#Zentropa Productions

[sashaspasiba]

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' They’re impressive, but Sasha gets my vote . We're excited for fresh opportunities and maybe a little extra boob volume — a new look could take things to the next level! ' Sasha Gymn Agent watching Sasha dreaming of volume

[yournoeliafan]

[byneddiedingo]

Jean-Marc Barr and Barbara Sukowa in Europa (Lars von Trier, 1991)

Cast: Jean-Marc Barr, Barbara Sukowa, Udo Kier, Ernst-Hugo Järegård, Erik Mørk, Jørgen Reenberg, Henning Jensen, Eddie Constantine, Max von Sydow. Screenplay: Lars von Trier, Niels Vørsel. Cinematography: Henning Bendtsen, Edward Klosinski, Jean-Paul Meurisse. Production design: Henning Bahs, Andrzej Borecki. Film editing: Hervé Schneid. Music: Joachim Holbek.  We're accustomed to movies, usually blockbuster action films, in which the feats of filmmaking technology are more impressive than the narrative or characterization, but it's startling to find that kind of disjunction in a supposedly serious art-house film. That's what happens in Lars von Trier's Europa*, however. The film's visual tricks -- front and rear projection, double exposures, juxtapositions of black-and-white and color -- linger in the mind longer than any of the characters or the story. At base, Europa is a thriller, set in Germany in 1945, about an idealistic young American, Leopold Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr), whose German uncle (Ernst-Hugo Järegård) gets him a job as an apprentice conductor on the Zentropa railway line. Leo is an idealist and a pacifist (the film is rather vague about what he did during the war) who wants to help Germany recover, but this only makes him putty in the hands of various opportunists, from the American military to the railway owners to an underground group of die-hard Nazis known as "werewolves." Things grow more complicated for Leo when he falls in love with Katharina Hartmann (Barbara Sukowa), whose father, Max (Jørgen Reenberg), owns Zentropa and is undergoing scrutiny in the "denazification" efforts by the occupying Allied forces. This is standard, even promising, thriller material, and to a large extent von Trier and co-screenwriter Niels Vørsel deliver on its premises. There are moments of suspense and surprise -- especially the assassination of a newly appointed Jewish mayor by a young boy planted on the train by the werewolves -- that would do any thriller writer and director proud. And it has to be said that the general atmosphere of the film, a lingering sinister darkness and chill, is effectively produced. But the tarting up of the story with gimmicks takes me out of the narrative and into a concentration on the effects. For example, there's a scene in which Katharina, in monochrome, is standing behind Leo, who is in color, until she walks out of the frame and re-enters next to him, both now in color. Then Leo leaves the frame and re-enters, now in monochrome, behind her. I know how it's done -- rear projection and careful storyboarding -- but I remember the effect, and not anything that was said by the characters while the trick was taking place. Something of the same could be said about the frame in which von Trier sets his story: The film begins with a shot of railway tracks lighted by a moving train and the voice (Max von Sydow's calm baritone) of a man hypnotizing someone: "You will now listen to my voice. My voice will help you and guide you still deeper into Europa...." The voice recurs throughout the film until it's clear that the "you" is Leo. As for the "Europa" into which Leo is being guided, von Trier has explained that he had Franz Kafka's satirical fantasy Amerika in mind while making the film. The framing, I think, freights the story with more significance than anything that actually appears in the film. Von Trier has said that Europa is something like "Hitchcock in a Tarkovsky setting," which is nothing if not overreaching. *Europa was released in the United States in 1992 under the title Zentropa to avoid confusion with Agnieszka Holland's Europa Europa, which had been released in 1991 in America. Von Trier also named his production company Zentropa, which is the name of the railway company in his film.

[o-the-mts]

25th Anniversary Movie Festival: Fucking Åmål (1998)

Title: Fucking Åmål (a.k.a Show Me Love) Release Date: 23 October 1998 Director: Lukas Moodysson Production Company: Memfis Film | Zentropa Productions | Film i Väst | SVT Drama Göteborg | Svenska Filminstitutet | Danish Film Institute Summary/Review: This Swedish teen comedy-drama (starring actual teenagers not people in their 20s) focuses on a few days in the life of two girls at the same…

[malsperanza]

