Tag Archives: Norwegian

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IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: LAKKI… THE BOY WHO COULD FLY (1992)

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Gutten som kunne fly; AKA Lakki, Lakki… The Boy Who Grew Wings

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DIRECTED BY: Svend Wam

FEATURING: Anders Borchgrevink, Nina Gunke, Bjørn Skagestad, Jorunn Kjellsby

PLOT: A young man dreams of escape from his grim life; salvation may be coming in the form of the wings that seem to be sprouting from his back.

Still from LAKKI... THE BOY WHO COULD FLY (1992)

COMMENTS: Lakki comes by his pitifulness honestly. His father is intensely self-centered and will walk away from a relationship without a moment’s notice. His mother fosters a deep narcissism that expresses itself through wanton promiscuity. They’re both heavy drinkers. The boy’s grandfather was hauled away for insanity, and mom has a friend who comes over to the house and just sits around, day after day. Lakki’s school days are miserable, particularly thanks to his hyperaggressive gym teacher, who of course is now sleeping with his mom. None of these adults seems interested or capable of taking care of a child, and Lakki would happily remove their obligation if he weren’t only 14 years old. Growing wings and flying away is honestly the best idea he can think of.

Those wings are, one supposes, the most fantastical element in Lakki. Whenever he hits a particularly low point, he hustles to a mirror sneak a peek. Notably, we only see them when he does. While the film is cagey about how genuine we should find this, there’s no mystery about their metaphorical heft as a means of escape. But on another level, the characters are so outlandishly extreme and the situations are so cartoonish that the whole thing plays as unrealistic. Even Lakki’s ventures into the dark side of his situation play almost as parody. An attempt to offer himself as a rentboy results in a comically violent encounter in which he beats up the wishy-washy would-be John. Meanwhile, a walk down the path of drugs is met with overwrought hellfire and screaming. Far from being a cautionary tale,  even the most dire situation Lakki faces is laced with heightened ridiculousness. It plays like an ABC Afterschool Special, International Edition.

The dialogue is similarly purple, usually making Lakki feel ever more weighted down by the responsibility that the adults disown. His mother is especially dismissive, over-sharing, then dismissing her son’s frustration. (She’s pretentious, too. In a flashback, she tells Lakki, “We mustn’t shout. The night might punish us.”) In a pair of fascinating scenes, Lakki’s parents treat him not as their child but as the peer they yearn to confide in, right down to sharing their booze, and Lakki laps the attention up with needy urgency. Young Anders Borchgrevnik is in every scene trying hard to embody the emotional torment in Lakki’s soul, but some scenarios defy the talents of even the finest actors, and the multiple moments where the boy buries his face in his arm and sobs feel uncomfortably inauthentic.

Writer/director Wam and producing partner Petter Vennerød earned a reputation in Norwegian cinema for exploring social issues, but this, one of their last collaborations, doesn’t really pull back the curtain on the human condition. (After the initial release flopped, the film was recut and issued under new titles to give it another go.) Lakki’s situation is unique and odd, and his resolve to take on the responsibilities that are repeatedly abdicated to him feels more like a surrender than a culmination. Lakki doesn’t fly, and neither does Lakki. He never could.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Lakki is a complete chaos, and the style suggests that Svend Wam for a moment thought he was David Lynch.” – Fredrik Gunerius Fevang, The Fresh Films

(This movie was nominated for review by Morgan. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

SLAMDANCE 2024: ODDS & ENDS

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Bitcoin Car

Trygve Luktvasslimo has many things to say about the evils of global business, agricultural affairs, and especially bitcoin. As screeds go, Bitcoin Car is, at least, a largely whimsical one. The plot description (if you’ll pardon the long quotation)—“a musical adventure in which a young goat farmer on a small coastal village finds herself on collision course with the megalomaniac death wish of a young crypto investor. After her brother comes home for the summer, she has to explain that she’s partially responsible for the gold-plated bitcoin mining facility located on top of the cemetery where their parents are buried because she accepted a lot of money in order to pimp out — and gold plate — her old Toyota”—suggests a number of possibilities, and its oddness is what caught our eye.

