TARK’S NOT HERE TO ENTERTAIN YOU
The film needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.
LUKAS MOODYSSON
Nothing prompts the eyes into a rolling fit more than a Swede poet vegetarian feminist. Too bad a Swede poet vegetarian feminist made a handful of some of the most honest, raw and empathic films to come out in the past twenty years.
Lukas Moodysson was a poète maudit from a young age, publishing books of verse in high school between Smiths album releases and meals of celery and toast. He wanted to reach a wider audience than poetry and novels could, so he learned to make films. His first outing, Fucking Åmål (1998) was a Dogme 95-esque portrait of two teen girls in love. Moodysson was pretty damned good at capturing youthful yearning, so great that famed Swede adulterer Ingmar Bergman proclaimed him a young master.
Moodysson’s movies have an air of spontaneity. They are shot with handheld digital cameras that seem to eavesdrop on the most intensely humorous, human moments. In Together (2000), the lenses zero in on a commune of Scandinavian hippies and the children suffering under their hippie bullshit. Together is a light and naturalistic ensemble jam, loaded with pathos and a shocking absence of meat. And ABBA.
Moodysson went on to make a Euro-harsher, Lilya 4-Ever, a harrowing demon hell ride about a Russian teenager, abandoned by her mother, who is kidnapped and sold into sex slavery. Watch it with lots of St. John’s Wort.
Hey hey, I like Lukas Moodysson quite a bit, y’see? He has a knack for showing faces full of feeling, he doesn’t shy away from harshing a mellow or two. You’ve got to harsh a few egg mellows to make a truth omelet. He is one of very few true heirs to the emotional realism crown of the gnome Mike Leigh and prick Cassavetes.
Moodysson has also dabbled in avante garde/deconstructionism with A Hole in My Heart and Container - two non-narrative films full of audio visual interruption and provocation. Mammoth, Moodysson’s first English language film, is a return to his naturalistic, tragicomic sensibility.
Lukas Moodysson is the outspoken blowhard I rolled my eyes at in high school. No wonder I’m an unemployed also-ran and he’s a poet of cinema.
(above: Moodysson flips off the Swedish film industry in a tuxedo and bear ears.)
The Hounds is a TV series about a band of broke musicians on the road. Inspired by the early struggling years of The Band.
Think Down By Law, The Last Detail, The Last Waltz and Mean Streets as a comedy show.
LUKAS MOODYSSON’S TOP TEN (lover of the youth jam/human tragedy combo spesh)
1. Bicycle Thieves (DeSica)
2. Fanny and Alexander (Bergman)
3. Gummo (Korine)
4. La Haine (Kassovitz)
5. The Last Picture Show (Bogdanovich)
6. Mirror (Tarkovsky)
7. On the Waterfront (Kazan)
8. Riff-Raff (Loach)
9. Secrets and Lies (Leigh)
10. Where Is the Friend’s House? (Kiarostami)
Moodysson Monday: Teen Lesbians, Commune Hippies, Russian Sex Slaves.
Luis Bunuel’s later films featured long, uninterrupted takes so that the censors couldn’t make cuts.
Luis Bunuel wagged his Spanish cock at authority.
FREE MOVIE IDEA #20
A group of poles apart young COUSINS converge on Thanksgiving day at their grandparents’ massive spread of land. While playing army, they pin their GRANDFATHER’s purple heart pendant onto an old dog who runs away with it.
The cousins embark on a mission deep into a countryside warped by their own collective imaginations, to recover the invaluable war decoration before day’s end.
kidjamz/adventure/family
GLARING OVERSIGHTS IN MY MOVIE WATCHING HISTORY
Haven’t gotten around to seeing ANY Kurosawas (besides Dersu Uzala)
No Fassbinders (except Year With 13 Moons and one ep. of Alexanderplatz)
Besides Joan of Arc - haven’t been in the mood for any Dreyer yet in my life
Most Hitchcocks
Never saw Gone With the Wind as well as a grip of old noirs.
What are some shameful absences in YOUR seen lists?
My eternal plan is always to make a film that a Chinese lady from the countryside can understand without subtitles.
(Source: communicants)
… NEITHER DO I WANT TO BE A THOUSAND-HAND BUDDHA
People think that I am very innovative, but in reality, I’ve been going in the same direction. I’m not one to develop myself horizontally, and be multi-faceted, neither do I want to be a thousand-hand Buddha. I stay true to my personality and the style that I’m used to, and see how I can delve deeper. My actors are the same, and my style stays pretty much the same. However, if you are a fan of my work, you will see that I’ve been changing and the changes are very subtle, not unlike the changes in one’s life. It’s not something that you can experience in a short time. You need to observe for a long time, and experience it. For example, one will not know how they will look like at age sixty, until they’ve reached that age. If you keep changing your looks by undergoing plastic surgery, then when you are seventy, how you look like isn’t a true reflection of how you should look like if you were to age naturally. I enjoy observing these changes in life, and in my work, I keep practicing the same style and am keen to see how much I am able to develop it further. It’s always been this way.