Hidden Blade - Tony Leung, Wang Yibo

Hidden Blade / Nameless - no spoilers Since other threads on this movie are very spoilery, and it's a film that you do not want to be spoiled for, here's a post without spoilers. Hidden Blade is very good and well worth watching, even if you're not usually interested in war stories or modern-era films. It's historical enough to be tinged with an epic quality (the moment of China's desperate struggle against the Japanese invasion) and the kind of melancholic emotional tone that Cdramas often do so well. If you come for the Tony Leung or the Wang Yibo, you won't be disappointed, but there's a lot more to like too. I wish the English release had kept the original title - Nameless, or Anonymous, instead of a title that sounds like a Hong Kong 1965 kung fu movie. This is nominally a WWII spy thriller, but it's much more a psychological portrait of people intertwined among complicated political and personal loyalties. The director, who also wrote the screenplay, keeps his secrets close to his chest and takes the story step by step through its mysteries in a fragmented way that switches from flashbacks to flash-forwards. This takes a little getting used to. It's a beautiful -looking film, shot with a lot of style and atmosphere. With the exception of one weak performance, the acting is riveting. Tony Leung is never less than deeply absorbing to watch. The more he withholds, the more he gives. Wang Yibo will not surprise anyone who admired him in The Untamed, but he has more scope here for ambiguity and shades of gray. (And if anyone wondered if he could do a fight scene in modern terms, the answer is yes.) I like this director's style. It's not exactly subtle - he uses mirrors every chance he gets to play up the duality of characters and their uncertain identities (along with the use of dual languages). But it works here and doesn't seem gimmicky. The dim, period color palette is poetic. The very conscious use of light and shadow also looked beautiful and made sense for the story. The director borrows from film noir, up to and including the way fedora hats cast shadows on faces. But he also borrows from other cinematic languages, especially Zentropa (Lars von Trier's dark-poetry movie about Germany at the end of WWII) and Andrei Tarkovsky's apocalyptic films. --- The rest of this is some tips for western viewers: If, like me, you're relying on the translated subtitles, there are a few things useful to know. (First, though: shoutout to a real film production that allows the actors to keep their own voices, and whose translation subtitles make sense and are in natural English. I weep for the poor titling in Cdrama series, knowing how much we lose.) ~ The story takes place in several different parts of China, not always made clear except that the dialogue occasionally switches from Mandarin to Cantonese or Shanghainese. I would love it if a native speaker could list the scenes where this happens, as I could only sort of pick up a few of the moments. On top of that, whole very important scenes are in Japanese, with both Japanese and Chinese actors. It may not be all that easy for western viewers to hear this at first, so listen for Japanese and be alert to it from the start. It's meaningful for the story. (Shoutout to Wang Yibo, who delivers a crucial scene in Japanese. I know he's fluent in Korean, not so sure about Japanese, though - and his performance in that scene is emotionally powerful, nuanced, with amazing vocal rhythm. It's pretty amazing. The always-astonishing Tony Leung also has major moments in Japanese - but I expect brilliance from him in any case.) ~ If you don't know much about the part of WWII that involved China and Japan, it's helpful to have a little context, as the movie assumes familiarity and doesn't use bad exposition to explain the background. I'm only giving bare bones as needed for the movie - and oversimplifying a lot. Japan invaded China in 1937, before the European part of WWII started. The invasion was extraordinarily brutal. An estimated 20 million civilians died. The Japanese occupied eastern China and installed a puppet government under Wang Jingwei. The main characters work for this Japanese-controlled regime. Meanwhile, north of China, by the 1930s the Soviet Union had expanded and spread communism all the way east. Prior to the Japanese invasion, China was in a civil war between the Chinese nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek and the communists under Mao Zedong. Both groups allied long enough during WWII to eventually repel Japan before resuming their war. So there are 3 different political entities vying for control of China. In all of this, the territory of Manchuria was particularly contested. Japan had invaded and occupied it in 1931, and wanted it as a buffer against the USSR, and for other reasons. Knowing these basic facts can help orient the film's story. I've seen some pretty stupid reviews in the US that call this movie "propaganda for the CCP." I'll just say this: If all the Hollywood WWII movies from The Longest Day to Saving Private Ryan are "propaganda for the USA" then maybe that's a legit pov. Whatever opinions any of us may hold about the Chinese government today (no doubt there are many different views here), the resistance to the Japanese invasion between 1931 and 1945 was heroic and patriotic. Anyway, the movie is findable on Youtube and I think Bilibili in some regions. Go watch it.