However, Gloria’s campaign against Big Crypto is peppered with long remarks extolling the evils of This (I do feel that bitcoin mining is an appalling waste of resources), and the goodness of That (I do not feel that digging in a hole in the ground should be romanticized). Bitcoin Car is capably executed by all involved, and has a few fun musical interludes with singing angelic electrons (“My Electric Blues,” with accordion and holy chorus, is an unalloyed delight), but it is far more preachy than weird.

Darla in Space

Are you getting enough from your kombucha? Sure, it may revivify and refine your gut—but where are the mind-blowing orgasms? Susie Moon and Eric LaPlante feel you deserve more. It’s nothing tawdry (despite the motel backdrop), it’s therapeutic, a “menage.” And unless your scoby is getting your rocks off, are you really having a refreshing quaff of kombucha?

Darla in Space is a fairly compact experience in cuteness, supported by solid performances and a charismatically deadpan scoby around the size of a kiddie pool. Darla is in horrible debt to the IRS (courtesy of her insensitive mother), and a chance discovery of a sensitive, sentient scoby (referred to as… “Mother”) puts her on the path to paying off her massive tax burden through its power of delivering mind-blowing orgasms.

Characters are established (Darla is quirky, as we know from the start with her advertisement for “Kitty Kaskets”), plot points are ticked, montages montage, and complications in the film, as in life, get complicated. But, this being a movie, we know all loose ends will be tied. Alex E. Harris keeps the hipster-awkward Darla just this side of believable, and J.S. Oliver provides a cuddlier take on the HAL phenomenon. Perhaps worth another look by our crack squad here at 366, but at least all the synopses, trailers, and press releases are up-front about the hyper-quirk. You have been warned. (Or, just as reasonably, you have been intrigued.)

The Washer

Major points awarded to writer/director/&c. Nils A Witt for this science-fiction oddity. His protagonist’s assuredness and mechanical aptitude renders The Washer a combination of Primer and Pi,  as our hero (of sorts) falls deeper and deeper into developing his time-bending invention comprised of an ever-growing array of synchronized washing machines. There is never any point in this tech-thriller where the premise is explained, even with the clever inclusion of various academic-looking types explaining this, that, and the other about the physics of time, space, light, and causality.

Jan is at the start of his career with what appears to be a small but respectable law firm, but his growing fascination with the spinning, watery-eye of his washing machine’s view port shunts him down a rabbit hole of strange science and personal alienation. As his research deepens, a mysterious woman stalks the periphery, and his failure to pay his bills—alongside the tremendous increase in water and electricity use noticed by the municipality—grind him down, leaving him covered in grease, clothed in ragged garments, and limping by the time he has fully assembled his rig. While Witt’s directorial debut makes the human toll all too clear, the science is left both mysterious and mundane. The Washer is a nice, quiet little speculative noodle-scratcher, and I look forward to another Witt work, whether I’ll understand it or not.

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SVIDD NEGER (2003)

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AKA The Black Lapp

DIRECTED BY: Erik Smith Meyer

FEATURING: Kingsford Siayor, Kjersti Lid Gullvåg, Eirik Junge Eliassen, Thor-Inge Gullvåg, Frank Jørstad, Guri Johnson

PLOT: In the furthest northern reaches of Norway, three young men fight to win the affections of pretty Anna: Peder, a strong-but-stupid man-child who is favored by Anna’s murderous father; Ante, a young Black man who was found on the beach as an infant; and Norman, a disaffected Sámi who longs to forsake his heritage and travel abroad.

Still from Svidd Neger (2003)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Like an episode of “Maury” transplanted to a remote patch of Norwegian tundra, Svidd neger is shocking, inexplicable, and gleefully inappropriate. With an ever-shifting tone and an unflagging desire to push buttons, this is a movie that is happily gross, joyfully surreal, and takes deep pride in zigging where others zag.  

