Tag Archives: Bali
The 101-Year-Old Man Who Skipped Out on His Bill and Disappeared (Hundraettåringen som smet från notan och försvann)
Posted on January 14, 2018 by carlosdev
101-year-old men stand out in any crowd.
(2016) Comedy (Netflix) Robert Gustafsson, Daniel Steiner, Caroline Boulton, Jens Hultén, David Wilberg, Shima Niavarani, Jay Simpson, Ralph Carlsson, Iwar Wiklander, Georg NIkoloff, Guhn Andersson, David Shackleton, Erni Mangold, Svetlana Rodina Ljungkvist, Eric Stern, Colin McFarlane, Cory Peterson, Shin-Fei Chen, Crystal the Monkey. Directed by Felix Herngren and Måns Herngren
Back in 2013, a Swedish cinematic adaptation of a bestselling novel The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared became a massive hit in Sweden, enough so that it was brought to America a couple of years later (and played the Florida Film Festival to boot). It was one of my favorite films from 2015 and is still one I watch periodically.
Now comes a sequel which while not getting a theatrical release here in the States is available on Netflix. The streaming giant hasn't really promoted the film much, so much so that almost no major publication has reviewed it and it has gotten almost no advertising. Is it worth checking out?
The movie takes place a year after the first one; it's Alan Karlsson's (Gustafsson) 101st birthday. He is celebrating with his pals Julius (Wiklander) and Benny (Hultén). As they celebrate they drink a Soviet soft drink that puts a little more pep in their step. Realizing that there are no bottles left of the confection and that the formula could make them a mint, they go on an extended road trip to rediscover the formula. On the way they are chased by the CIA, Karlsson gets a job as a soft drink company executive and a monkey makes their lives miserable. Also the biker gang from the first film continues to chase them for the missing money.
While director Felix Herngren returns as does much of the cast, the sequel doesn't hold a candle to the original. There continue to be Gump-like flashbacks to Karlsson's colorful past (including meetings with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger) and Bennie continues to be the world's most indecisive man – a shtick which is getting old at this point – but to the bad the make-up on Gustafsson is strangely less convincing than it was in the first film. Also the humor is a lot more pedestrian; it's like the writers were trying to play it much safer than the first one. Maybe because this one is an original script rather than based on an existing property there's a little less cohesion to the story.
For those looking for a good comedy to stream, standing on its own this isn't bad entertainment. Fans of the first film however are going to be sorely disappointed.
REASONS TO GO: The characters are all nicely developed from the first film. Gustafsson is a gem.
REASONS TO STAY: This isn't nearly as good as the first film. The humor is pedestrian and the monkey is annoying.
FAMILY VALUES: There is some profanity, brief nudity and some drug use.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The films that Crystal the Monkey has appeared in have a combined worldwide gross of more than $2.5 billion; this is her first Swedish-language film.
CRITICAL MASS: As of 1/14/18: Rotten Tomatoes: No score yet. Metacritic: 57/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: A Man Called Ove
NEXT: Goodbye Christopher Robin
Posted in VOD Review	| Tagged Bali, biker gang, champagne cork, CIA, cinema, Cinema365, comedy, Crystal the Monkey, Daniel Steiner, Films, Henry Kissinger, movies, Netflix, Richard Nixon, Robert Gustafsson, soda formula, Soviet Union, The 101-Year-Old Man Who Skipped Out On His Bill and Disappeared, VOD Reviews	| Leave a reply
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann)
Working on the railroad all the live-long day.
(2013) Comedy (Music Box) Robert Gustafsson, Iwar Wiklander, David Wiberg, Mia Skaringer, Jens Hulten, Bianca Cruzeiro, Alan Ford, Sven Lonn, David Shackleton, Georg Nikoloff, Simon Sappenen, Manuel Dubra, Cory Peterson, Kerry Shale, Philip Rosch, Keith Chanter, Patrik Karlson, Johan Rheborg, David Hogberg, Alfred Svensson, Eiffel Mattsson. Directed by Felix Herngren
Our lives have a certain texture and richness that we don't really detect while we're living it. Some of us labor in obscurity, affecting only those we're close to and loved by. Others are destined not necessarily for greatness, but for greater effect.