[saturdaynightmatinee]

CALIFICACIÓN PERSONAL: 8 / 10

Título Original: The Salvation

Año: 2014

Duración: 92 min

País: Dinamarca

Dirección: Kristian Levring

Guion: Anders Thomas Jensen, Kristian Levring

Música: Kasper Winding

Fotografía: Jens Schlosser

Reparto: Mads Mikkelsen, Eva Green, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Michael Raymond-James, Sivan Raphaely, Douglas Henshall, Mikael Persbrandt, Jonathan Pryce, Eric Cantona, Alexander Arnold, Nanna Øland Fabricius, Toke Lars Bjarke

Productora: Zentropa Productions, Spier Films

Género: Western; Drama; Action; Thriller

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2720680/

TRAILER:

[whileiamdying]

Lars von Trier Behind the Curtain

The Danish director’s new installation of his sci-fi hospital soap opera “The Kingdom” arrives in conjunction with unfortunate medical news of his own.

By Adam Nayman December 1, 2022

Von Trier has always been a divisive filmmaker, both decorated and disparaged in art-house circles.

Photograph by Laura Stevens / Camera Press / Redux

Lars von Trier’s supernatural soap opera “The Kingdom,” which ran on Danish public television in 1994, is set in a Copenhagen medical facility overrun in equal capacity by vengeful ghouls and pale Scandinavian bureaucrats. A typical episode might find a doctor grafting a cancerous liver onto his body as a trophy or staff members engaging in a game of blackmail over a severed head. In the most notorious sequence, a pregnant woman gives birth to a blood-soaked, full-grown man with the face of the creepy German character actor Udo Kier. The series was part “The Shining” and part “E.R.,” with an atmosphere of absurdist clock-punching dread that weirdly anticipated “The Office.” The voluble neurosurgeon Dr. Stig Helmer (Ernst-Hugo Järegård), newly imported from Sweden and lording over his “Danish scum” colleagues, was the Ricky Gervais figure, a world’s-worst-boss type raging impotently against his own obsolescence.

“The Kingdom” ran for two raucous seasons and von Trier had hoped to make a third, but Järegård died in 1998, and von Trier eventually moved on. A remake developed by Stephen King, in 2004, retained little of the original’s genre-bending alchemy. So it came as a welcome surprise when von Trier announced, in December of 2020, that he would be reviving the series for a final installment titled “The Kingdom Exodus.” This time, the hapless antagonist is the late Dr. Helmer’s officious son (Mikael Persbrandt), who is belittled among staffers as “Halfmer” and abandoned to assemble his own faulty IKEA office furniture alone. The series, which is streaming on MUBI, balances demonic intrigue and slapstick medical gags with wry in-jokes, callbacks, and cameos aimed at diehard fans.

By unfortunate coincidence, the project arrived in conjunction with medical news of von Trier’s own. In August, von Trier’s production company, Zentropa, announced that he’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Von Trier told me recently, over Zoom, that his symptoms made directing the series a struggle. “The actors in ‘Kingdom Exodus’ are doing a good job,” he said. “But I felt terrible, because I had this disease, and I didn’t know that I had it at the time.” He eventually received a diagnosis, and with a characteristic mix of narcissism and self-abasement opted to make oblique reference to his condition onscreen. In the original “Kingdom,” von Trier appeared in formal wear at the end of every episode to recap the ludicrous plotlines and bask in his God-like creative control. In “Exodus,” his role is the same, but the exegesis is delivered from behind a curtain for reasons that he refers to, in voice-over, as “vanity.” All that’s visible are his shoes, peeking out from beneath the fabric—a poignant symbol for a filmmaker who once gleefully compared his cinema to a pebble lodged in a shoe.

Von Trier has always been a divisive filmmaker, both decorated and disparaged in art-house circles, but he has spent the last decade of his career under the pall of his clumsy offscreen provocateurism. In 2011, at the Cannes press conference for “Melancholia,” his film about a woman whose colossal unhappiness seems to bring about the literal end of the world, a journalist asked von Trier a question about his German roots. He responded with a rambling, kamikaze monologue in which he declared that he “sympathized” with Hitler and added, “How can I get out of this sentence? . . . O.K., I’m a Nazi.” As a close follower of von Trier’s gonzo career (not to mention as a Jew), I found the comment glib and distasteful, but not especially meaningful. Von Trier, a critic of far-right ideologies at home and abroad, has always had a devout sense of political incorrectness, and he has never been one to walk back an outrageous claim. When an uproar ensued, and Cannes declared von Trier “persona non grata,” he publicly declared remorse, then proceeded to have the phrase printed on a T-shirt and wore it to his next première, where it complemented the four-letter word newly tattooed on his knuckles.