COMMENTS: There is something that unites every culture, every group of people on this planet: having someone to look down upon. Racism, sexism, bigotry of every shade are built upon the notion that those people over there are deeply inferior to us, with no regard to how appalling we might be ourselves. As proof of the pervasiveness of this mindset, look no further than the living paradise that is Scandinavia. Those medically socialized fjord-huggers would appear to have created an equitably minded, affordably furnished standard of living for their people. But despite receiving high marks for livability, they have still found a ready-made pariah in the Sámi, an ethnicity in the northernmost parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and northwest Russia with their own language and culture. Sometimes known as Laplanders (a term which is now deemed pejorative), the Sámi people lived quite independently until the 19th century, when aggressive governments sought to assimilate them and wipe out their distinctiveness. While these policies have been rolled back somewhat (especially in Norway, where the Sámi have their own parliament), the disdain and resentment never really goes away. And that seems to be the basic sentiment behind Svidd neger: no matter how trashy people get, they can always find someone else to crap on.

And my goodness, the residents of this isolated outpost are supremely trashy. The root of all nastiness is Karl, Anna’s drunkard father who opens the film by drowning his philandering wife and casting her mixed race infant into the sea. Impressively, he only manages to get worse as the film progresses, as we learn about how his violent ways have affected nearly every other character. Naturally, his only interest in his daughter is her ability to produce a male heir to secure his “kingdom.” It also follows that he would throw his support behind Peder, an impressively stupid hunk of meat whom we see attempt to rape Anna twice and who spends the rest of his time fruitlessly masturbating or hopping gleefully on a broken tractor like a four-year-old.

It soon becomes clear that the only decent people in the film are outsiders, but they’re no angels. Norman, the Sámi who wants out, is so disgusted with being an outsider that he’s willing to trade-in to become white trash in another country. (His dreams of “Ammrica” revolve around drinking lots of Coke and dressing like a biker, complete with Confederate flag patch.) Meanwhile, Ante is already the ultimate outsider (he is the subject of the film’s title, whose least offensive translation is “burnt negro”), but he seems determined to become even moreso, adopting the language and attire of the Sámi, indulging a deep and abiding love for Dolly Parton, and sending out bottled messages to prospective new fathers.

On top of all these wild characters, director Meyer piles on crazy plot twists, full-blown musical numbers, elaborate fight scenes, and a deux ex machina that starts building during the opening credits. Along the way, he peppers scenes with amusing quirks and curiosities, but then just as quickly drops in something dark and disturbing. For example, Peder’s deluded mother meets her end in a horrifying impalement, but then is left to flail about hilariously like a wind sock. The score often matches the schizophrenic tone of the movie, jumping from light pop to dramatic orchestration to tinges of bluegrass in rapid succession.

Somehow, despite the extreme circumstances and the extreme reactions to them, everyone seems to get roughly what they deserve, which says a lot about how well Svidd neger delivers its parade of the idiotic and the grotesque. Like its awful protagonists, the movie is easy to look down upon as crass and disgusting. Yet it somehow wins out in the end.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This movie is not for everyone! It’s the sickest, most twisted and weird movie to ever have been made in Norway.”–Nordic Fantasy

(This movie was nominated for review by Thomas. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

ALL THE HAUNTS BE OURS: A COMPENDIUM OF FOLK HORROR

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Severin Films. 15 disc set.

“Folk Horror” is a buzzword that has blossomed over the past decade to become a marketing phrase. It brings to mind things British, pagan and ancient/medieval, usually in that order. This makes for a nice narrow niche to categorize and sell to the audience; if a film has certain elements that are on the checklist checked off, it’s officially Folk Horror®.  The genre even has its Unholy Trinity: The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw, Witchfinder General. Of course, with some digging, we find that there’s a lot more to the subject to beyond those tentpoles.

It’s a massive subject tackle, and we’re fortunate that the person taking it on is Kier-la Janisse (film-programmer/editor; founder of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Stories; author of “House of Psychotic Women“) with Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021), a 192 minute documentary serving as a primer/immersion into Folk Horror. It’s the foundation for “All The Haunts Be Ours,” a massive boxs et with 19 feature films (some making their debut on Blu-ray) and tons of bonus material. In short, this is a college semester course compressed into 15 discs; and although it’s pricey, it’s a lot less than what one would be paying for an actual college class. This is the most ambitious box set  that Severin Films has done to date—and they’ve done collections of Al Adamson, Christopher Lee’s European Films, and Andy Milligan in just the past three years!

