Jason's Blog, page 180

The Mummy From Another Planet

A Sam Space story not translated into English. The Ka-Bling! panel at the bottom I stole from an Enki Bilal story.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

After some uneven films Wes Anderson triumphed with this stop motion animation film based on Roald Dahl's book. It has a very appealing handmade feel, and avoiding blues and greens, mostly sticking to earth colours, it looks amazing. Anderson keeps the visual style from his previous films, the centered images, and there's also the 70s soundtrack and the son with daddy issues. Not sure how much a kid will get from all this, but it's a great film, and I loved that strange and touching scene towards the end with the wolf.

Circus Magri

This is an illustration from a children's book project I worked on called Circus Magri, but never finished.

Songs From The Second Floor

A surreal masterpiece by Swedish director Roy Andersson, this is a film that should be seen in the cinema. It loses some of its power on my little tv. All the images are carefully composed in muted colours and filmed with a static camera. Each scene is one long take, looking like a painting that has come to life. The dialogue is anti arty, though, if that's a word, very much normal, every day talk.

What's the film about? Well, it came out in 2000 and is pretty much a millennium film. The world is going to hell, there's chaos everywhere, and we follow a group of people who try to do the best they can with the situation. Among them is the businessman whose furniture store burned down and his two sons, one a taxi driver, the other a poet in a mental institution. At the same time, the politicians decide to sacrifize the life of a little girl. Did I mention that it's also funny, in a Scandinavian, long dark winters kind of way?

Scenes from the film can be found on youtube, among them the amazing six minutes long one take ending, here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s-e79...

An illustration...

... done for a Norwegian magazine. It's a portrait of Erik Falk, my editor at Jippi Comics who published my comic book Mjau Mjau.

The Aughts

Apparently some good films have been made the last ten years. Like Timecrimes, a Spanish film where a man in the countryside sees a naked woman in the woods through his binoculars. He goes to investigate and is attacked by a man whose face is covered by bandages. Then he travels back in time. Directed by Nacho Vigalondo.

Timetravel films are fun, no? They're hard to screw up. This one starts out creepy, then gets strange, then stranger and then funny. How far can you go with the paradoxes that always appear in these films? Well, in this film pretty far, with the main character in usual fashion going back in time to correct what he did wrong the first time he went back in time. It's very inventive, even though I seem to remember a short story by Isaac Azimov that had some of the same premises, and I can only assume an American remake is in the works where they have some hunk instead of a bald, fat middleaged guy in the main role and lose all the charm of the original.

Sketches...

... from The Iron Wagon.

Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana

Two Finns, one loves coffee, the other vodka, go on a car trip and on the way pick up two women, one Russian, the other Estonian.

Great title! It's a Kaurismäki road movie, a funny but strange film, that might be his most poetic one. It's also short, lasting less than an hour, and in black and white. There's a sequence of the two men in the car, with one of them, Matti Pellonpää, having a long monologue. It's very unusual in a Kaurismäki film, but it turns out it's only there to set up the men's complete silence and shyness around the two women, not even being able to look in their eyes.

I see on IMDB that Kaurismäki got a new film coming later this year called Le Havre starring Jean-Pierre Léaud and Kati Outinen, so that's something to look forward to. There is also this great quote by the man himself: "Cinema is dead. It died 1962, I think it was in October."

Ariel

Turo Pajala is a mineworker losing his job. He goes to Helsinki trying to get a new one, but life is tough in the big city. He meets a woman and her son, but ends up in jail. Together with another prisoner, Matti Pellonpää, he escapes and hopes to start a new life in Mexico.

The film continues Kaurismäki's interest in the working class or the factory workers and their concern about holding onto their jobs and creating a life worth living. In some way the film is a variation on Shadows in Paradise, ending with the same image, a ship, their opportunity for escape or a better life. The film also shows Kaurismäki as the master of the laconic conversation, and at the end has one of the best visual jokes I can remember seeing, that includes the roof of a convertible. Finally, as with all his films, it really makes you want to start smoking.

The cover...

... for Mjau Mjau #9.