During our conversation, von Trier spoke slowly and deliberately, with a certain self-consciousness about his frail condition. But he brought up Hitler unprompted, looking amused to be suddenly back on treacherous ground. He was in his home in Lyngby, just north of Copenhagen, sitting in front of a framed painting bearing a striking, enigmatic resemblance to Peter Paul Rubens’s “The Massacre of the Innocents,” depicting the slaughter of infant children in Bethlehem. When I asked him about his impulse to pick at the scabs of controversy, he said, “Are you asking if I’m a Nazi?” and added, “I should have put on my uniform.” He admitted that, upon reflection, l’affaire “Melancholia” may have been subconsciously premeditated. The day before the press conference, he’d gone to see his friend and mentor Gilles Jacob, the former Cannes president and power broker. “He gave me a book about Cannes, and there were two pictures of me in it: one where I was in a leather jacket with a bald head, and one with me in a tuxedo. And then underneath it says, ‘That’s how it always goes with rebels. They start off one way, and then they conform.’ I said to him, ‘I don’t think this is a nice thing to write. It doesn’t please me, anyway. So I have to find something very provocative to say at the press conference tomorrow.’ He said, ‘Yes, you do.’ ”

Such trollish tendencies have helped fuel misconceptions of von Trier as a gifted but immature delinquent. He has referred to himself as “a simple masturbator of the silver screen,” but a more accurate diagnosis might be that he is a cinematic prankster who believes, fervently and somewhat paradoxically, in innocence as a virtue. Films like “Breaking the Waves” (1996), starring Emily Watson, and “Dancer in the Dark” (2000), starring Björk, are hymns to martyrdom that pits holy fools against the emissaries of a cold and cruel world. Part of von Trier’s polarizing trilogy about physically and psychically brutalized female innocents, along with the Nicole Kidman-starring “Dogville” (2003), those films earned von Trier accusations of misogyny and masochism. But he rendered the protagonists’ Pyrrhic victories so ecstatically that any claims of bad faith seemed moot. Von Trier’s films have always been perched on a high wire between blunt-force shock tactics and bone-dry satire. To borrow the trilogy’s title, they also wear their “golden hearts” on their sleeves.

Von Trier has always been clear that he views filmmaking as a way of revealing himself. He grew up, in Copenhagen, in a radical Communist household where, as he once put it, everything was allowed except for “feelings, religion, and enjoyment.” This upbringing left him with a host of debilitating hangups and a complicated relationship to authority. His most widely circulated quote that’s not about Nazis is “I’m afraid of everything in life except filmmaking.” After trying and failing to win entrance to Denmark’s national film academy, he was finally admitted on his third attempt, in 1979, and found a suitably obnoxious way to mark the occasion. He told me, “The first thing I did was get a spray can and then, on the wall, just opposite the headmaster’s window, I wrote ‘film school is dead.’ ” Von Trier’s willingness to play the enfant terrible was a big part of his early legend, but so was his almost preternatural assurance with a camera. In 1984, at the age of twenty-eight, he won a technical prize at Cannes for his first feature, “The Element of Crime,” an expressionistic police procedural with a hypnotically immersive effect. He had taught himself filmmaking on his mother’s 8-mm. camera with the help of a how-to manual. “I still have it,” he said, of the book. “And it’s so worn out because I read it so many times.” He added, “I will say that I learned ten times more from that book than I learned from film school.”

Von Trier’s movies are filled with allusions to his favorite directors, but he speaks of his filmmaking as the work of a lonely explorer. “I wanted to see myself as a scientist who was put on a deserted island and asked to go west,” he said. “That meant that I should only go with my own compass and then go the route I was shown, because otherwise it would have no significance.” His pilgrim’s progress has been defined in part by fruitful detours, such as his co-founding, in the nineties, of the filmmaking collective Dogme 95, which was both a bold experiment and a publicity stunt. Its members took a semi-facetious “vow of chastity,” embracing an ascetic filmmaking process—shooting on location, using only handheld cameras; eschewing period pieces or genre tropes—in order to rescue cinema from manipulative visual beauty. (“I like rules and borders,” von Trier told me. “I also like when I have my back to a wall. I have to find something completely new to say.”) Dogme 95’s notoriety made von Trier’s cinema briefly synonymous with a kind of grubby, low-resolution ugliness, and his two most famous features—“Dancer in the Dark,” which won the 2000 Palme d’Or, and the epic Thornton Wilder pastiche “Dogville”—are united in part by their status as eyesores. But “Dogville,” which was shot on a bare soundstage meant to represent a Depression-era mountain town, exemplified von Trier’s powers of suggestion. With a devilish grin, he told me that he wrote the script, a fusillade of dialogue linked together by a magisterial voice-over, on a ten-day cocaine bender. “Normally, when you write, you stop and don’t know if you should go right or left. With coke, you just go right. You decide straight away.”

