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Supernatural: Carry On (2020)
Boring
I watched Queen's Gambit before watching this and it was like coming out of a Michelin restaurant to then gorge on a half-eaten hamburger found in the trash can at Dairy Queen.
It was boring and dragged seriously. I watched it sped up because literally nothing was happening and otherwise it would've been unbearable to watch. It's the dragging sentimental slow-speed montage of your dreams. It would've been cool to see more old characters as a nod to the series' long run. It's why I bothered to watch the finale, to maybe see Ellen, Ash, Jo, Charlie, all the old favorites. But not even Castiel was featured to give him a more satisfactory ending. Why they didn't bother to cast old fan favorites but did cast random vampire Jenny from season 1 boggles the mind. If Covid was the reason, why was Jenny more important than literally any other beloved character? And why was it OK then for the huge crew to appear maskless on the bridge at the end?...? But my main gripe with the episode is that it's so boring it's entirely skippable. This show should have concluded at the end of the angel arc 100 years ago. You know, when it still had some kind of value as a TV series.
Ivalo (2018)
Started out strong, but then...
This series started out strong, but then it got tangled up in it's own convoluted and unbelievable plotting. The actors and actresses are great, and especially the child actress Venla does a great job. The sense of family really comes across. The filmography is incredible and the beauty of winter in Lapland comes across wonderfully. These are the reasons I'm giving this a 6 instead of a 5/10.
But if you could give an outstanding award for plot holes and ridiculousness, it would go to this series, I'm sad to say. I lost interest after the halfway-point and barely watched the last two episodes.
What is most irksome is how the lead characters are excused all their flaws--the German man cheats on his wife and the whole storyline is about her being a "psycho crazy woman". To give the depiction of her mental breakdown some balance, perhaps his cheating could've been in some way even mentioned, but it's literally never addressed and he's depicted as the victim to her inexcusable mental breakdown while he is heroically trying to save lives. Nina's character has a similar problem, her actions as a police officer in the last episodes are not believable and for her to be barely reprimanded for them is irksome.
Overall, not a very good watch.
Kaikki synnit (2019)
Visceral depiction of the trauma of religion
This is a little gem of a series. The performances are truly top-notch and I found myself tearing up near the end, which I rarely do. The lead actor and actress are incredibly solid and vulnerable. The screenwriting and plotting was solid. The filmography and landscapes are beautiful and you can really feel that you're watching Ostrobothnia--could the landscape be more flat?
The theme of the series really is about the trauma of religion. I have rarely seen a movie/TV-series tackle the subject with such vulnerability and from so many points of view. It's interwoven with grief, internalized homophobia and domestic violence. The storytelling comes across with very little melodrama, except for the culmination at the end. That's one of the reasons I didn't rate this a total 10/10. But the ending was well done and believable to me, so it isn't a huge complaint, and perhaps the culmination needs some extra drama, so it may be just a personal thing. Some characters, like the business man, were also too stereotypically depicted to my liking. But again, that is a small complaint in the big picture.
Bonus points for Lauri's mother's performance. It still brings me goosebumps when I think back on it. Such raw grief and guilt really makes you feel for her even with everything you know about her. But it's the humanity coming across in the series. I also thought it was very well done to have Lauri slowly start to speak more and more in his childhood dialect as the series went on. This is something foreigners won't catch, but it was a very satisfying detail for them to include, as that's what happens when one goes back.
I have ties to Laestadianism and what is portrayed does ring true to me. But I'm sure only someone who has left the religion can truly say anything about this depiction of it.
Karppi (2018)
Season 2 overshadows season 1
The things that work well throughout the series are the filmography and the acting. The lead actor and actress have good chemistry and give nuanced performances. The filmography is beautiful and really showcases the bleak beauty of the Finnish landscape.
