You, the Living
Directed: Roy Andersson
Starring: Jessika Lundberg, Elisabeth Helander, Bjorn Englund
Short sketches in the daily lives of the Swedish. Seen at the Portland International Film Festival.
Poor movie. It has the bad luck that I decided to get violently ill halfway through it. No idea what happened, but I felt fine when I got there, and had intense pain about 15 min. in. After being there for an hour, I had to leave. An hour later, I was perfectly fine again. What the hell?
Anyway, if the rest of the movie went the way of the first half, it was pretty goofy but not outstanding. There were scenes where the audience found it a lot more hilarious than I did. One example was a guy telling a story to the camera while stuck in traffic about a dream he had the night before about being at a dinner party with a bunch of people he didn’t know. He wanted to lighten the mood so he pulled the tablecloth off the table, broke all the china and was arrested for it. He told the story and then the next scene was him walking around the table filled with china. This sent the audience into fits of laughter. It was cute, but it wasn’t laugh out loud hilarious. I would have loved if it was since I love laughing like that, but this was just cute amusing, not awesome funny.
Rating: C
Tags: bjorn englund, elisabeth helander, jessika lundberg, roy andersoon, you the living
I love the Portland International Film Festival. I like it because I have seen some awesome movies at past festivals that have never been released in the U.S. and I can’t find on DVD. I don’t see as many movies as I would like to when I go since I get worn out and it does last about three weeks. I swear it used to only be two weeks but maybe I’m imagining things. I’m going to try to see these movies this year, but we’ll see what the final tally of movies I actually see will be. 
Here are the movies I plan to see and I’m stealing the descriptions from the film site.
YOU, THE LIVING
SWEDEN
Director: Roy Andersson
Intertwining a series of seemingly unrelated events surrounding a wide cast of characters, You, the Living portrays human flailing for self-fulfillment in a surreal world. As in his critically acclaimed Songs From the Second Floor, Andersson uses a sardonic, starkly formalistic technique to create a series of 50 visually ingenious, cleverly choreographed and frequently uproarious vignettes of modern life—”what you might get if Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot wandered into the moody existential vistas of Andrei Tarkovsky!”—Sight and Sound. “A strong contender for the accolade of funniest film in the Festival.”—London Film Festival. This year’s Swedish submission for the Best Foreign Film Oscar.
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Tags: 4 months 3 weeks 2 days, a man's job, art of negative thinking, breath, duchess of langeais, family ties, film festival, gentle breeze in the village, getting home, in the heliopolis flat, international, irina palm, jar city, la antena, portland, priceless, romulus my father, taxidermia, tell no one, unrelated, year of the nail, yella, you the living