Von Trier has been up front over the years about his various addictions and anxieties. “As a private person, I love medicine,” he told me. “I take so many pills because I have so many things now that have to be cured.” “Melancholia,” along with the bleak, annihilating sex-horror movie “Antichrist” (2009) and the two-part sex-addiction saga “Nymphomaniac” (2014) were billed as part of his Depression Trilogy, and he told me that the decision to return to the world of “The Kingdom” was partially an attempt to manage his mental health. “I was having—believe it or not!—depression,” he told me. “I had to start working because that was the only thing that really worked. ” If the arrogant, alcoholic Dr. Halfmer is the butt of the show’s jokes—and an avatar of its gently contemptuous Swedish-Danish rivalry—the elderly female patient Karen (Bodil Jørgensen), who gets admitted to the hospital in the first episode, is something like its soul. She is suffering from a unique case of “nyctophobia”—an extreme fear of the dark—which seems to put her in communication with a spirit realm. Like most of the unusual maladies depicted in “The Kingdom,” Karen’s condition is played simultaneously for laughs and for a kind of implicit empathy. As black as the show’s hell-is-other-people humor can be, it’s rooted in a tender sense of human frailty. It is not particularly scary in a horror-movie sense, instead accessing a more ephemeral, existential sort of terror that, in von Trier’s hands, is indivisible from comedy.

Von Trier told me that his health struggles affected the show’s tone. “I think I underestimated what horror really needs, which is time,” he said.“The reason there are so many jokes is because I could only work for about an hour and a half each day while I was writing. Everything became compressed.” I asked von Trier whether he viewed himself as an essentially comedic filmmaker. “I believe that humor and, let’s say, fascination, or fear, come from the same source,” he said. “I’m terrified of getting on a plane, but I have been a few times, and it’s fantastic to fly, when it goes through the clouds, all of that. The fear comes from the fascination of the thing.”

“Exodus” is von Trier’s first project since his infamous serial-killer movie “The House That Jack Built,” from 2018, whose title refers to the towering flesh-and-blood structure that the protagonist (played by Matt Dillon) erects out of the bodies of his victims. (When I asked von Trier if the focus on a male antihero represented a conscientious departure, he said mordantly, “I thought it would be nice to try to do something where there are no suffering women. There were a lot of women in it, but they died, they didn’t go on suffering.”) At once confrontationally repulsive and mesmerizingly abstract, the film was easy to interpret as a self-portrait of sorts, the story of a loner trying to reconcile his aesthetic impulses with his depressive misanthropy. It featured clips from von Trier’s own filmography, giving the proceedings a valedictory air. The same could be said for “The Kingdom Exodus,” with its endearing, old-school echoes of its predecessor. But, like “The House That Jack Built,” the series is ultimately too thorny to function as a victory lap. In 2017, Björk accused von Trier of sexual harrassment on the set of “Dancer in the Dark”; he claimed that he’d only hugged her. In the new series, he coyly includes a running subplot about Halfmer’s alleged (and utterly hapless) impropriety toward a female colleague—a spoof of P.C. culture from the experienced but untrustworthy vantage of somebody who’s spent decades working and living on the edge of cancellation.

Whatever von Trier’s desire for attention, the need to be liked (or forgiven) is simply not part of his artistic constitution. “I’m very aware of the risk of doing what I call old-man films,” he told me. “These are the films that happen because you have a house that is too big, and you’re striving to repeat your success.” He continued, “I don’t have this idea that there’s a film I haven’t made yet that has to be made, right now. Also, because of this Parkinson’s I’ve picked up, I could live with not doing more films.” He sounded less resigned about his status as a troublemaker. “Persona non grata? I like that very much,” he said, laughing. “I’m the only persona non grata that I know.” ?

