The first season of this series has now passed, and with it, some recollections are made: at first, it felt a bit dull but that’s because I had jump-started the season with “Dexter”, which is an entirely different animal. This series focuses on Jonathan Ames, a hapless 30-something suburban writer who smokes too much pot and drinks too much white wine, which is why his girlfriend leaves him at the very beginning of the first episode. Jonathan re-enters his (formerly their) apartment and writes an ad on Craigslist where he says he’s an unlicensed private detective available for hire.

And so the story begins.

Some of the characters involved are his best friend, a neurotic guy who’s often down and angry, and his boss, who also loves pot and wine.

All of this, mingled with the cases that Jonathan undertakes, makes for what HBO calls a “noir-otic comedy” which kind of adds it up. It’s not bewildered by a thousand simultaneous plots and is quite calm, which might be pinned down from all the pot. Anyway, it’s no Seinfeld on valium, but an acquired taste that is original and radiantly written.

I fell more and more in love with Ted Danson’s character as the series progressed, and I feel that as a whole, the last episode is quite a bit away from the first, as progression goes. Lovely and nice, not fishing for laughs all the time, and what laughs may come hit hard.

A little spoiler alert is in place here, so read on only if you dare.

I really liked this film. The dialogue felt real, as did the characters. The script contains a lot of pretentious and impressive twists that all feel real. The film made me feel that the clichés and the little things that made the characters happy and sad are what mattered. That everyday feeling, together with the constant anachronistic jumping in time and the “supernatural” sequences (e.g. where Tom turns a walk to work into a musical daydream with drawn birds and a big band), the brilliant soundtrack (with Morrissey regalia to boot, imagine that) and a lot of desire turned this film into a great experience for me. Very cute, calm, American (I feel, as a non-American) and recommendable.

A nice step back into form. Wallander finds a colleague, Svedberg, opening up about emotions and the police department where they work. He is quite soon found dead, and the more an over-worked and exhausted Wallander looks into the case, the more it seems to be connected with another, and it seems like a serial killer is loose. I found the parallel story-lines working very well together, and the cinematography, especially the use of light and focus, was really good. Wallander’s persona blooms in this film, where it touches on his family life as in the first. Or rather, it touches the parts of him that seemingly wilt and make him very human; the emptiness that haunts him from within, branching out as he tries to solve the case is portrayed beautifully, not to mention how exciting this episode was. This last installment of the Wallander mini-series made me long for new episodes!

As the first film of the English Wallander mini-series set a shining example, the second installment was a bit of a let-down in my eyes. Despite the obvious problems with turning a story that somewhat evolves around hackers into something eventful and interesting, Wallander himself isn’t a very happening person; it’s what’s inside that makes most of this series kick, if you look away from the wonderful cinematography, the energic screenplay, good dialogue and real acting, this story didn’t entice me. It’s a bit like flogging a dead horse, but still, not a very good TV film. The other two installments are, however, recommendable.

This is a quite beautiful, intrinsic and simply made documentary about the band Joy Division, and about Manchester’s youths during the late 1970s and early 1980s. As a few lads congregated, learned their instruments and put together their landmark mal de vivre with the help of Martin Hammett in the shape of “Unknown Pleasures”, the life of the group is both professional and private. Ian Curtis’ life is high-lighted, and still not dissected from the view-point of Deborah Curtis. Annik Honoré, Curtis’ lover, is interviewed, as is a bunch of Manc people, e.g. the members of Joy Division, Richard Boon, Kevin Cummins, Paul Morley, Genesis P. Orridge. They’re not there to be name-dropped, but all bring good info to the table. Very little of what’s found in this documentary is filler. There is bootleg video included, a piece of a conversation between Curtis in hypnosis and Bernard Sumner, filmed scrawls from Rob Gretton’s note-book. All in all, a quite precious film, laying bare the landscape that was the preface, basis and aftermath of Joy Division. A very good music documentary indeed.

A very strange documentary on how racism turned clubs into gangs, youths into warriors and a relatively small stretch of land into a war zone during the past 40 years. This film looks into the history of Los Angeles, how black youths were shunned by the government, harassed by the police and basically pushed to the brink of rioting, as in Watts and Detroit in the 60s. Then in the 90s when rioting hit Los Angeles again, clubs for youths of the 70s had turned into gangs, formed around the two biggest gangs of them all: bloods and crips, who have so far been the reason for the deaths of more than 15000 people. Highly recommendable, this film lets out the anger, despair, peer pressures, negative and positive thinking surrounding the entire nature of gangs forming. This is a very important, well-written and thoroughly researched and interviewed film.

Not as good as the first volume in the series about Huerta, i.e. Hopey, Maggie and their friends and enemies. This tome is centered around Maggie, Hopey and Ray (as the title implies) who are getting older, jobs and somehow finding out that they don’t change as persons despite getting older.

