Film Festival:
Tonight I went to see a film named
101 Reykjavik; it was from
Iceland (naturally), and about a shiftless, socially inept twentysomething
slacker in Reykjavik who ends up getting his mother's lesbian lover (played by
sultry Spanish actress Victoria Abril, who will be well known to
Almodovar fans) pregnant.
It was quite an enjoyable film; not quite as arty as
Angels of the
Universe, but quite amusing, and with some poetic moments and
some breathtaking outdoor visuals (as may be expected in an Icelandic
film). The dialogue was mostly in Icelandic (with subtitles) though
partly in English, as Abril's character (being from Spain) didn't speak
Icelandic (and, this film would suggest, many people in Iceland
can understand and speak English). The music was by Damon Albarn and one
of the former members of the Sugarcubes (that's
the Ickle One's old band,
of course), and featured some amusingly cheesy electronic takes on
the Kinks'
Lola.
After this, I saw
Bells From The Deep, a Werner Herzog documentary about mysticism and the occult in a remote corner of Russia (near the
Mongolian border). It included a lot of outré bits, including
elderly people crawling around a sacred tree stump, tales of visions of
hidden cathedrals and apparitions, and pilgrims crawling along thin ice to
pay tribute to the fabled city of Kitezh, said to be hidden at the bottom
of the lake (where the Mongol hordes couldn't sack it, of course), as well
as footage of locals lining up to buy "consecrated water", a Jesus-lookalike
in elaborately embroidered velvet robes spouting mystical mumbo-jumbo and
blessing people, and Mongolian throat singing (including, very possibly,
the same sample the KLF used on Chill Out, or maybe not).