[lgbtpopcult]

Lesbian/Bi Movie-TV Nominations Golden Globes

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE – DRAMA

VIOLA DAVIS

MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM

ANDRA DAY

THE UNITED STATES VS. BILLIE HOLIDAY

VANESSA KIRBY

PIECES OF A WOMAN

FRANCES MCDORMAND

NOMADLAND

CAREY MULLIGAN

PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN

BEST MOTION PICTURE – MUSICAL OR COMEDY

BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM

(Four By Two Films; Amazon Studios)

HAMILTON

(Walt Disney Pictures / RadicalMedia / 5000 Broadway Productions / NEVIS Productions / Old 320 Sycamore Pictures; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)

MUSIC

(Pineapple Lasagne Productions / Landay Entertainment; Vertical Entertainment / IMAX)

PALM SPRINGS

(Party Over Here / Limelight Productions; NEON / Hulu)

THE PROM

(Netflix / Dramatic Forces / Storykey Entertainment; Netflix)

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE – MUSICAL OR COMEDY

MARIA BAKALOVA

BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM

KATE HUDSON

MUSIC

MICHELLE PFEIFFER

FRENCH EXIT

ROSAMUND PIKE

I CARE A LOT

ANYA TAYLOR-JOY

EMMA

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE – MUSICAL OR COMEDY

SACHA BARON COHEN

BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM

JAMES CORDEN

THE PROM

LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA

HAMILTON

DEV PATEL

THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD

ANDY SAMBERG

BEST MOTION PICTURE – FOREIGN LANGUAGE

ANOTHER ROUND (DENMARK)

(Zentropa Entertainments; Samuel Goldwyn Films)

LA LLORONA (GUATEMALA / FRANCE)

(La Casa de Producción / Les Films du Volcan; Shudder)

THE LIFE AHEAD (ITALY)

(Palomar; Netflix)

MINARI (USA)

(Plan B; A24)

TWO OF US (FRANCE / USA)

(Paprika Films; Magnolia Pictures)

BEST TELEVISION SERIES – DRAMA

THE CROWN – NETFLIX

(Left Bank Pictures / Sony Pictures Television)

LOVECRAFT COUNTRY – HBO

(HBO / Afemme / Monkeypaw / Bad Robot / Warner Bros. Television)

THE MANDALORIAN – DISNEY+

(Lucasfilm Ltd.)

OZARK – NETFLIX

(MRC Television)

RATCHED – NETFLIX

(Fox21 Television Studios)

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A TELEVISION SERIES – DRAMA

OLIVIA COLMAN

THE CROWN

JODIE COMER

KILLING EVE

EMMA CORRIN

THE CROWN

LAURA LINNEY

OZARK

SARAH PAULSON

RATCHED

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A TELEVISION SERIES – DRAMA

OLIVIA COLMAN

THE CROWN

JODIE COMER

KILLING EVE

EMMA CORRIN

THE CROWN

LAURA LINNEY

OZARK

SARAH PAULSON

RATCHED

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A TELEVISION SUPPORTING ROLE

GILLIAN ANDERSON

THE CROWN

HELENA BONHAM CARTER

THE CROWN

JULIA GARNER

OZARK

ANNIE MURPHY

SCHITT’S CREEK

CYNTHIA NIXON

RATCHED

[moviepoland]

Another Round (2020) ULTRA HD

𝐀𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐑𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 (𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟎) 𝐔𝐋𝐓𝐑𝐀 𝐇𝐃

🗓️ Release Date : 27 November 2020 . 𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞 : There is a theory that man is born with half a per mille too little. That alcohol in the blood opens the mind to the outside world, problems seem smaller and creativity increases. We know it well; after the first glass of wine, the conversation lifts, the possibilities open up. Martin is a high school teacher. He feels old and tired. His students and their parents want him terminated to increase their average. Encouraged by the per mille theory, Martin and his three colleagues throw themselves into an experiment to maintain a constant alcohol impact in everyday life. If Churchill won World War II in a dense fog of spirits, what could the strong drops do for them and their students? The result is positive in the beginning. Martin's class is in a different way now, and the project is being promoted to a real academic study with the collection of results. Slowly, but surely, the alcohol makes the four friends and their surroundings loosen up. The results are rising, and they really begin... . 𝐖𝐚𝐭𝐜𝐡 𝐍𝐨𝐰 𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐌𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐞

⬇️      ⬇️      ⬇️      ⬇️ .