Alan Karlsson (Gustafsson) is one such man. From the time he was a boy, he loved to blow things up, a gift from his father who was a bit of a revolutionary and died espousing contraceptives as the means to a better society. Alan's penchant for explosives would eventually get him put into a mental hospital and later in life, into a retirement home.
It is in the latter place that one day – on his 100th birthday as a matter of fact – he just decides to step out of his window and leave. Nobody sees him go, and Alan manages to make it to the bus station and has just enough money on him to purchase a ticket to the middle of nowhere. While he's waiting for the bus to come, a pushy biker sort (Sappenen) insists that Alan watch his suitcase while he's in the bathroom. When Alan's bus arrives, he absent-mindedly takes the suitcase with him. What Alan doesn't know is that there is 50 million kroner inside the suitcase.
The bus lets him off in a one-horse Swedish town where the train no longer runs. Julius (Wiklander) watches over the train station and graciously takes Alan in for lunch and drinks, the latter of which Alan is more enthusiastic about. Their little party is broken up by the arrival of the pushy biker who wants his suitcase back in the worst way but the two old men manage to subdue him and lock him in a freezer.
Taking to the road, Julius and Alan meet up with Benny (Wiberg), a perpetual college student who has no degree yet despite having taken 920 credits in classes over 18 years but can't make up his mind what he wants to do with his life, and later on with Gunilla (Skaringer), a lovely young Bohemian who is keeping a purloined elephant in her barn. Chasing them is Gaddan (Hulten), the leader of the biker gang whose pushy member had unwittingly given the suitcase to Alan, and Pim (Ford), the English drug lord whose cash it is.
In the meantime, Alan reminisces about his remarkable life which took him to the Spanish Civil War (where he saved General Francisco Franco's life), the Manhattan Project (where his suggestion helped J. Robert Oppenheimer solve a critical problem with the atomic bomb and led to him having a tequila drinking session with then-Vice President Harry Truman), the Soviet Union (where he would eventually be imprisoned with Albert Einstein's slow-witted brother) and the C.I.A. (where he would be a double agent passing useless information between both sides).
In that sense, this is a bit of a Forrest Gump-like film in which Alan drifts through history, and the parallels are a bit striking. While not quite as slow as Gump, Alan is certainly not the brightest bulb in the chandelier and kind of allows life to take him where it will, avoiding disaster often by the slimmest of margins.
This is based on a massively popular novel that is available here in the States. The movie version was a huge hit in Sweden where it recently became the biggest box office success of any Swedish-made movie in history. The distributor is the same group that brought the Millennium trilogy to American shores and is hoping for a similar type of success. There are plenty of twists and turns to keep those unfamiliar with the book guessing as to where the plot is going.
Certainly that sort of success would be merited here. I found it funny in a less over-the-top way than American comedies are these days. Comedies coming from America seem to be hell-bent on pushing the envelope of good taste and excess (which isn't of itself a bad thing); this is more content to use absurd situations and serendipity to get its humor across. This is definitely more old school and those who prefer the comedies fast-paced and frenetic will likely find this slow and frustrating.
Gustafsson is one of Sweden's most popular comic actors and we get a good sense why; his comic timing is impeccable and his mannerisms as the 100-year-old Alan are pitch-perfect. He gets able support from Wiberg who plays perhaps the most indecisive man ever, Hulten as the crazed biker and Ford as the apoplectic drug lord (Ford played a similar role in Guy Richie's Snatch). Throughout Herngren hits the right notes and allows the comedy to happen organically rather than force things.
There are a few quibbles – the narration is a bit intrusive and there are some factual errors (for example, President Roosevelt actually died three months before the Trinity atomic test, not after) but for the most part the movie is pleasant and funny, though not life-changing. It's the perfect tonic for a bad day and if you need further praise than that, you just must not have many bad days.
