A double feature with Lukas Moodysson’s Vi Är Bäst! (We Are the Best!) and Nobuhiro Yamashita’s Linda Linda Linda. Because~ Why not? RIGHT?
Archives For sweden
Oh.mah.gosh.
It’s a battle of the horse-riding sword-brandishing tough ladies that -actually- existed in real life, with lives brought onto the silver screen, beautified while being personified by THE faces of their own Golden Eras.
In the case of Greta Garbo, of course, with Hollywood in her most fun and most relaxed Queen Christina, often mistaken for a man and featuring the infamous scenes of Garbo kissing a lady and being romanced by John Gilbert while in mannish get-up. Then there’s the Mexican and Latin movie classic diva La Doña Maria Felix as Catalina Erauso, escaping a convent and dragging it up as Don Alonso, making the ladies of the Peruvian Viceroyalty swoon in La Monja Alferez, with a twist ending to match Some Like It Hot.
And to quote Toni Collette:
We’re women dressed as men dressed as women!
This is a tough one. I do have a terrible Greta Garbo bias, but I think I’m handing it down to La Doña on this one. Maria Felix is like the awesome fusion of everything that’s good with both Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford.
BiBi did a rendition of Mavis Fan & 100%’s Who Gives a Damn What Song Is On (管他什麼音樂) [MV] in a mash-up with ABBA’s Thank You for the Music that everyone loved landing her in the #2 position behind GEM.
Frankly, I wasn’t completely feeling her version of the Mavis Fan song, because- DUH! Mavis Fan sings it best. It’s an attitude, nothing about the voice. But I’m sick and tired of people complaining about BiBi- when I love her arrangement to highlight her voice, they say it’s boring. When she delivers this type of performance, they say she can’t sing. Worse yet! They complain her voice is nasal. WTF, BiBi’s voice is the complete opposite of nasal, people generally confuse it with a male’s voice!
Get a grip and take a chill pill.
I also made a [nomination] list of all my favorite foreign things of the last decade. If I had included all movies, general suspects would have applied (eg. Children of Men, Dancer in the Dark), but still remains a very ME list. I hope you like the selection, and don’t hesitate in suggesting films to watch.
I really can’t remember exactly when I started out the Top Flicks About Chicks list on MUBI, but it must have been around the same time I wrote how Chick Flicks was a doomed genre in regards of critics. So it might be almost 4 years… and I’ve finally reached 300 titles in the list!!!
A Chick Flick should center on little girls, girls, young women and women… as students, as neighbors, as friends, as daughters, as granddaughters, as sisters, as mothers, as lovers. They are simply women. With that alone, we can tell all sort of other stories that have little to do with romantic comedies.
The purpose of the list, of course, was to encompass an array of female character — not only in the binary sense, since the list also includes men/boys who identify as women/girls… and viceversa — of various cultural, ethnic, social backgrounds. Not favoring one genre over the other, not valuing dramas over comedies… just simple stories about different women.
Though I’m sure the list could be longer, that’s 300 feature length films out of the 2896 (counting shorts) currently rated on the site- that’s roughly 10% so I suppose the list could expand to up to 500 or maybe 1000 once I reach 5000 or 10000 rated films on the site.
1. Treeless Mountain 2. Welcome to the Dollhouse 3. Juliana 4. Labyrinth 5. Fuckin’ Amal 6. Mirrormask 7. Gun Hill Road 8. Pariah 9. Bend it like Beckham 10. Swing Girls 11. The Land of the Deaf 12. Sunny 13. Whip It 14. Stoker 15. Maria Full of Grace 16. Breaking the Waves 17. My Marlon and Brando 18. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days 19. Dil Bole Hadippa! 20. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 21. Kotoko 22. Violeta Went to Heaven 23. Skin 24. Raise the Red Lantern 25. Incendies
I picked 25 of the 300 films to illustrate some of the variety (I hope it’s AS varied as I intend the list to be), though I ran out of picks and couldn’t include any of the ‘older’ female characters. If I could pick 5 more, they’d be: Lemon Tree, Frozen River, Late Bloomers, Mother, For 80 Days.
My nephew (my niece is past that, I think) is at that awkward Third Culture Kid stage in which he’s learning Spanish after speaking Swedish. When he just got here (about) 7 months ago, he didn’t speak much. My niece at that time was awkwardly explaining things as “this and that” while pointing. Being slightly younger, my nephew has already picked up the language a lot faster — he even uses words such as “grandazo,” (kinda like saying “super big”) “oye,” (hey) and “ya pues” (come on!) — as if he’s grown up here. He even calls on the ice-cream man [1] with a nonchalant “amigo, amigo” (friend, friend).
The downside to that is that he’s forgetting Swedish a lot faster too.
At school, he’s not only learning English, but also Italian- this is why, when we’re at the dinner or lunch table (sitting by my side), he keeps asking me if I know how to say “x word” in “x language” — as a language buff, I know how to get around this stuff. Especially at the age of 5. LOL So while I dazzled him with my “Vad heter du?” to which he responded “Mommy, mommy! Amy knows Swedish!” to then ask me if I knew how to say “apple” in Swedish. I did. But apparently, he didn’t. He asked his mom the same question to make sure I was telling the truth, and she told him “it starts with ‘Ä’…” (which sounds similar to “eh”), so all giddy he responded “ÄLEPHANT!”
What do you get when you put rap, hip-hop and swing together- besides Simon D. [1]. How about adding some western into the mix? With a dash of Esteman and Andrea Echeverri [1]. And how about adding a dash of Swedish into it too? That’s MOVITS! yo~~~
At least that’s them on their latest single [1].
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/76836117″ params=”color=ff0090&auto_play=false&show_artwork=true” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
It’s like… it’s like Glen Hansard rapping in Swedish. LOL
I was watching Erik Lamens’ SM-rechter (SM Judge) because… well, because I couldn’t resist the synopsis of a judge being wrongly accused of abusing his wife when they were only into SM. It’s all a true story to boot!
All throughout the film, I kept thinking Veerle Dobbelaere looked a lot like Famke Janssen had a lovechild with Andie MacDowell — with a dash of Noomi Rapace. I’m still uncertain why I thought of Noomi, but the Famke and MacDowell connections are there at plain view.
I think the Noomi bit could have been due to Dobbelaere’s final outburst. But I could totally see Famke Janssen doing this role, if there ever — heaven forbids!! — were a Hollywood version of it.