Woodlands (the first disc in the set, also available as a standalone release) comprehensively examines Folk Horror, beginning with its roots in folklore and literature and moving into film, starting with that Unholy Trinity and other British films, plus television programs like “The Owl Service,” “Children of the Stones,” “Doctor Who,” and the work of Nigel Kneale. The documentary then shifts to North America, examining it by region: New England (Washington Irving, H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King); the South (influences of folk music and Evangelicalism), and the West (Native American lore). After that, the film goes global, focusing on horror in Eastern Europe, Australia, Japan, and Brazil, addressing a lot of films you’ve heard of (Viy, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, and the Coffin Joe movies, to name just a few), along with many more that you probably haven’t.

For a 3+ hour documentary, you don’t feel the time drag, and you’ll spend a lot of time afterwards Google-searching availability of titles. Even though it’s a deep dive into the subject, it also feels like it’s just scratching the surface and not even close to being the Last Word in Folk Horror. The subject is thoroughly examined, and even though you could walk away with some sort of definition, “Folk Horror” doesn’t seem “defined” in a way that traps it in a box. It’s a fluid term Continue reading ALL THE HAUNTS BE OURS: A COMPENDIUM OF FOLK HORROR →

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NORTH BEND FILM FESTIVAL 2021 FEATURES PART 2: FOUR MORE

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The North Bend Film Festival runs through July 18. Online ticketing is available, but is geo-locked to residents of Washington, Oregon or Idaho. In the future, these movies may be available through alternate venues—stay tuned to this website for updates.

Cryptozoo (dir. Dash Shaw) – Of all the films available for online access at North Bend, ‘s Cryptozoo was the one that most caught my attention as a connoisseur of weird cinema. The animator/writer/director of My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea spreads his wings here with an equally absurd and fantastical, but decidedly more R-rated, take on “cryptids” (which in this case means mythological characters like gorgons, unicorns and Pegasuses more than modern legends like Bigfoot and Nessie). Set in the late 1960s, the premise is that these mutations really exist and are traded on the black market, with poorer collectors settling for alkonost feathers, while the ultra-rich enslave the critters themselves. Lauren is an agent who rescues cyptids from their captors and brings them to live at a special zoo/sanctuary run by her wealthy patron Joan. Meanwhile, the U.S. army is also in the cryptid-capturing biz, hoping to weaponize the creatures—especially the dream-eating baku (a creature also referenced Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer), an entity with whom Lauren has a special connection.

Cryptozoo (2021)I hinted that Cryptozoo is more “adult” than High School, a fact that’s immediately apparent from  the pre-title sequence, which includes both full-frontal nudity and unexpected unicorn violence. Human and cryptid players alike will spend much of the third act covered in blood. Shaw’s handmade, hand-animated style is like a series of graphic novel panels strung together, making for a choppy viewing experience that may alienate those accustomed to slick, big-budget Hollywood animation. But the compositions are eminently artistic: a sky full of new constellations, a golden-hued grazing unicorn, a naked woman standing in front of a will-o’-the-wisp light show. There isn’t one big psychedelic sequence like High School‘s drowning, but miniature hallucinations are scattered throughout, like a pink fetal head flopping out of a purple and green egg . There’s even a throwaway dream of storming the capital (only this time, the rioters are hippies bringing in an egalitarian utopia). The well-researched creature designs are fascinating, and you can expect to see most of your favorites (especially if you’re into Greek mythology), as well as many unfamiliar ones. Cryptozoo also features a top-notch collection of voiceover talent (Lake Bell, , , )—but it’s the artwork that dazzles here. Cryptozoo already has a distributor and should be released to theaters later this year—if you’re a fan of trippy animation, you should check it out.

Code Name: Nagasaki (dir. Fredrik Hana, by Fredrik Hana and Marius Continue reading NORTH BEND FILM FESTIVAL 2021 FEATURES PART 2: FOUR MORE →