"Hope" and Norway's Oscar History

by Nathaniel R

The Norwegian Film Institute has selected Maria Sødahl's cancer drama Hope to represent them at the Oscars. The film stars Bræn Hovig and the ever-ubiquitous Stellan Skarsgård (who works as often in Scandinavia as he does in Hollywood, which is to say, a lot) as the couple thrown by a terrible diagnosis. Hope was selected over two other finalists which were: Disco by Jorunn Myklebust Syversen about a young girl mixed up with a Christian cult (which we reviewed at TIFF last fall), and Margreth Olin's documentary The Self Portrait about an acclaimed photographer struggling with anorexia. (Olin was submitted 11 years ago for her second narrative feature Angel though she's primarily a documentarian.)

1987 Norwegian nominee "Pathfinder"Norway has been perpetually overshadowed by Sweden and Denmark in terms of the cinema. They have a smaller film industry than their Scandinavian neighbors but the other problem is a noticeable lack of internationally-adored auteurs. We hoped that the rise of Joachim Trier would change that but, alas, the Oscars aren't helping in that regard as he's been submitted twice from his three Norwegian language films and the Academy passed both times.

Oscar stats and great Norwegian films after the jump...

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The New Classics: Oslo, August 31

Michael Cusumano here for the 30th episode of The New Classics.

It was hard. Absolutely.

Scene: The Bucket List 
Halfway through Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31 we get an extended scene of the protagonist, Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie), sitting in a cafe and simply listening to the other patrons talk. He appears perfectly ordinary sitting there. Just a guy in a cafe. What we in the audience know, which everyone who meets him on this fateful day does not, is that Anders started the day by filling his pockets with rocks and wading into a lake, attempting suicide a la Virginia Woolf. He couldn't go through with it and spends the rest of the film teetering quietly on the brink...

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Beauty Break: Ten March 1st Babes

by Nathaniel R

Welcome to March! 2019 can officially begin (heh-we're on the film calendar, not the calendar-calendar). Today is Javier Bardem's 50th birthday. Happy half-century to one of cinema's most striking faces!

To help get us going this morning -- we're off to a slow start -- here are the ten beautiful (aka favorite) people born on this day (March 1st) in no particular order whatsoever...

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NYFF: Norway's Oscar Submission "Thelma"

by Jason Adams

Sometimes a critic can't help but interject him or herself into a review, and Joaquim Trier's Thelma is one of those times for me. Thelma tells the story of a young woman from a cripplingly religious family who goes off to college and starts having epileptic seizures that coincide with an awakening of same-sex longings. Meanwhile I'm the homosexual son of an epileptic and was raised in a speak-in-tongues Pentecostal church. Needless to say I felt Thelma, you guys.

So much that it's hard to divorce myself critically to see the forest for the dead birds dropping down among the trees. Trier gets so many precise details so right that I know from my own specific, particular life experience - the warm waves of excitement and guilt at discovering drink and swear-words when you first leave home; the way an epileptic seizure can be a sudden horrific tearing open of reality itself's seams -  that I'm more than willing to go along with anything he does, even when it is sometimes a hint too austere for its own good.

It's hard to say something that features a woman deep-throating a python - but you know, in a sexy way - remains austere, but Trier manages. He is Norwegian, after all. Thelma is an ice pond of a film floating over fiery little volcanic eruptions - like its protagonist (an exquisitely conflicted Eili Harboe) Thelma is Fire & Ice, Passion & Repression, a Freudian phantasmagoria strapped into a cool silk blouse.

TIFF Horror x3

by Chris Feil

Amid screening global cinema and the odd Oscar contender or two, I was able to cram in some horror films to my TIFF lineup. The festival is so large that it doesn’t just limit its horror entries into the genre-centric Midnight Madness program. My sampling was not only a mini European tour, but also a trip through different genre tropes: the French extremity of Revenge, a gothic ghost story with The Lodgers, and a surprising psychological chiller with Thelma.

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