Some Bergman Things

Some years back, I watched a whole bunch of things Ingmar Bergman had done. Most of his movies “proper” are available through conventional means, but a surprising number of things weren’t. (We’re talking plays like The Ghost Sonata (on one end of the video quality scale) to The School for Wives (on the other end), not his … movie movies.)

Fortunately, there was a guy selling bootleg DVDs of these things, and I bought them all.

It’s been brought to my attention that those DVDs are no longer available, so I thought it my civic duty to upload this stuff (along with some other bits and bobs I got from torrenting) to Youtube.

Here’s the channel. Download the videos before they disappear, I guess? I mean, there’ll be a bunch of copyright strikes, I’m assuming.

And, yes, most of these do not have subtitles, and the vast majority are in Swedish, so this’ll only be useful to the 8M Swedes and the 10K Norwegians and Danes that admit to being able to understand Swedish.

(And some Finns.)

Hm… doesn’t Youtube have some kind of crowd-sourced subtitling thing? *roots around* Yes, indeed. I’ve now switched that on, so if you want to provide English subtitles, be my guest.

Useful Consumer Review

All Emacs users, at one point or another, feel like they need a pedal to get all the keystrokes in. But now I could actually use one: I’ve got a blogging project that requires using a scanner, and triggering that with a foot would mean less bending to reach the keyboard.

So I got an iKKEGOL USB Foot Control Action Switch Pedal and was excited to see just what obscure HID keycode it’s generating. (These things usually pretend to be keyboards, which makes for easy integration without any drivers and stuff.)

So I connect the pedal and start up xev and:

“b”? It sends “b”!?! “b”!!!

OK, I can work with that for the scanning thing, but “b”!?!?

“b”!!!1!?

Totally Epic

I don’t really have time for this, but I’ve started blogging about yet another 80s comics publisher: Epic Comics.

Or rather “publisher”: It’s an imprint of Marvel Comics, but was initially running as a somewhat separate entity within the Marvel offices.

Don’t expect very frequent posts. Or at least not to begin with, as the initial batch of things Epic published included series that went on for quite a while, which means that I have to read thousands of pages to blog about them.

But if you’re interested: Here’s the link to the Totally Epic blog.

NFLX2019 November 15th: Klaus

Klaus. Sergio Pablos. 2019. ☆☆☆☆☆★

This is super sweet. It’s told in a brash, irreverent tone, but it’s a very sentimental Christmas movie about Santa Claus and stuff. If you’re easily moved, it’s full of really touching scenes throughout: It’s amazing that they keep delivering these highly emotional punches time and time again.

And the animation is really fun to watch.

So: Sweet, funny, pretty, touching. It’s a new Xmas classic.

This post is part of the NFLX2019 blog series.

NFLX2019 November 8th: Earthquake Bird

Earthquake Bird. Wash Westmoreland. 2019. ☆☆☆★★★

Man, this is a mess. I was totally on board thinking this was a really interesting movie, where ever shot had a deeper meaning. We were all “oh, this means she can see dead people! No, she’s a vampire! No, she’s dead!” but calm down: There’s no Shyamalaning going on here:

The resolution to this movie is the most boring possible thing and will make you go “really? really!? Because that’s not a twist!”

Dude.

But I loved the colours here. The actors are great and it’s all very very pretty. Was this sponsored by the Japanese tourist board or something?

So in conclusion: It’s a very stupid movie that pretends that it’s smart, and that’s not ultimately fun to watch.

This post is part of the NFLX2019 blog series.