While there are some changes in plot that slow down the tempo in here, I found some of the dada-drawn passages quite irritating, but still it’s a sign of Hernandez’ ability to incorporate the serious with the laughable and mash it together.

The characters evolve, and even though not at the same pace as before that would have been strange. This is a quite nice assortment of little stories, and despite my missing the tempo of yore, it’s nice to see the happy days and demons up close and in detail, quite poetic through the motions. Especially the dogs.

All in all: not at all as good as “Locas I” (which I give 5/5 without hesitation, but still interesting, vibrant and at times beautifully written. I’ll buy the third volume as soon as it hits the streets.

This is the way the Swedish Wallander films should have been made in the first place, if at all. I must confess to not having read the books, but I have seen a few of the Swedish films, all done in kind of the same old, drab way that Swedish TV-films are produced: the same old cast is there, the same old way of acting (often as though a character never changes), boring cinematography, horrendous dialogue, bad soundtrack and what seems like no pretensions whatsoever. It’s all very meat-and-potatoes. You know exactly what you’ll be served, how it’ll be presented and how you’ll feel having finished it off, especially if you’ve seen even one previous episode in a series of these Swedish detective films, most notably “Beck”. The Wallander series is successful, both as books and as TV films. Successful enough to lure people from England into doing a few TV-films, thankfully using fresh ideas. The film begins where Wallander witnesses an act of self-immolation. It continues with him and his team trying to unveil the identity of the girl who killed herself this way and why, while at the time more crimes are being committed, and are they related in some way? While the police team is focused upon, Wallander’s relation to his daughter, his father and his failed marriage are happening. The episodes are spoken in English, but everything else is Swedish; they even shot a lot of footage in Sweden. As I am myself from Sweden, where I live and breathe to this day, it’s very refreshing to see people from abroad come in and use our culture to build a quite carefully planned detective drama, where the main character, police detective Kurt Wallander (as played by Kenneth Branagh), is a middle-aged, quite sad character. Branagh portrays Wallander quite humanly, using subtleties and the character’s general down-faced mood and thinking to lead the way.

The cinematography leaves the Swedish equivalent in the dust, and the direction is tight; as previously stated, this is simply put how I think the series should be done. True, the pronounciation of some words (e.g. “Ystad” like “Gstaad”) strike me as interesting and funny, but there are such crisp, subtle clarities left everywhere in this that point to what is so intricately Swedish in some ways, e.g. the bag-in-box phenomenon – as Swedes often purchase their wine in a 3-liter box rather than in a bottle – that leaves any weird ways of saying words in the attic of one’s mind. On the characters, I don’t think there are any real archetypical edges visible, but rather an assortment of humans who struggle with their personal lives as well as their professional roles. Hence, I feel they become more interesting as the film goes on, even if the progression is slight. All in all, I recommend this series and will most definitely check out the other ones. The Swedish film industry, are you taking notes? You should well be.

Gus van Sant has written, directed and edited this film, that delves into the lives of high-school youths. It is all based on the American Columbine massacre committed by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. As usual, van Sant lets the lives of the characters lead the direction rather than him forcing something, which never happens in this film. For me, not even the intense physical violence overpowers the feeling of natural lives being lived throughout this film. Some people slack off at school, others take pictures, some murder. I can clearly see how some critics may dislike this film entirely; the languid atmosphere is at times a little taxing even for me, though I mostly really like van Sant’s direction; what seems hypnotic can lead into the lax and boring. Some might call this playing it safe, but all in all I like this non-Hollywood-esque film, which I shelf below films like “Paranoid Park” and “My Own Private Idaho” but above so much else by many other film-makers.

This HBO documentary is not about Roman Polanski’s entire life. In fact, it is to the greatest extent centered in the court case from which he fled in 1978, where he was sentenced for unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, in fact a 13-year-old girl. A lot of archive footage is used and is very well-edited to paint a picture of a great director who has battled a lot of turmoils in life (most notably the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate). A lot of judicial figures are interviewed in depth regarding the court case, the very peculiar (and probably criminal) judge Rittenband, along with journalists from the time and friends of Polanski. The music – mostly period jazz – is used very nicely, often alongside period snippets from TV news. The main character is not interviewed for this documentary, and while I feel the documentary skirts away too much from Polanski’s pedophile act, his victim has since forgiven him and there are a couple of interesting facts about her mother’s role in the case. All in all this is a good documentary about the chilling events surrounding a human being who happens to be a world-renowned film-director. By the way, David Wells has admitted to lying in the documentary, and it’s interesting to see if anything will really happen to Polanski now that he – 31 years after fleeing the USA – is arrested in Switzerland because of his outstanding punishment.