🎬 𝐂𝐋𝐈𝐂𝐊 𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄 𝐓𝐎 𝐖𝐀𝐓𝐂𝐇 🎬

. ⬆️      ⬆️      ⬆️      ⬆️ . 🗓️ Release Date : 27 November 2020

⏰ Runtime : 110 minutes

📂 Genres : Drama, Comedy

💼 Production Company  : Zentropa Entertainments, Det Danske Filminstitut, Film i Väst, Nederlands Filmfonds, Netherlands Film Production Incentive, Media Programme of the European Community, Svenska Filminstitutet, Topkapi Films, TV 2, Zentropa International Netherlands, Zentropa International Sweden, Zentropa Productions 2, Eurimages

🌎 Production Countries  : Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Casts : Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Lars Ranthe, Magnus Millang, Maria Bonnevie, Susse Wold, Helene Reingaard Neumann, Diêm Camille G., Martin Greis-Rosenthal, Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt, Frederik Winther Rasmussen

🏷️ Plot Keywords : -

[dunderklumpen]

small niko updates from the last few days

interview with kino.dk (1, 2) in danish with terrible sound. idk what he says but he touches his face a lot so 🤷‍♀️

in this interview he says he’s open to doing a sequel to his first feature film nattevagten if the script is good (the director of the original is apparently working on said sequel)

he’s being a dumbass dad about it and suggests the title parkeringsvagten jfjskdfdsfkdsl

apparently zentropa (the production company behind smagen af sult) was going to submit niko’s chef movie to cannes, but then corona happened, and they expect that the festival will be cancelled

[mikkelsenpai]

Netflix has made a deal to finance and release the next film by director Alexander Payne. Sources said the film doesn’t yet have a title, but that it is going to star Mads Mikkelsen, who is finalizing his deal. It was described to me as a father/daughter story about a Danish journalist who takes a road-trip with his teenage daughter across the US as he writes a story for a newspaper.

The film will begin shooting next month in Sweden, Denmark and the US. Several distributors bid for Payne’s film. Script was written by Erlend Loe (Nord). It will be produced by Bona Fide Productions’ Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa, and Lizette Jonjic of Zentropa Productions.

The deal gives Netflix a solid awards season film for next year, following a bumper crop of awards films upcoming this fall. Plan is for the film to be released in fall, 2020. Payne has won two Oscars, for writing The Descendants and Sideways (both of which he directed), and he has been a critical favorite since launching his career on Citizen Ruth followed by the Oscar-nominated Election, which has established itself as something of a cult classic. His other films include Downsizing, About Schmidt and Nebraska.

Payne has other projects percolating that include The Menu, a dark satirical comedy he was putting together earlier this year to direct, with Emma Stone and Ralph Fiennes circling to star in a Will Tracy & Seth Reiss-scripted satire that focuses on an eccentric culinary event that is planned for an exclusive island and becomes the hot ticket to die for. I’ve heard it referred to as a Tarantino-esque take on The One-Percent. That was shopped back in April. But the Netflix film will be his next.

Payne is repped by CAA and Bloom Hergott’s John Diemer; Mikkelsen is repped by UTA and Denmark-based Art Management.

[mellowyknox]

“The Journey” Promo

The Journey is 7 stories filmed on the 7 continents. Locations Denmark (Birth), South Africa (Love), Papua New Guinea (Fear) , USA (Loss), Argentina (religion), Antarctica (Rationality), Nepal (Death)

Production: Zentropa Production Copenhagen Director: Christoffer Boe Producer: Kasper Dissing Cinematographer. Jacob Møller

Year: 2016

[jjr1971]

