There is a lot of good Swedish crime media out there. Which is very funny to me… there is this TV show based on a crime novel series, Wallander, which takes place in a real town, Ystad. The second season takes place over the course of exactly one calendar year. So I watched the season and counted how many people were murdered in the show. Then I found the population of that town in the year the show was produced.
I forget the actual numbers but let’s say the real murder rate in Sweden is X. That year the murder rate in the US was something like 6X. Well the murder rate in imaginary Ystad in season two of Wallander was 60X! This was extremely funny to me and my friends so we started to refer to the universe depicted in Swedish noir fiction as “Crime Sweden,” the imaginary Sweden where there is actually a ton of crime.
Crime Sweden is definitely a dark weird place. It has been funny to me to compare it to available data about actual Sweden because the two places are very different. Right when I moved to Los Angeles I was preparing another data comparison project like this that I never finished because I was derailed by the move… I was watching other TV shows trying to find a similar frame of reference I could use to calculate other crime statistics for Crime Sweden.
My friend who was most into watching this stuff with me eventually moved to Sweden for grad school. He went to Ystad and sent me a tourist postcard from there saying “I finally made it to Crime Sweden”, haha.
yeah I had a friend who I “assigned” watching The Bridge to for this dumbass data project… god I wish I had finished it. My plan was to make a website about crime rates in Crime Sweden. I forget what thing I assigned myself to watch. I know I had a spreadsheet of this shit somewhere but I cannot find it, haha!
This was back in the Bay Area where my entire social life was organized around a meetup-based google group mailing list where people were trying to throw ever-funnier events for one another… on some level I was trying to one-up the friend who went to Ystad, haha. He would throw these elaborate Star Trek TV watch parties, so I would throw elaborate Crime Sweden themed watch parties with the same level of mock fandom energy. I remember we ate a lot of crispbread
the 2021 Netflix serial murder procedural series The Chestnut Man supposes a world where contemporary Danish culture is completely enthralled to the idea of tiny stick figurines made from chestnuts and are constantly making, selling and singing songs about them
Also I too watched this a few months ago…and also have no strong feelings about it.
Y’all ever see The Day of the Jackal? Just watched it, had it on the list for a while and put it on under the impression that it was more like Man on the Roof than it turned out to be.
But, wow. What a movie. I think I count three extremely-soft-karate-chop-to-the-neck deaths. Must be 15 solid minutes of prominent screen-time for the Jackal’s incredible white Alfa Giulietta Spider. 2.5 hour buffet of very pretty shots of early 70’s Europe masquerading as early-60s Europe. Jeez.
Life after BOB: The Chalice Study, a live? machinima art piece run in Unity that toured during lockdown. GiTS-level breathless psychobabble about Chalice, who gets implanted with a Destiny BOB (Bag of Beliefs, an AI that plans your perfect life) as a baby by her father. concept art for the sets & characters done by Linnea Sterte, of Stages of Rot & A Frog in The Fall
a nonlive record is on youtube, a digital ‘short’ that is 50 dense minutes long. the supplementary wiki is dead so you can’t check the background facts about e.g. a glass on a shelf
I haven’t seen anything like it. A group of teenage girls hang out one night and try to freak each other out by telling the must fucked up stories they know. Some of the stories you don’t get to hear, some you only hear a vague memory of, and some you hear in exquisitely drawn-out one-take monologues that are delivered with such beautiful subtlety. These stories are framed by little impressionistic moments from the night… After-school special level acting but edited in this beautiful, surreal way, all slow, soft dissolves. And that framing is further framed by a perfectly uncanny narrator.
This movie did not get the attention it deserved, at all. I loved it. Also, I think it’s sort of low-key a huge fuck-you to the “true crime” genre. Highly recommended!
I watched Orphan: First Kill because people seemed to like it but I think people just like the goofy twist (not the goofy twist from the first movie, this one has its own goofy twist) because it’s more of the same. Also, it’s a prequel to a movie from like, 13 years ago but it has the same person playing the lead and she looks considerably older which is a really big problem for the reality of the fiction for this movie.
The Deep House never really gets itself going and is one of those movies where your inner monologue about nothing becomes louder than the movie itself and you start to notice every half fraction of a degree in temperature change and get fidgety.
Shudder added Primal Rage a while back and I started watching a few minutes of it because the plot description made it sound like a proto-28 Days Later, but I went to bed right after the reporter gets attacked by a rage monkey and it gets loose. I might go back to it, but I have a feeling that it’s just another knock-off of The Crazies and like The Crazies and its knock-offs it’s probably going to go nowhere.
I didn’t love this one! which is only funny because I went into all 3 of moonrise kingdom, grand budapest, and french dispatch feeling skeptical, like no amount of consecutive hits could make me absolutely confident I’d like a wes anderson movie, and adored them all. this one felt like he kind of overloaded the framing device and started with a very heavy hand then tried to end it with a light one and I wasn’t so sure about all that
Watched Inu-Oh with some friends dubbed. They (the dub actors) tried to sing with the set up songs but gave up completely once Woodstock came to town. I understand but I wanted to hear the attempt. I love this movie. Makes me want to go to a music festival again. The vibes are immaculate and keep circulating the tapes/stories.
At some point I should probably read up on the heike stories or watching heike monogatari science saru worked on so I can feel any stronger thematic connections. My current assumption is they are like a similar collection of tales like the canterbury tales that a would be emperor wants to canonize the ones that feed his narrative.
