Masterpieces of Swedish Cinema: Masjävlar

Sweden overall makes pretty good quality films for a country with only 9 million people in it. And it ain't easy being a Swedish director either, because one is always being compared to Bergman.

In Masjävlar, a young woman from Stockholm (which is considered a very big city in Sweden) travels back to her country hometown to celebrate her father's 70th birthday. Sounds boring, but it's not. It's very touching and interesting to anyone with an interest in Swedish culture.

The film is shot entirely in Delarna, the region in Sweden famous for the little red horses (wooden ones not real ones). This film dwells on very familiar territory for Sweden: cold weather, birthdays (big holidays in Sweden), suicides (everyone here knows at least one victim), and drinking too much (so I fit right in).

If anyone knows what the title means I would appreciate some help. Linda is in Malmo at the moment so I am without my translator. I think it means 'Dammit' or something.

The Aristocrats, A Drunken Post

Been seeing a lot of movies lately. I normally don't like films but for some reason in Europe they are a good way to keep in touch with the best of American culture without watching TV shows, which I refuse to do.

Recently saw a move called The Aristocrats. Probably didn't play in too many theaters in the USA because of the strong intellectual subject matter. No media companies want to be associated with that stuff. Worse than terrorism, it is. The last thing they want is consumers thinking. The cast was good... everyone from Cartman to Don Rickles to Bob Sagat was in it. 75 jokers in all, all of them stand-up comedians.

I love stand-up. I think Woody Allen, Richard Pryor and Bill Hicks are three of the best I've seen. I never understood what was so funny about Lenny Bruce, even though I realize he was sort of a godfather of modern comedy. Sometimes it's true that you had to be there. So much so that the actual originals sound boring because they are so copied that everything they say sounds like a cliche.

A literary example is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Julie, or the New Heloise", which I had to read in a Literature class in Paris and was so bad it made me want to jump off the Eiffel Tower instead of reading it. When I told the professor how bad I thought it was he actually agreed and said that because we are Modern we cannot read such things because we live them day to day and take we take them for granted.

What's the name of this post? Oh yeah. The Aristocrats. Funny joke? See for yourself. It's not a knee slapper but a perfect metaphor for the human condition. If you don't get it well then you gotta go see the entire film where they tell the joke 50 times and then evaluate it from every possible angle.