BTLXXVIII 1996: Private Confessions

Private Confessions (Enskilda samtal). Liv Ullmann. 1996. ⭐⭐⭐⭐★★.

I couldn’t find this film anywhere: Not on Amazon, not Netflix, not nowhere, so I torrented it. And the torrent turned out to be with Spanish dialogue. *sigh*

But then it turns out that some kind person has put the entire thing on Youtube. Thank you.

Pernilla August and Samuel Fröler reprise their roles as Bergman’s parents from The Best Intentions. But confusingly enough, Max von Sydow is back, too, but not in the same role.

It’s directed by Liv Ullmann, and she interprets Bergman’s script much more convincingly than Bille August did in the previous film. And Sven Nykvist is back as the cinematographer, so it’s a jolly old reunion, you have to assume.

This was made as av TV series, too, but I watched the shortened theatrical version. One of these years I should rewatch all the TV versions of everything from Scenes from a Marriage onwards…

This post is part of the 87 Bergman Things series.

BTLXXVII 1995: The Last Gasp

The Last Gasp (Sista skriket). Ingmar Bergman. 1995. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐★.

The first ten minutes is documentary: Bergman shows us clips from old Swedish films (pre 1920) and tells us a bit about the people that made the films.

And then we get a one act TV play where Bergman imagines a meeting between two of these filmmakers.

It’s basically a monologue, and it’s great. The guy who does the monologue’s fine, but I can’t help imagining Gunnar Björnstrand in the role, perhaps because he seems to be adopting some of his mannerisms in imagining what a 1920 actor/director would behave like.

This post is part of the 87 Bergman Things series.

BTLXXVI 1992: The Best Intentions

The Best Intentions (Den goda viljan). Bille August. 1992. ⭐⭐⭐★★★.

The copy I had of this film didn’t work, so I had to watch it via Amazon Prime, and it turns out to have two levels of subtitling in English: One from the theatrical version (burned into the film) and one for the hard of hearing (which I probably could have switched off before I ripped it from Amazon for watching on Linux). And since it’s Amazon, the latter subtitles grow increasingly out of sync and at the end appear half a minute before the sound.

Oh, well.

Anyway, this is yet another film with a script by Bergman based on his autobiography. (Well, it’s a TV series also released theatrically.) So lots of early-1900s drama. But this isn’t bad; directed by the guy who later did The House of the Spirits and other overblown pan-European melodramas.

It’s fun seeing Max von Sydow again. It’s been, like, several weeks. But everything that’s fun about Bergman has been straightened out and made obvious and overblown; no emotional beat is allowed to proceed without the score telling us how to feel, the children laugh at exactly the right place, the camera moves to the right place for the actors to walk into for maximum melodramatic effect.

This was apparently a major success and won a lot of awards (like the Cannes d’or one). I think it doesn’t get interesting until after the marriage, because the portrait of the priest and his wife (i.e., Bergman’s parents) at work is new and fresh and very sympathetic. And then it goes zzz again.

This post is part of the 87 Bergman Things series.

Flashair, Emacs and Me

My blogging methodology is that I 1) open an Emacs Message buffer, write stuff, and then 2) take pictures of stuff (mostly comics), wanting to have those images appear right where I’m typing. This is a solved issued with Flashair, PyFlashAero and watch-directory.el, but I thought that it sucked that there were so many moving parts.

And besides, PyFlashAero didn’t always do the right thing, and you have to specify so much stuff…

So I wanted to bring it all into Emacs for less fuss. You know this makes sense.

I had a third generation Toshiba Flashair card (W-03), and the problem is that it’s just too slow for my approach, which is basically to look into all directories on the card. It’s s-l-o-w. So I gave up in the project. PyFlashAero was written that way for a reason.

Half a year passed, and then I somehow was made aware that Toshiba had launched a new generation of their product, and it promised 3x faster WIFI speeds and a brand new and faster CPU.

So I got a card:

And I would like to say that it was an immediate success, but it definitely wasn’t. I could download the directory indices nice and fast, but whenever I tried to download an image, it stopped after 0 (zero) bytes. So it seemed like that card had a problem reading itself, basically, and would just hang whenever I tried requesting some data from the (exfat) file system on the card.

But! There was a new firmware W4.00.02, and I had W4.00.00. I installed the new firmware, and presto! It is teh work!

Look, I can snap pics of myself here I’m typing this stuff on the couch:

And it appears in the buffer within a second or two after I snap it! It’s a new paradigm! And it’s untouched by filthy unclean Pythonic hands; it’s all pure Emacs.

The range of the Flashair W-04 also seems improved… the old one had to be within a few meters of my laptop for the laptop and the Flashair to be able to communicate whereas the W-04 seems to be able to communicate over, er, more meters. Here, I went out into the hall and snapped a pic and this image was here in this buffer when I got back:

It’s magic!

But when I went to the kitchen and snapped a pic there, nothing showed up here, so it’s not that magical.

Anyway, here’s the Emacs source code.  You probably need a newish Emacs version for it to work.

BTLXXV 1993: The Bacchae

The Bacchae (Backanterna). Ingmar Bergman. 1993. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐★.

Bergman had first staged this opera to great acclaim at the Stockholm opera. This TV version is, as usual with Bergman, hugely reworked. And between the acts we get a five minute lecture about Dionysus.

Anyway, it’s trey fab, especially the first act. I think it loses some tension in the second act when the plot goes a bit eh? I mean, we (and the Bacchae) are supposed to care that much about that dick-head king dying for some reason or other instead of rejoicing? It’s sad for the mother, of course, but, uhm.

But the first act is off the curb.

I got my copy of this from the Bergman bootlegger.

This post is part of the 87 Bergman Things series.