Season 1 was okay, I would rate it a 7½. The downfall of season 1 is definitely the lengthy subplots. They should have trimmed it down considerably and focused more on the lead characters and the lead storyline. The 12 episodes could have been condensed into 8-10 episodes. But that said, though it is a downfall, the season carries out satisfyingly enough, it just needed a couple episodes to properly pull me in. If you are expecting this to be like Broen or Karppi to be like Saga, this is not the show for you. And I say that as someone who doesn't think Broen is perfect either, it has its own pitfalls. This is its own series and feels more procedural with enhanced filmography. But if you come into it without Broen-like expectations or an Excel file ready to compile possible plot holes (I can't even remember if there were considerable ones, but I'm pretty good about watching something to my enjoyment and ignoring things so take that into account), I'm sure you will find enjoyment in it as I did. Saga Noren and Sofia Karppi are completely different characters though they may look a bit alike. But a lot of Nordic women have blonde, curly hair, so it's not that unusual.
Season 2 really evolved with how the plot was constructed. There's 8 episodes in total and it's completely sufficient to cover the storyline. There are still subplots that are given due focus, but this time they held a lot more interest to me and they connected to the main plot. I did figure out who did it, but I don't count that as a bad thing as I often do with these series. Overall it was a pleasing viewing experience, I would rate Season 2 8½.
So, rating the series 8/10.
As a sidenote, reading through these comments some people seem properly upset about a boy having long, curly hair. It may come as a shock to some, but in Finland boys are allowed to grow out their hair as long as they want, if they wish. Similarly, girls can have hair that's not gender normative. Also, who cares, I think Karppi's son's hair length has very little to do with the story.
The Internship (2013)
I'm giving this 1/10 because it's not possible to grade it 0/10
Painful sexist rambling unfunny nonsense. How this movie got produced and filmed and released is beyond me, but what can't mediocre white men accomplish, right?
Personal Shopper (2016)
A story about loss
If you want to see an American haunted house-flick with a couple good scares, this is not for you. The film has more layers than that and it does require for the viewer to have individual thought. I would categorize it as a character-driven drama. Maureen (Kirsten Stewart) has just lost her twin brother. Both of them were mediums and before he died, they made a pact: whoever died first would give the other a sign afterwards. We meet her when she is working as a personal shopper for a celebrity in Paris, disjointed from the people around her and consumed by the thought of his brother contacting her from the afterlife.
The film moves at a slower pace and is not afraid of normalizing nudity, which is to be expected from a European film. It introduces thoughts about the afterlife and the history of practicing the paranormal. The performances are solid, but Stewart is the one who carries the film from beginning to end.
The plot is as follows: Maureen believes that her brother's old house is haunted, thinks it's her brother and tries to reach for him there. Instead, she reaches a bad spirit. Around the same time, she confides about her loss and being a medium to her boss's lover. She starts to receive text messages from someone who is stalking her, and she believes that they are either from her brother or someone manipulating her to believe that they are from his brother. Her boss is murdered and someone tries to pin it on her. It's revealed that the murderer was her boss's lover, and that he's most likely also been sending her the text messages. The bad spirit was just an old spirit that Maureen contacted at the house by accident, because she is a medium, after all.
At the end of the film, Maureen starts to have visions that she (once again) believes are from her brother. She sits in a room and asks the spirit questions, and it answers by a loud banging sound. The gist of her last question is: Has all of this been just inside my head, all along? The "spirit" answers yes.
What I took away from the film was that it was, all along, an amalgamation of her grief that she had no way of comprehending, and her guilt for having the same condition but yet surviving her brother. She was so consumed by looking for her brother in everything she experienced that in the end, she imagined signs from him, and was taken advantage of her obsession and vulnerability by a man who wanted revenge from a lover who saw him as something to be discarded without thought. The film had spooky elements to it, but by the end I was no longer scared, but only sad for her. The only thing she was still holding onto was the certainty that she would have one final contact with her brother. But in the end, she was just alone, and had been alone all along. The film ends with her realizing this fact.
I also liked the fact that the film made something seem like a paranormal plotline and then gave it an answer in reality. First I thought that the bad spirit from the haunted house was somehow connected, that a paranormal spirit was giving Maureen signs and followed Maureen and murdered her boss. The scene where Maureen finds her boss's dead body becomes scarier when we learn who murdered her in reality. When Maureen heard sounds coming from the apartment, she didn't hear a disembodied spirit. She heard a human being who'd just committed a brutal murder, and who was in the same apartment with her. And that I find scarier than haunted houses.