This film is a guilty pleasure, but I fucking love Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron (1977), starring James Coburn & Maxmillian Schnell.  From its period accurate costuming and equipment including vehicles, to its music and sound design with disturbing and compelling visuals (the opening montage still gives me chills, as does the concluding one) to its signature Peckinpah slow-motion operatic violence and gore borrowed wholesale from The Wild Bunch in this Wagnerian mythology where the Wild West is mashed-up with the dismal Eastern Front in a way only Hollywood & Peckinpah could dream up. This film aspires to be anti-war, but many film theorists more able than I have written books and articles about the near impossibility of actually creating an effective anti-war film, especially if it depicts combat. Israeli historians of WW2 have done research that largely debunks the mythology of this film when compared to actual history, especially the state of unit cohesion in the Wehrmacht of 1943.  By this late in the war the casualty rates were staggeringly high and a cohesive platoon such as Steiner’s would’ve been nearly impossible in 1943.  No, the Cross of Iron is a portrait of how Germany would *like* to remember itself in WW2, not how it actually was.  No mention is made of the Holocaust, Nazi ideology is openly mocked by its soldiers excepting a few ideological fanatics, and even the hard-ass conservative, aristocratic Prussian commander isn’t fully comfortable with the lingering, leveling aspects of Nazi ideology. The one bit that is true, that I learned watching Peter Jackson’s latest documentary of World War I, They Shall Not Grow Old, is the antipathy felt by Germans from various other regions (Bavaria, Saxony, Rheinlanders, Swabians) towards the hardass, martinet Prussians of the northeast in and around Berlin/Brandenburg.  In Jackson’s film, the British soldiers remarked how easy-going the Bavarian and Saxon POWs were, and joked with their captors that the unit facing them were full of Prussians and to please give them hell on their behalf.  The Prussians may have unified Germany by force of arms and economic customs union, but there’s not much love lost between other Germans and them at a cultural level.  The Prussian is routinely mocked, especially by the laid-back Bavarian.  Humorlosen Prussians are the butt of many Bavarian jokes. Historians argue that with the extremely high casualty rates and destruction of unit cohesion on the Eastern Front, German soldiers if anything became more ideologically committed to the Nazi cause because it was the only common bond holding them together.  Comrades died too rapidly and unexpectedly on the Eastern Front to form deep, lasting bonds.  Units were decimated, the remnants blended with other units, etc.  The German army became more fanatical as the war progressed and went badly, not less.  There’s also the mythology of the alleged “purity” of the Wehrmacht and all the atrocities are blamed on the Waffen SS.  This is pure nonsense and belied by history.  The Waffen SS were decidedly worse but the Wehrmacht were hardly innocent of war crimes and they were quite instrumental to The Final Solution/Holocaust in their own right.  Men like Sgt. Steiner probably either never existed or were killed early on. This Anglo-American/German production, shot on location in Yugoslavia in 1977 is perhaps arguably a product of the ideological necessities of the Cold War as it stood in the late 1970s.  It was necessary to believe there were “Good Germans”, even among those who donned the Wehrmacht uniform and participated in Operation Barbarossa and some of these men are now Bundeswehr flag officers and valuable NATO allies and sufficiently entnazifiziert that we needn’t bring up the past anymore.  Whereas the reality is a good deal more murky.  Another favorite film of mine that heightens these contradictions and problems and makes an interesting companion piece to Cross of Iron is Lars von Trier’s Zentropa, set in immediate post-war Germany during the allied occupation with Nazi “Werwolf” bitter-ender terrorists still active and not yet fully suppressed; Zentropa acknowledges that while the Nuremberg Trials may have gotten many of the big fish, a lot of smaller fish got away.  Some were (unjustly) rehabilitated to become captains of industry or literal Bundeswehr captains.  Yet more films set in this period that I obsess over is Orson Wells’ The Third Man set in occupied post-war Vienna and Agnieszka Holland‘s Europa! Europa! where a young Jewish boy tries to conceal his Jewish identity and joins the Hitler Youth after being “liberated” from the Soviets by the Wehrmacht and mistaken for an ethnic German. I learned in reading up on the troubled production of Cross of Iron that supposedly a sequel was made featuring Richard Burton taking over the role of Sgt. Steiner called Breakthrough.  I’ve never see it, though I suppose I should, but for me, any notion of a sequel undercuts the beauty of the original film.  In my headcanon, everyone save Capt. Kiesel dies.  There’s no way Steiner & Stransky survived that final battle.  The film doesn’t make any sense if they do. That final battle takes on a dream-like quality that lets you know this story is now entering the realm of myth and legend...and our principal players are dead.  Thus I refuse to acknowledge Breakthrough as a true sequel.

[thenationview]

Danish director Lars von Trier diagnosed with Parkinson's

Danish director Lars von Trier diagnosed with Parkinson’s

Danish director Lars von Trier, known for producing films such as “Melancholia” and “Dancer in the Dark”, has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, his production company announced Monday. Zentropa explained that it released information about the filmmaker’s health ahead of the “The Kingdom Exodus” series premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September, to avoid speculation. The producer…