REASONS TO GO: Oddball sense of humor. Forrest Gump in Europe. Absurdly funny.
REASONS TO STAY: Narration is a bit intrusive.
FAMILY VALUES: Some crude humor, a little violence and some bad language.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Gustafsson estimated that if all the time he spent in the make-up chair was tallied, he would have been there three uninterrupted weeks 24/7 in the chair when all was said and done.
CRITICAL MASS: As of 4/22/15: Rotten Tomatoes: 69% positive reviews. Metacritic: no score yet.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Cocoon
NEXT: Danny Collins
Posted in New Releases	| Tagged 100th birthday party, Albert Einstein, Bali, based on a novel, blowing things up, bus station, cannon factory, CIA, cinema, comedy, double agent, drug lord, drug money, elephant, ex-boyfriend, explosives, Fabrege Egg, Films, firing squad, Florida Film Festival, Florida Film Festival 2015, Francisco Franco, freezer unit, Harry S. Truman, Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann, indecisive, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Joseph Stalin, KGB, Manhattan Project, movies, Music Box Films, reviews, road movie, Robert Gustafsson, Ronnie Hult, Spanish Civil War, Swedish Cinema, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, train station	| 1 Reply
Julia Roberts looks soulfully at the Eternal City.
(Columbia) Julia Roberts, Javier Bardem, Viola Davis, Richard Jenkins, Billy Crudup, James Franco, Tuva Novotny, Luca Argentero, Giuseppe Gandini, Rushita Singh, Hadi Subiyanto, Christine Hakim, Anakia Lapae, Arlene Tur. Directed by Ryan Murphy
Most of us, at one time or another, undergo a rigorous self-examination of the soul, one usually brought on by some kind of crisis. We are forced to face our own deficiencies, define who we are and compare ourselves to who we need to be. Most of us must do us all by our own lonesome; some of us use the benefit of a therapist. Others take a different route.
Liz Gilbert (Roberts) is a successful freelance writer who's married, lives in a great apartment in Manhattan and is surrounded by a coterie of friends and admirers. Of course, this means she's absolutely miserable. Her husband Stephen (Crudup) is a bit of a self-involved dweeble, perpetually trying new careers in an effort to find something that'll stick. He has announced that he is going back to school to get his masters, just as Liz is looking forward to spending some time in Aruba. When he asserts "I don't wanna go to Aruba," she replies tearfully "I don't want to be married."
Stephen contests the divorce and doesn't want to let go. Liz does what any sensible woman just getting out of a marriage to a decent enough guy that she was miserable in – she leaps into the bed of David (Franco), an off-Broadway actor who has adopted Eastern philosophies and follows an Indian guru. He is just as superficial as Stephen is, and Liz decides to leave on a year-long journey of to find out who she is since she feels numb inside, as she tells her best friend Delia (Davis). Of course, it doesn't hurt that despite being cleaned out in the divorce, her publisher paid for the trip with an advance on the book that Liz would eventually write (a fact not mentioned in the movie).
Her first stop is Rome, where she meets Sofi (Tuvotny), a Swedish ex-pat; Giovanni (Argentero), Sofi's Italian boyfriend and Luca Spaghetti (Gandini), who claims his family invented the namesake pasta. Here, she dives headfirst into Italian cuisine, from Neapolitan pizza to Roman pasta to gelato and everything in between. She eats without feeling guilty, launching herself into La dolce far niente – the sweetness of doing nothing. Check.
From there, she goes to the ashram of the Indian guru that David follows. Here, she meets Richard (Jenkins), a garrulous Texan who, as she puts it, speaks in bumper stickers. He chides her into finding a way to meditate despite the attacks of mosquitoes and an inability to clear her mind. He calls her "Groceries" because of her appetite and the two wind up being pretty good friends, enough so that Richard confesses to her the reason he's there in one of the movie's more compelling scenes.
She also befriends a young girl (Singh) who is about to enter an arranged marriage, which troubles the both of them. Eventually she gets with the program, but Liz not so much, the wedding reminding her inevitably of her own. Eventually, she finds some inner peace. Check.
