every ninth episode seems to be a long set of memories so that new viewers can get updated on what they have missed in previous episodes. Good idea, but bad for those of us who have seen all the previous episodes, and want to see more of Hideki and his quest to find out wether Chii really is a Chobit.

I hope I will never have to see a final episode of Chobits.

Film für alle (1995 Music Video)

Worth buying for the "Arbetslös" music video

[7/10 · 19 February 2002]

Peter Wahlbeck rules. That's why I saw this movie in the first place. A lot of it is just, well, plain boring. But the "Arbetslös" music video is the coolest thing I've ever seen! It's a lot of short video clips from a sci-fi movie that must be from the 50s or 60s, which is the exact opposite to the song. It's so funny! I wish I had the movie the clips come from too! (This movie is also worth seeing for the sketches with Dragan)

Address Unknown (2001)

This movie made me experience physical pain

[7/10 · 31 January 2002]

I love this movie! OK, it's horrible, it's disgusting, watching it made

me sick...and saying that I experienced physical pain is not a lie.

There is no happiness in this film. Everyone is depressed and

everyone has difficult problems to deal with, and those problems

don't get solved, but rather get worse during the film. But this is

why I love it! A film that can give you such strong feelings, even if

the strong feelings are depression and pain, is a GOOD film!

Might be good to see this if you think YOU have problems. =)