After that, it's off to Indonesia – Bali to you and me – to meet up with the medicine man Ketut (Subiyanto) whom she met a year earlier and predicted that she would be back to teach him English. She stays in the area, translating old parchments for him in the mornings and exploring Bali in the afternoons. It is here that she meets Phillipe (Bardem), a Brazilian ex-pat who runs an import business. The two begin to fall for each other, but Liz doesn't need a man anymore – does she?
This is based on the New York Times bestseller, and it's appeal to women can be measured by its appearance on Oprah (the daytime talk diva devoted two entire shows to the book) and the number of women in the audience at the movie, which was roughly about 80%. There is certainly an empowering element to the book and the movie, which teaches women that they need to find fulfillment from within.
At least, that's the message I think is intended, but the movie doesn't really bring that across so much. Most of the wisdom that Liz arrives at comes from others, be it the irascible Texan in India, or the gentle healer in Bali. She seems to bring little to the table internally other than a penchant for whining about how unfulfilled she is.
I don't know the author personally so I can't guess at how accurate the portrayal of her is. I'm sure she couldn't have been disappointed to have Roberts, one of the most beautiful women on Earth, playing her. Roberts is a fair actress in her own right, as Erin Brockovich conclusively showed, but this won't be measured as one of her finer performances. To be fair, it can't be easy to portray someone whose chief trait seems to be inner emptiness but you never get a sense of that emptiness being filled in a significant way. Perhaps that's a subtlety I overlooked.
She is also matched with two of the best actors in the world in Bardem and Jenkins, and neither one disappoint. Jenkins' rooftop soliloquy in the Indian portion alone may win him Oscar consideration for Best Supporting Actor, if Academy members remember that far back come voting time this winter. Bardem plays a wounded divorcee who desperately loves his children, but is terrified of getting his heart broken again.
Murphy crafts a very slick, good-looking movie that runs a very long time – I was definitely shifting in my seat right around the India sequence – and doesn't have as much depth as it purports to. As Liz accuses Richard of speaking in bumper stickers, so is the movie a series of motivational posters of cats hanging from ledges and eagles gliding into sunsets. There is nothing truly profound here, other than the simple advice not to worry so much about what you eat, find balance in your life, and then find a hot Brazilian to fool around with. Sage advice all, but especially for those who can afford to take a year off and embark on an all-expenses paid journey of self-discovery. Most of us don't get that kind of opportunity.
The secret to finding self-realization is to look inward. You're simply not going to find it in a book or a movie, although those desperate enough will look in those places first. As Richard says repeatedly to Liz (repetition is a theme in the movie), you have to do the work. Nothing comes easy in this life, not even something simple like a plate of spaghetti. Realizing that is the first step towards wisdom.
REASONS TO GO: Bardem and Jenkins are two of the best actors working and are worth seeing in their roles. Gorgeous cinematography makes this worth checking out.
REASONS TO STAY: Spiritual aspects are a bit hazy. Quite frankly, this seems quite self-indulgent and new age-y.
FAMILY VALUES: There's some sexuality and occasionally bad language, as well as a bare male derriere; otherwise, it's suitable for teens and above.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Director Murphy is responsible for creating the hit Fox Network show "Glee."
HOME OR THEATER: There is some beautiful cinematography here, but not the sweeping majesty that would compel home viewing.
TOMORROW: Trucker
Posted in New Releases	| Tagged actors, ashram, Bali, based on a bestselling book, Billy Crudup, Brazil, charity, chick flick, cinema, Columbia Pictures, confessions, divorce, dysfunctional relationships, Eat Pray Love, eating, Films, guru, import/export, India, Italy, James Frano, Javier Bardem, journey, Julia Roberts, mediine man, meditation, movies, Naples, New York City, pasta, praying, reviews, Richard Jenkins, Rome, Ryan Murphy, self-discovery, self-realization, Viola Davis	| 1 Reply